Diana of the Crossways, v4
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v4
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'The tradesmen all beseech ye,
The landlord, cook and maid,
Complete THE CANTATRICE,
That they may soon be paid.'
provoked her to laughter in pathos. He approached, posturing himself
operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to
Madame Sybille, the cook. Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers' private
concerts, Diana's lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar
had assumed. She had to compose her countenance to talk to him;
but the moment of song was the trial. Lady Singleby sat beside her,
and remarked:
'You have always fun going on in you!' She partook of the general
impression that Diana Warwick was too humorous to nurse a downright
passion.
Before leaving, she engaged Diana to her annual garden-party of the
closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not
unobserved. Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them
would have been gathered. He walked in full view across the lawn
to her, and they presented mask to mask.
'The beauty of the day tempts you at last, Mrs. Warwick.'
'I have been finishing a piece of work.'
Lovely weather, beautiful dresses: agreed. Diana wore a yellow robe
with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first
time, he noticed her dress! Lovely women? Dacier hesitated. One he
saw. But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett? And who steps beside
her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays
within her bonnet? Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but
his charmer!
Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to
woo Diana to a stroll. She could not restrain her feet; she was out of
the ring of her courtiers for the moment. He had seized his opportunity.
'It is nearly a year!' he said.
'I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best.'
'Unaltered?'
'A year must leave its marks.'
'Tony!'
'You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven months dead. Let her rest.
Those are the conditions.'
'Accepted, if I may see her.'
'Honestly accepted?'
'Imposed fatally, I have to own. I have felt with you: you are the
wiser. But, admitting that, surely we can meet. I may see you?'
'My house has not been shut.'
'I respected the house. I distrusted myself.'
'What restores your confidence?'
'The strength I draw from you.'
One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as
had passed in quietness. Diana was met and captured. But those last
words of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm
faith in herself. Noblest of lovers! she thought, and brooded on the
little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect
truthfulness.
The world had watched them. It pronounced them discreet if culpable;
probably cold to the passion both. Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt,
and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech. She was
given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers. He in
the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his
ambition; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty. An astute
world; right in the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature;
utterly astray in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of
the soul of man or woman. Hence its glee at a catastrophe; its poor
stock of mercy. And when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the
honour of the profession, must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet
revealed of a serpent sex.
Save for a word or two, the watchman might have overheard and trumpeted
his report of their interview at Diana's house. After the first pained
breathing, when they found themselves alone in that room where they had
plighted their fortunes, they talked allusively to define the terms
imposed on them by Reason. The thwarted step was unmentioned; it was a
past madness. But Wisdom being recognized, they could meet. It would be
hard if that were denied! They talked very little of their position;
both understood the mutual acceptance of it; and now that he had seen her
and was again under the spell, Dacier's rational mind, together with his
delight in her presence, compelled him honourably to bow to the terms.
Only, as these were severe upon lovers, the innocence of their meetings
demanded indemnification in frequency.
'Come whenever you think I can be useful,' said Diana.
They pressed hands at parting, firmly and briefly, not for the ordinary
dactylology of lovers, but in sign of the treaty of amity.
She soon learnt that she had tied herself to her costly household.
CHAPTER XXVIII
DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OF THE
TASK FOR DIANA
An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor a
goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the woman's
faculties past naturalness. She must never expose her feelings to her
lover; she must make her counsel weighty--otherwise she is little his
nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will say.
She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal of
artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring. But feelings
that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting the fine jet
of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through his ears to
think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by a creature super-
feminine. She must make her counsel so weighty in poignant praises as to
repress impulses that would rouse her own; and her betraying
impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after she had given
Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house. Only as true Egeria
could she receive him. She was therefore grateful, she thanked and
venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the word of
love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen his moral
energies and inspirit him. His chivalrous acceptance of the conditions
of their renewed intimacy was a radiant knightliness to Diana, elevating
her with a living image for worship:--he so near once to being the
absolute lord of her destinies! How to reward him, was her sole
dangerous thought. She prayed and strove that she might give him of her
best, to practically help him; and she had reason to suppose she could do
it, from the visible effect of her phrases. He glistened in repeating
them; he had fallen into the habit; before witnesses too; in the presence
of Miss Paynham, who had taken earnestly to the art of painting, and
obtained her dear Mrs. Warwick's promise of a few sittings for the sketch
of a portrait, near the close of the season. 'A very daring thing to
attempt,' Miss Paynham said, when he was comparing her first outlines and
the beautiful breathing features. 'Even if one gets the face, the lips
will seem speechless, to those who know her.'
'If they have no recollection,' said Dacier.
'I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of
speaking.'
'Put it into the eyes.' He looked at the eyes.
She looked at the mouth. 'But it is the mouth, more than the eyes.'
He looked at the face. 'Where there is character, you have only to study
it to be sure of a likeness.'
'That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.'
'Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.'
'Still I feel it could be done. See--now--that!'
Diana's lips had opened to say: 'Confess me a model model: I am dissected
while I sit for portrayal. I must be for a moment like the frog of the
two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he
stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth
for both of them. I am not quite inanimate.'
'Irish countrymen,' said Dacier.
'The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as
you please.'
Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features
with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate
purpose.
Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them
together. She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them,
having forgotten this or that. They were conversing of general matters
with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like
the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or
discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and
expected love some day to be leaping up. Diana noticed that she had no
reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present. These
two had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham
was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win
his approval.
'Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?'
He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was
difficult to catch. He did not gaze intently. Mr. Redworth was the
genius of friendship, 'the friend of women,' Mrs. Warwick had said of
him. Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself. The portrait was
his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her
occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous
Beauty. So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively
the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an
amateurish hand. Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers,
Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost
daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful
sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at
home. On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.
Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics,
as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the
remembrance it seemed magical. Not a breath of scandal, and yet the
liveliest flow. Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn,
a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances,
before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour. Mr.
Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived
the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow;
and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what a
trial for you!'
'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.
She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded
the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.
'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her
flush at the entrance of the Scot.
Diana sedately took his challenge. 'We, Mr. Westlake, have the
philosophy of ownership.'
Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake
murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'
'Did we not start from China?'
'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'
'You try to elude the lesson.'
'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on
my cranium.'
'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'
It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it. The mark of the book,
if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of
speech. Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in
that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the
remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a
woman. She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her
contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.
Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair. Diana
smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at
Dulness.'
'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith. 'I was one day at a
dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints
and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all
sprang up merry as crickets. It led to a pretty encounter and a real
prize-shot.'
'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.
''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the
populace, my lady.'
'Rank me one of the populace then! I hate duelling and rejoice that it
is discountenanced.'
'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,'
Diana said. 'The citizen is generally right in morals. My father also
was against the practice, when it raged at its "prettiest." I have heard
him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a
trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, "It's all nonsense!"
and walking to the measured length, "It's all nonsense, you know!" and
when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, "I told you it was all
nonsense!"'
Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations,
and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!--and excuseable to
her:--she had to Jonah the adjective. What the poor fellow said was--'
He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to
rightly emphasize his noun.
Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of
masculine veracity in narration. 'A story for its native sauce
piquante,' he said.
'Nothing without it!'
They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by
their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant
accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see
insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing
the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal
gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan
Smith would have let the expletive rest.
Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate
duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he
approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men braced
to civil conduct.'
'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the
sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.
Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly agreed;
and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.
'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by
prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.
'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to be
protected from the bully?'
He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our
benefit?'
He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'
'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous
chapter,' said Diana.
'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men, dear
madam. The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his
possessions.'
'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the
general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon. It is the
trick men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'
Lady Pennon thumped her knee. 'Not a bit. There's no resemblance, and
they know nothing of us.'
'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously
bowing;--and Westlake said:
'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in
close proximity to the fire.'
'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame
of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a
divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She
made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant
to your grave!" We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why.'
'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could
trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied:
'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'
Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs.
Warwick, remarked: 'On the stage, we have each our parts equally.'
'And speaking parts; not personae mutae.'
'The stage has advanced in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly;
and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when
it is in advance of reality. Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a
likeness to be seen. Probably there are still Old Conservatives who
would prefer the personation of us by boys.'
'I don't know,' Westlake affected dubiousness. 'I have heard that a step
to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.'
'Serious?'
'That is the doubt.'
'The doubt throws its light on the step!'
'I advise them not to take any leap from their step,' said Lady Pennon.
'It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires; but
perhaps too painful a way,' Whitmonby observed. 'Poor Mountford Wilts
boasted of knowing women; and--he married. To jump into the mouth of the
enigma, is not to read it.'
'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby.'
'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement.'
'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the
pretence that it sleeps!' Diana said.
'The sacrilegious hand to strip you of your mystery is withered as it
stretches,' exclaimed Westlake. 'The sage and the devout are in accord
for once.'
'And whichever of the two I may be, I'm one of them, happy to do my
homage blindfold!' Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it.
Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier. 'That rosy
mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect.' An instant she saddened,
foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for a
modern cry from him, the silent. She quitted her woman's fit of
earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him. 'Aslauga's knight,
at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and
is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours long!
Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at
midnight, hears that the chitellaine is away dancing, and remains with
all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back!
Adorable! We had a flag flying in those days. Since men began to fret
the riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast. Soon we shall behold a
bare pole and hats on around it. That is their solution.'
A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say: 'Well, I am all for
our own times, however literal the men.'
'We are two different species!' thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the
theme. 'I am sure, I read what they write of women! And their
heroines!'
Lady Esquart acquiesced: 'We are utter fools or horrid knaves.'
'Nature's original hieroglyphs--which have that appearance to the
peruser,' Westlake assented.
'And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our "arts," the
literary pirouette they perform is memorable.' Diana looked invitingly
at Dacier. 'But I for one discern a possible relationship and a
likeness.'
'I think it exists--behind a curtain,' Dacier replied.
'Before the era of the Nursery. Liberty to grow; independence is the key
of the secret.'
'And what comes after the independence?' he inquired.
Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt
Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him: 'The two different species then break
their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of
the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty.
So I am against independence.'
'Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!' Diana said. 'So the
eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they are
for civilization. Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the women
of the future--don't be afraid!--the far future. What a different earth
you will see!'
And very different creatures! the gentlemen unanimously surmised.
Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker; frightful
hosts.
Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to
paint it.
'You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim
Sneer,' interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for him,
of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to
be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that
he rushed to support her. She covered him by saying: 'If he has to be
encountered, he kills none but the cripple,' wherewith the dead pause
ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged,
though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly: 'Jehoiachim,' and
had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal his want of
comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's gatherings.
'They know nothing of us whatever!' Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.
'They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,' said
Diana: 'but would any man understand this . . . ?' She dropped her
voice and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart
and Miss Courtney: 'Real woman's nature speaks. A maid of mine had a
"follower." She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her
if she could trust him. "Oh, yes, ma'am," she replied, "I can; he's quite
like a female." I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had
received the highest of eulogies.'
The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the
understandings of men. Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to
herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not
'quite like a lady.' She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs.
Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate
sentiment--owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament. Like Dacier
also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes: it led to
suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young
poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of wing-
chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney--Mrs. Warwick's latest
shieldling: he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to
sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encouragement of her follower.
Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom: a damsel
castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every
act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a
certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious,
or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human
couples up to decrepitude. And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt
her gift of reading into them. Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of
young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement
admirer. But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well,
mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds. He was kind indeed in
commissioning her to do the portrait. His desire for it, and his urgency
to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his visits
of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the betraying signs.
Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the passion in numbers of
gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration with her lively play of
dialogue, must be coquettish; she could hold them only by coldness.
Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to the lips of a woman who
is under an emotional spell: rather they prove that she has the spell for
casting. It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham thought: it was cruel to Mr.
Redworth; at whom, of all her circle, the beautiful woman looked, when
speaking to him, sometimes tenderly.
'Beware the silent one of an assembly!' Diana had written. She did not
think of her words while Miss Paynham continued mutely sketching. The
silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at
work, critically perforce; the faster if their hands are occupied; and
the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts. Miss Paynham
felt for Mr. Redworth.
Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to
enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to the
pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support it:--
just a doubt, with all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of
naturalness in a continuous cleverness. But he signified pleasure,
and in pleasing him she was happy: in the knowledge that she dazzled,
was her sense of safety. Percy hated scandal; he heard none. He wanted
stirring, cheering; in her house he had it. He came daily, and as it was
her wish that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him and
show her exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed him
without consulting the world. He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's
presentation of a costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array
of ornaments, and excuse a visit. Judging by the absence of any blow
within, he saw not a sign of coquettry. Some such visit had been
anticipated by the prescient woman, so there was no reddening. She
brought about an exchange of sentences between him and her furious
admirer, sparing either of them a glimpse of which was the sacrifice to
the other, amusing them both. Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit
him; and he left them, proud of his absolute confidence in her.
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