Diana of the Crossways, v5
G >>
George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v5
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7
'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her. 'Tony would have left her
friend for her last voyage in mourning. And my dearest will live to know
happiness.'
'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'
'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'
'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is
called the pain of life. It is the death of them. So much I understand
of what our existence must be. But I may grieve for having done so
little.'
'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself
and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;
especially the chief one.'
'Name it.'
'It is best named Amor.'
There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to
be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune. Her still-flushed senses
protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was
obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no
knowledge of it.
A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of
Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate. She had spoken of the irony in
allusion to her freedom. Now that, according to a communication from her
lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which
paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.
'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,
who rejoined: 'Shall I go at once and see him?'
'Can it serve any end? But throw it into the fire. Oh! no simulation of
virtue. There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did. But
I perceive clearly--I can read only by events--that there was an
understanding. You behold it. I went to him to sell it. He thanks me,
says I served the good cause well. I have not that consolation. If I
had thought of the cause--of anything high, it would have arrested me.
On the fire with it!'
The letter and square slip were consumed. Diana watched the blackening
papers.
So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may
hope for grace. We talked of the irony. It means, the pain of fire.'
'I spoke of the irony to Redworth,' said Emma; 'incidentally, of course.'
'And he fumed?'
'He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.
He is never less than acceptably rational. I won't repeat his truisms;
but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims
would expound the enigma.'
'Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,'
said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the
letter. 'He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words
for wisdom. Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the
world's reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy
phalanx of common sense. It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled
to express themselves.' She relapsed. 'But neither he nor any of them
could understand my case.'
'He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.'
'Could there be a keener irony than that? A friend of Dada's waited
patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out
man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.'
'But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.'
'Oh! true. We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a
discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward. The
material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it. All
life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit. I will brood
on your saying.'
'It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying
always, are!' exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's
mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.
CHAPTER XXXIX
OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN
ANTI-CLIMAX
A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to
wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of
souring permanently. Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire
mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her
senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of
sleep. February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds. A broad
warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over
peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or
piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset. Or sometimes those
daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the
shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the
bosom of the viewer. Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with
rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts. Or they drenched wood and field for
a day and opened on the high South-western star. Daughters of the wind,
but shifty daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be
watched to be loved in their transformations.
Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does
Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
confidingly animal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have lost
the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
daily desires. She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance
breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her
old ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the
saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
barrenness to her sensibilities.
In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells and
stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,
botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always
eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods.
Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away
headlong to Club-life. He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks of the
zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to
herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal mood,
larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man. The suspicion Emma had
sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to question:
could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not long service
rather less than a proof of friendship? She could be blind when her
heart was on fire for another. Her passion for her liberty, however,
received no ominous warning to look to the defences. He was the same
blunt speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a
transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood.
She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was
amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness
and her appearance unmentioned. He forbore even to scan her features.
Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly
rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal
waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact. But her
instinct of a present safety was true. She and Arthur discovered--and it
set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very accurately
--that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow School, a
little book, a record of his observations in nature. Lady Dunstane was
the casual betrayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's publishing;
anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity. His excuse
was, that he had not published opinions. Let us observe, and assist in
our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights!
'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.
'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,' said
he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.
In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of
the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and
understand the climate of our country. 'We have no Seasons, or only a
shuffle of them. Old calendars give seven months of the year to the
Southwest, and that's about the average. Count on it, you may generally
reckon what to expect. When you don't have the excess for a year or two,
you are drenched the year following.' He knew every bird by its flight
and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original
human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a
spell to his thirsty hearers. Something of astronomy he knew; but in
relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who
felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone. An allusion
by Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant
evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our
mortal eyes. Altogether the mind of the practical man became
distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic. Diana
said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to
the source of them.' Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,
disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.
Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs. Neither
of them replied. Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of
nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.
Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great
male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense
of life. Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the
mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it. When he
had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a
broader and cheerfuller liveliness. Arthur was flattered by an idea of
her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly
sympathetic associate. Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step
was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,
excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated. They
amused themselves, and Emma too. She revelled in seeing Tony's younger
face and hearing some of her natural outbursts. That Dacier never could
have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and
inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured. She
hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom
she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.
March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had
foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of
wind. It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection? It could not be her
seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted
with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and
recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit
passed and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard
shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the
French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her
happiness. She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma,
who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of
holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.
'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.
'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth. 'The debts we owe
ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing
age: and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the
debts of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will
see. If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the
contrary way, I think I have courage.'
'You will not fear to meet . . . any one?' said Emma.
'The world and all it contains! I am robust, eager for the fray, an
Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do
you discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And
besides again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not
outraged the world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may
fancy.'
She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
their companionship in imagination to a waste. Her clearing intellect
prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
He had loved her. 'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But
the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.' And in her quick
brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel. He had not
given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen
dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman
he married. This after almost justifying the scandalous world:--after
. . . She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door
had closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine
danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the
world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to
her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty secret. She knew
too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high
her conceit of herself might place her. Happily she now stood out of the
sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar; and her compassion for women was
deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding. She spoke of it to Emma
as her gain.
'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma
said.
'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and
because you did not take to her, Emmy.'
'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'
'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy. One
never loses by believing the best.'
'If one is not duped.'
'Expectations dupe us, not trust. The light of every soul burns upward.
Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for
atmospheric disturbance. Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to
life. I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have
power to do some good, and belong to the army. When we are beginning to
reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the
world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great
things gained and greater to achieve. Personally I behold a queer little
wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high
and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the
desert-springs to me. Instead of which, I have once more to go about
presenting my face to vindicate my character. Mr. Redworth would admit
no irony in that! At all events, it is anti-climax.'
'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and
there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.
Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.
Sullivan Smith.
'My poor dear countryman! And he thought me worthy, did he? Some day,
when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'
The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted
for the smallest support in her self-esteem.
The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were
harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder,
intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful
memories. Diana sat startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a
revival of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her
heart. She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold,
striking at her feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an
hour of deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison
through her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to
whom subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old
intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have to
join myself together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but don't
notice the cement.'
'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.
'I long to show you I will.'
The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she
was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with
them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up
to her finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called
the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty.
'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.
'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
allusive.
'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.
She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.
Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
verification upon the delivery of the saying:--
'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
and bread for nobody.'
Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance!
To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed
caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to
light, other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the
last page of the final chapter. A prospectively popular narrative
indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a
story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her
young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of
aristocracy to lure the native taste. When we have satisfied English
sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will
account to posterity for the condition of the branches. Those yet
wakeful eccentrics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of
remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the
threads concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead
leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily. But it
happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period
plants the main threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman, or a
hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow
machinery.
Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's
blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love
they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of
a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a
foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem. For to be true to her, one
cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world than
that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the
common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit
of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay
in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it
was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.
For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride,
by Mr. Percy Dacier. She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to
Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed
the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his
effigy bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his
quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his
breeding, without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her
creed was on the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist. She was
white from head to foot; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared
deeply studied in purity. Judging from her look and her reputation,
Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy
sentimentalist, likely to 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings' for
him at a mad rate in the years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the
peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take
it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher
notes of life: the very highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full
significance to Emma now. Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the
meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the
under-brute in us. Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the
penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.
She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her
friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily
at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her
beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of
passion.
But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to
death, passed from Emma's mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to
address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of
goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse
that she cast.
Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have
been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came
to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink.
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7