Diana of the Crossways, v5
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v5
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The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to
hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose. Her
harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle
above the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
he should desire as little of these meetings as possible. Eclipses are
not courted.
The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble
attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling
error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its
dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,
was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the expedition was
over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and
all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the
creature declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have a
faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one
thing out of the wreck!--with my dog!'
Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr.
Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.
She came out of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related to Emma,
beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force of No in
earnest.' The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian,
if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered and withstood a
fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.
Emma contented herself with the result. 'Were you much supplicated?'
'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
as she spoke.
She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply to
a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To
Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.
CHAPTER XL
IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THRICE
WHIMSICAL
On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through
the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling
and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to
ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex,
incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy.
The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing
to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-
gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat
in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the carriage
at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for
the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven. Redworth, like the
good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of
London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year. Eight
of their wickets had fallen for a lament able figure of twenty-nine runs;
himself clean-bowled the first ball. But Tom Redworth had got fast hold
of his wicket, and already scored fifty to his bat. 'There! grand hit!'
Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails. 'Once a cricketer,
always a cricketer, if you've legs to fetch the runs. And Pullen's not
doing badly. His business is to stick. We shall mark them a hundred
yet. I do hate a score on our side without the two 00's.' He accounted
for Redworth's mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his
flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill.
Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying
of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.
'And why are you doing nothing?' Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:
'My stumps are down: I'm married.' He took his wife's hand prettily.
Diana had a malicious prompting. She smothered the wasp, and said:
'Oh! look at that!'
'Grand hit again! Oh! good! good!' cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it,
while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible
catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball
flying away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen
running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading
the fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers.
Diana said merrily: 'Bravo our side!'
'Bravo, old Tom Redworth'; rejoined Sir Lukin. 'Four, and a three! And
capital weather, haven't we: Hope we shall have same sort day next month
--return match, my ground. I've seen Tom Redworth score--old days--over
two hundred t' his bat. And he used to bowl too. But bowling wants
practice. And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe in
mouth and cheering. They do enjoy a day like this. We'll have a supper
for fifty at Copsley's:--it's fun. By Jove! we must have reached up to
near the hundred.'
He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest
figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.
Diana praised the little fellow.
'Yes, he's a real English boy,' said Emma.
'We 've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand,' exclaimed Sir
Lukin, 'and a confounded Radicalized country . . .' he murmured
gloomily of 'lets us be kicked! . . . any amount of insult, meek as
gruel! . . . making of the finest army the world has ever seen! You saw
the papers this morning? Good heaven! how a nation with an atom of
self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners!
We do. We're insulted and we're threatened, and we call for a hymn!--
Now then, my man, what is it?'
The boy had flown back. 'Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one
more for the hundred.'
'Well reckoned; and mind you're up at Copsley for the return match.--
And Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone--they don't
hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we're
not prepared for war: We never are! And whose the fault? Says, we're a
peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us! He doesn't feel a kick.--Oh!
clever snick! Hurrah for the hundred!--Two-three. No, don't force the
running, you fools!--though they 're wild with the ball: ha!--no?--all
right!' The wicket stood. Hurrah!
The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.
'Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,' said Emma. 'He
looks well in flannels.'
'Yes, he does,' Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having
spoken so simply. 'I think the chief advantage men have over us is in
their amusements.'
'Their recreations.'
'That is the better word.' Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was
warm. 'I mean, the permanent advantage. For you see that age does not
affect them.'
'Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.'
'Well, he is what would be called mature.'
'He can't be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his
constitution, means youth.'
'Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.'
'I should imagine you imagine the possible chances. He is the father who
would play with his boys.'
'And lock up his girls in the nursery.' Diana murmured of the
extraordinary heat.
Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for
girls.
'He bats admirably,' said Diana. 'I wish I could bat half as well.'
'Your batting is with the tongue.'
'Not so good. And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps,
is surer. But there is the difference of cricket:--when your stumps are
down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.'
'Supposing all marriages miserable.'
'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
certainly planned.
They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to The
Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who fancied
it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but as he
was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.
The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will not,
until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called a
climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter. Diana in
addition sustained the weight of brains. Neither with waxen optics nor
with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see. But her
characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which had
supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
clear reading of others distracted the view of herself. For one may be
the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.
The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a
struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
worthier: she thought him the handsomer. He throve to the light of day,
and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies. Her
intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before her.
She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-
flannelled, and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named him to
Emma, who shook her head, and sighed. The abstract, healthful and
powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor
efforts. Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where
it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to
breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the
contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation,
overshadowed her. In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered
romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe.
Nothing touched her there--nothing that Redworth did. She could not have
admitted there her ideal of a hero. It was the sublimation of a virgin's
conception of life, better fortified against the enemy. She peopled it
with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy
nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music. Higher and
more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure
herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions. Living up
there, she had not a feeling.
The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home,
was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the
Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she
accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library
a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no
allusion to the books. Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung
staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy
of that position had no significance.
'He thinks she has a streak of genius,' Diana said to Emma.
'It may be shown in time,' Emma replied, for a comment on the work. 'He
should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.'
'They are, doubtless, good investments.'
He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana's hearing, that he considered
the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment. It had not yet a
name. She suggested various titles for Emma to propose: 'The Funds'; or
'Capital Towers'; or 'Dividend Manor'; or 'Railholm'; blind to the
evidence of inflicting pain. Emma, from what she had guess concerning
the purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery there which might
make Tony's treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she appeared actuated
contrariously; and only her invalid's new happiness in the small
excursions she was capable of taking to a definite spot, of some homely
attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for the journey.
Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur Rhodes with
them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a walk on the
Downs.' At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr. Redworth's
domestics were in attendance to serve them. Manifestly the house was his
property, and not much of an investment! The principal bed-room, her
father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use, appalled her with
a resemblance to her London room. She had noticed some of her furniture
at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the light of a bargain
from a purchase at the sale of her goods. Here was her bed, her writing-
table, her chair of authorship, desks, books, ornaments, water-colour
sketches. And the drawing-room was fitted with her brackets and
etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed and scattered, small
bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory figures Chinese and
Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns, dozens of dainty
sundries. She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an omission of one of
them; all were there. The Crossways had been turned into a trap.
Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness. She treated it
as if unobserved. At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma
to her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
kingdom. Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the
Downs and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner.
As to that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public.
Arthur's opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent
companionship on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to
his face. Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
Redworth out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning
stale.'
'Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.
And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
grimace.
A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
under her perverted mood. She put him to proof, for the chance of arming
her wickedest to despise him. Arthur was petted, consulted, cited,
flattered all round; all but caressed. She played, with a reserve, the
maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it
because she hoped for a visible effect--more paternal benevolence--and
could do it so dispassionately. Coquettry, Emma thought, was most
unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description. Innocent of
conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household treasures
she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks
to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.
The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a
trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world,
animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the
menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily less
sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in life
was going; for in him shone not a glimpse. He appeared to Diana as a
fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:
one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle. The
enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by
burning. In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith. But
the man? She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood
of tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had
previously reproved with a desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied
yearning to be more than loved, to love. It was alive, out of the wreck
of its first trial. This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter
to her pride: chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her. And then her
comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love. And to a
widow! It proved him to be senseless of romance. Poetic men take aim at
maidens. His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the
widow's shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration
of her life. She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed
clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical
wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her
eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving. The woman who talked of the
sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
pursuer.
Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of how she
appeared. Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged sweetness,
and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate. More of her
intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter thoughtlessness of
consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend, almost of her own
rearing. She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways, that she had no
desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr. Redworth's liking
such a solitude. In truth, the look back on it let her perceive that her
husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real generosity, as her
heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of prescient delicacy,
for not knowing she would and must be haunted there. Blaming him, her
fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her unjustness and the poor
man's hopes.
A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of men
of letters. And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed in a
way to sharpen her instincts. The wine he had drunk of late from her
flowing vintage was in his eyes. They were on their usual rambles out
along the heights. 'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,' said
she, speeding her tongue to intercept him. 'Literature is a good stick
and a bad horse. Indeed, I ought to know. You can always write; I hope
you will.'
She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana! May I take your hand?'
This was her pretty piece of work! 'Why should you? If you speak my
Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext. And pray, don't loiter.
We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know
they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up
again.'
Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
eloquence to have a chance. She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.
'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.
Only don't look rueful. My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame
myself horribly.'
His chance had gone, and he composed his face. No hope in speaking had
nerved him; merely the passion to speak. Diana understood the state, and
pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as a
senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking to
shun the apparently inevitable. A sidethought intruded, that he would
have done his wooing poetically--not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon,
she apprehended. Supposing it imperative with her to choose? She looked
up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know
that she had no choice.
Emma was requested to make Mr. Redworth acquainted with her story, all of
it:--'So that this exalted friendship of his may be shaken to a common
level. He has an unbearably high estimate of me, and it hurts me. Tell
him all; and more than even you have known:--but for his coming to me,
on the eve of your passing under the surgeon's hands, I should have gone
--flung the world my glove! A matter of minutes. Ten minutes later!
The train was to start for France at eight, and I was awaited. I have to
thank heaven that the man was one of those who can strike icily. Tell
Mr. Redworth what I say. You two converse upon every subject. One may
be too loftily respected--in my case. By and by--for he is a tolerant
reader of life and women, I think--we shall be humdrum friends of the
lasting order.'
Emma's cheeks were as red as Diana's. 'I fancy Tom Redworth has not much
to learn concerning any person he cares for,' she said. 'You like him?
I have lost touch of you, my dear, and ask.'
'I like him: that I can say. He is everything I am not. But now I am
free, the sense of being undeservedly over-esteemed imposes fetters,
and I don't like them. I have been called a Beauty. Rightly or other,
I have had a Beauty's career; and a curious caged beast's life I have
found it. Will you promise me to speak to him? And also, thank him for
helping Arthur Rhodes to a situation.'
At this, the tears fell from her. And so enigmatical had she grown to
Emma, that her bosom friend took them for a confessed attachment to the
youth.
Diana's wretched emotion shamed her from putting any inquiries whether
Redworth had been told. He came repeatedly, and showed no change of
face, always continuing in the form of huge hovering griffin; until an
idea, instead of the monster bird, struck her. Might she not, after all,
be cowering under imagination? The very maidenly idea wakened her
womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
accurately. It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights, where
she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors, but near her
beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not habitually send
because of the coming of a particular gentleman. Dresses were left at
Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and poor Danvers,
despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned to the
melancholy descent.
'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'
If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
daily shifting feminine maze he beheld. The strange thing was, that
during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
limpid and direct.
CHAPTER XLI
CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City's awning
of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by the
weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were
severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to
embrace: breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer. The latter, if
confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas
Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to fly
for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from
Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked off
the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close ahead of
him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers' offices to a City
Bank. One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that cold stuff
they were now selling out of barrows, with cream. His companion
answered, that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the sort; and what
was it like?
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