Diana of the Crossways, v5
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v5
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'If all Englishmen were like him!' she chimed with Emma Dunstane's
eulogies, under the influence.
'My dear,' the latter replied, 'we should simply march over the Four
Quarters and be blessed by the nations! Only, avoid your trick of
dashing headlong to the other extreme. He has his faults.'
'Tell me of them,' Diana cooed for an answer. 'Do. I want the flavour.
A girl would be satisfied with superhuman excellence. A widow asks for
feature.'
'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma. . . .
'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
rescuing her--then perhaps!'
'But it has been happening!'
'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly. I go to him a derelict, bearing
a story of the sea; empty of ideas. I remember sailing out of harbour
passably well freighted for commerce.'
'When Tom Redworth has had command of the "derelict" a week, I should
like to see her!'
The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too. What she
craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury,
and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's bestowal of
her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust. The
aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think highly of the
woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor, therefore,
rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life. And yet, as
she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of
life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant: the two
latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion. Danvers, on the night
of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with trembling fingers,
and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been
all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did
not share.
But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
shoot direct as the arrow of logic. Diana's glance at the years behind
lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them.
She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart's
wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen. Dacier was
a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer conceivably her
mate. Recollection rocked, not she. The politician and citizen was
admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than to his, but
she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers who was true
to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final release from
the shadow of his chains.
Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her
cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma
Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by Dacier
to his constituents. She alluded to it, that she might air her power of
speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of stirring
afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high opinion of
the orator's political wisdom: whereby was revived in her memory a
certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish
naughtiness--too vile!--as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear
vision the loftiest manliness. What did she do? She was Irish;
therefore intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges.
But she was an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few
small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the
impulse. It had to be this or a burst of weeping:--she put a kiss upon
his arm.
She had omitted to think that she was dealing with a lover a man of
smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a
coat-sleeve. Redworth had his impulse. He kept it under,--she felt the
big breath he drew in. Imagination began busily building a nest for him,
and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it. The impulse of
each had wedded; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her
of the stronger.
She rose on the morning of her marriage day with his favourite Planxty
Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes. Emma drove down to the
cottage to breakfast and superintend her bride's adornment, as to which,
Diana had spoken slightingly; as well as of the ceremony, and the
institution, and this life itself:--she would be married out of her
cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud; yes, a sober person
taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends.
The change was marked. She wished to hide it, wished to confide it.
Emma was asked: 'How is he this morning?' and at the answer, describing
his fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and
his fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom
declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Rock and unexpectingly
informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this
time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally.
'He has a lovely day.'
'And bride,' said Emma.
'If you two think so! I should like to agree with my dear old lord and
bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present
rather like a Christmas bon-bon--a piece of sugar in the wrap of a rhymed
motto. He is kind to Arthur, you say?'
'Like a cordial elder brother.'
'Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for her
letter. She meant well--and I fear she suffers. And it may have been a
bit my fault. Blind that I was! When you say "cordial elder brother,"
you make him appear beautiful to me. The worst of that is, one becomes
aware of the inability to match him.'
'Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony.'
The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting
to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage--with the man of men had
a tinge from the hymenaeal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the
compensation coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on this
road.
'How does he go down to the church?' said Diana.
'He walks down. Lukin and his Chief drive. He walks, with your Arthur
and Mr. Sullivan Smith. He is on his way now.'
Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill. 'That is
so like him, to walk to his wedding!'
Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the maid,
as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped 'in the colour of the
occasion' to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through
sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive meanings:--
she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state. After several
knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came hurriedly to
say: 'And your pillow, ma'am? I had almost forgotten it!' A question
that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma, with
patience trembling. Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually carried
her own about. 'Take it,' she had to reply.
The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage.
'And tell me,' Emma said, 'are not your views of life brighter to-day?'
'Too dazzled to know! It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance
of sun. I hope they are.'
'You are beginning to think hopefully again?'
'Who can really think, and not think hopefully? You were in my mind last
night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life
and the fear of extinction. When we despair or discolour things, it is
our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
drudge. I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear: "There is
nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by." That is
Emma's history. With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the
immortal: teaches me to see immortality for us. It comes from you, my
Emmy.'
If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts: proof to
Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity;
therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her
happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband. No blushing
confession of the woman's love of the man would have told her so much as
the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling's
pellucid little sentence.
She revolved it long after the day of the wedding. To Emma, constantly
on the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds,
those words were a radiance and a nourishment. Had they waned she would
have trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence. They
shone to her of their vitality. She was lying along her sofa, facing her
South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from
her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not
without celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to deepen;
and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend's
departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had betrayed her
feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head
and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children ranged up the garden-
path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers;--and of her
murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds: 'Old
Ireland won't repent it!' and Tony's rejoinder, at the sight of the
bridegroom advancing, beaming: 'A singular transformation of Old
England!'--and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears
down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word
in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and
blinked on a moisture of the eyelids. Now the dear woman was really
wedded, wedded and mated. Her letters breathed, in their own lively or
thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating. Emma gazed into the depths of
the waves of crimson, where brilliancy of colour came out of central
heaven preternaturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant
seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness. Angelical and mortal
mixed, making the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human
conditions with the ethereal and psychically divined. Thence it grew
that one thought in her breast became a desire for such extension of days
as would give her the blessedness to clasp in her lap--if those kind
heavens would grant it!--a child of the marriage of the two noblest of
human souls, one the dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country
and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future. She was
deeply a woman, dumbly a poet. True poets and true women have the native
sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance.
Emma's exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved
in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness. They sat
embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the
splendid sky. 'You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?'
'Praying, dear.'
'For me?'
'That I might live long enough to be a godmother.'
There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's
fingers.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age
Accounting for it, is not the same as excusing
Assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights
Avoid the position that enforces publishing
Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing
Chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness
Could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?
Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony
Envy of the man of positive knowledge
Expectations dupe us, not trust
Externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless
Fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings
Heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him
Holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency
I don't count them against women (moods)
I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest
I wanted a hero
I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the habit
If he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you
Infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them
It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
Let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness
Literature is a good stick and a bad horse
Material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it
Mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the sense
Nothing is a secret that has been spoken
Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by
Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near
Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us
Question the gain of such an expenditure of energy
Rare men of honour who can command their passion
Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning
Sham spiritualism
She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations
Sympathy is for proving, not prating
The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay
Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper
We don't know we are in halves
We're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us
Weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian (No!)
When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt
Who can really think, and not think hopefully?
Who venerate when they love
With that I sail into the dark
Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless
[The End]
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