Diana of the Crossways, v5

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Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would
certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. 'So, here's the boy. Query, the
face he wears.'

'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.

'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
'Well, and what next?'

'You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering.'

'Is that all?'

'Why, what more?'

Arthur was jealously, inspected.

'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.' Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a
reflected ahem. 'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
She's down with a cold, you know.'

'An influenza,' said Arthur.

The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
cloak her sad plight.

'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog
that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap. Ah,
but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse
than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the
laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye understand?'

The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of
the darting cracker-metaphor.

'I think I do,' he said. 'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'

'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
granted! She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
more deserving of homage than that lady.'

'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur. 'There's no
sweeter subject to me.'

His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. 'As long as you like!--nor
to me!' he exclaimed. 'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
and your . . . But let the cur go barking. He can't tell what he's
lost; perhaps he doesn't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on
her tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you
and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady,
to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'Tis a law they've
instituted for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'

'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.

' Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic;
and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with a cold,
no matter where; but we know where it was caught. So there's a pretty
library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and
a poetical figure too!'

He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.

Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
another world to me if I lost her.'

'True; but what of the lady?'

'No praise of mine could do her justice.'

'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
object. Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on the
bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'

'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'

'And chaste.'

Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.

'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.

'Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
echo, my friend. Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting
under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'

'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.

'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'

Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some
items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.

It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A
greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him.
But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial
influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the
repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan
Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the
many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the
pleasure he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
drumming upon politics.

'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
Club-steps.

Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.

'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. 'I am
glad to have met you this evening. I hope you'll dine with me one day
next week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'

'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.

'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'

'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'

'Ah. You've not seen her?'

'Not yet.'

'Well, good-night.'

Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
address.

He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both; the
end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness
with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the
offer of a seat at his table. He owned himself incomplete. He never
could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune.
But they led to happiness! Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for now Diana
Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering
dubiousness. Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and
the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this
cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his
habitual fresh countenance. As for the scandal, it had never shaken his
faith in her nature. He thought of the passion. His heart struck at
Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him
little, if but her heart were at liberty. That was the prize he coveted,
having long read the nature of the woman and wedded his spirit to it.
She would complete him.

Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them.
At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to
have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes. The difference between
appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear
and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship; knowing
that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily
on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a
soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser
mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely. Now Redworth
believed in the soul of Diana. For him it burned, and it was a celestial
radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses
and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
for strength. She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth
in purification. He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could
not have phrased it. The something sovereignty characteristic that
aspired in Diana enchained him. With her, or rather with his thought of
her soul, he understood the right union of women and men, from the roots
to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension
of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With
her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross
earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and
the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In Booth, a happy
prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
nobler races, now very dimly imagined.

Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship
tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.

Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he too; and they
were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating castaway. Her
passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart. And at present he had
no claim to visit her, dared not intrude. He would have nothing to say,
if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business: as to
which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he was wanted.

Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet. 'She's got a cold,
you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
Obliged to keep up a show. And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with. I fancy
I ought to know women by this time. And look here, Redworth, last night
--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady of my
acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering about
Diana Warwick. I broke with her. I told her I'd have out any man who
abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her. By Jove! Redworth, those
women can prove spitfires. They've bags of venom under their tongues,
barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour. But I broke with
her for good. I doubt if I shall ever call on her again. And in point
of fact, I won't.'

Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.

Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang on
to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that
Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.

When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
Braddock, on her friend's affairs. He took a seat beside her. 'No, Tony
is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock. She
is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'

'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.

'She speaks of your kind services. This is mere matter for lawyers.'

'She is recovering?'

'You may see her at Copsley next week. You can come down on Wednesdays
or Saturdays?'

'Any day. Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'

'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'

Emma feared she had said too much. She tried candour again for
concealment. 'My poor Tony has been struck down low. I suppose it is
like losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow
to the system.'

'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'

'Yes.' Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an
exclamation: 'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how
cruel it is!' Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly
abhorrent to him.

'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her. 'I thought you were above that literary
jargon.'

'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect practically
explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.

'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones,
and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony
of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are
they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for
indulgence. There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony
when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure. And you to talk
of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm bound-
up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins
my fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself. At least I hope
that's my case.'

He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.

His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value
or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.

Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real
quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
query whirring round Diana's ears. Her senses were too heavy for a
suspicion.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT

From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness
to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of
fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her
body. She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had
been scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does. But she
was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened
world. She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others,
and made the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being
is to men. She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would
have deemed it the reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of the
atoms composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done
wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings
the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had
thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against
him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;
one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately
the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she had been guilty
of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the incapacity to
forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was
related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend
to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state
of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;
of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief. That was an
unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to
be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had
struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till
Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she
perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The very word
Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her
own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in
spurning her.

'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.

'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'

'I proved myself unworthy of him.'

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
cause, the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not
commonly the capital offence in love. Tony's deep prostration and her
resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
within herself. Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish
in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and
polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of
love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair
object of their courtship.

Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;
and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,
was mountainous. She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud; sure
nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be
discovered somewhere. Having never wanted money herself, she was unable
perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began however to
comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human
creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably
added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those
little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades
perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her
character and her purse. Surely an honourable man was bound to her in
honour? Tony's remark: 'I have the reptile in me, dear,' her exaggeration
of the act, in her resigned despair,--was surely no justification for his
breaking from her, even though he had discovered a vestige of the common
'reptile,' to leave her with a stain on her name?--There would not have
been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily,
refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed.

Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber,
where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or
the long falling breath of wakeful grief. One night she asked whether
Tony would like to have her by her side.

'No, dear,' was the answer in the dark; 'but you know my old pensioners,
the blind fifer and his wife; I've been thinking of them.'

'They were paid as they passed down the street yesterday, my love.'

'Yes, dear, I hope so. But he flourishes his tune so absurdly. I've
been thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the
female's duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies. I won't cry any
more.'

She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to disburden her heart in
tears.

For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened. She not merely
abased herself and exalted Dacier preposterously, she had sunk her
intelligence in her sensations: a state that she used to decry as the sin
of mankind, the origin of error and blood.

Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the suggestion of it,
notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show
her face in public. She said: 'I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I
can fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark. At present, I feel
like a wrestler who has had a fall. As soon as the stiffness is over,
it's best to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I
shall never be in the wrestling ring again.'

'That is a good decision--when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony,' Emma
replied.

'I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose. I feel my
new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf
of the old. What is the task?--merely to drive a face!'

'It is not known.'

'It will be known.'

'But this is a sealed secret.'

'Nothing is a secret that has been spoken. It 's in the air, and I have
to breathe to live by it. And I would rather it were out. "She betrayed
him." Rather that, than have them think--anything! They will exclaim,
How could she! I have been unable to answer it to you--my own heart.
How? Oh! our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us; we cannot escape
it. But I have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none
of them would have done the like.'

'None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do.'

'I talk, dear. If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust.
The moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover.
She could not otherwise exist. I am sensible of evasion when I open my
lips.'

'But Tony has told me all.'

'I think I have. But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not.'

'Dear girl, accounting for it, is not the same as excusing.'

'Who can account for it! I was caught in a whirl--Oh! nothing
supernatural: my weakness; which it pleases me to call a madness--shift
the ninety-ninth! When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am
certain I had my clear wits, but I felt like a bolt. I saw things,
but at too swift a rate for the conscience of them. Ah! let never
Necessity draw the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to
its perdition. I remember I was writing a story, named THE MAN OF TWO
MINDS. I shall sign it, By the Woman of Two Natures. If ever it is
finished. Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing. It
should; I do not say that it does. Capacity for assimilating the public
taste and reproducing it, is the commonest. The stuff is perishable, but
it pays us for our labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming
tricksters. Now I can see that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of
his--the authoress outliving her income!'

'He dared not speak.'

'Why did he not dare?'

'Would it have checked you?'

'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.
What power charged the gun, is another question. Dada used to say, that
it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him. "So fare ye
well, old Nickie Ben." My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a
spotted reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with
sulphur-flames.' She sighed. 'I am down there where they burn. You
should have let me lie and die. You were not kind. I was going
quietly.'

'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the
woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me. Do set your
mind on that. Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma. Will
you?'

Tony bowed her head mechanically.

'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said. 'That
hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him. And I feel that
if I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'

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