The Amazing Marriage, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young
lord,--burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the
moment it was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be
magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty in
women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower judged
by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
observations of him. Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude
philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what did
the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door? Older men
might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.

Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that
is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
succession of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not
instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the
uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like the
tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
seductive. The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us
more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal;
and the Dame will have him only as an index-post. Hence her endless
ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of
character,--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people! To
preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we
must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than
shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing
activity of the head.

Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to
stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey
with him to London, doctor or no doctor. The doctor would not hear of it.
The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning for
the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully affecting
his linen. Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a mere show of
reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat the bed where
he lay, a gouty volcano. Gower's one shirt was passing through the
various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way to negro.
His natural candour checked the downward course. He mentioned to Mrs.
Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that this
article of his attire 'was beginning to resemble London snow.' She was
amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow. 'It will
save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her. She then
remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a
reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer
speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on
the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.

In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess
Livia, who had come down to see the admiral 'concerning an absurd but
annoying rumour running over London.' Gower was out for a walk. He knew
of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of
his clothing.

'But I know the man,' said Livia. 'Lord Fleetwood picked him up
somewhere, and brought him to us. Clever: Why, is he here?'

'He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.'

'Sent by whom?'

Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew
stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming
herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the
admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor's next visit; Mr.
Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten
minutes, to divert him with his talk. She protected in this wretched
manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of
secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to
Admiral Baldwin at once. Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was
unheeded.

The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the
knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood! Henrietta had
spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood's hatred of the title of Dowager. But
when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear to
excite him? If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire 'one of
his broadsides,'--as they said in the family, to assert its and that
might exhaust him; and there was peril in that. And who was guilty? Mrs.
Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided. She
made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.

Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the
choice of his thoughts as well. He was in the house with his devoutly,
simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work
without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral's shirt-collar
cutting his ears. The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know
whether it was for rapture or annoyance. As a result he was but
histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of
the lady appeared in the room.

She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
summoned immediately. The remorseful woman flew.

'Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting news.
Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed. You are Lord Fleetwood's friend and
will not allow him to be prejudged. He will be in town shortly. I know
him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty--and to
a woman? He is the soul of chivalry. So, in his way, is the admiral. If
he were only more patient! Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood's version. I am
certain it will satisfy me. The admiral wishes you to step up to him. Be
very quiet; you will be; consent to everything. I was unaware of his
condition: the things I heard were incredible. I hope the doctor will not
delay. Now go. Beg to retire soon.'

Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.

Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
extreme exhaustion. He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: 'Kill myself? Not half so
quick as they'd do it. I can't rest for that Whitechapel of yours. Please
fetch pen and paper: it's a letter.'

The letter began, 'Dear Lady Arpington.'

The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life's
ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old
friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky
brevity. It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl
of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at
a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to
stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at
furthest. He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have the
young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.

Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.

'Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil's abroad"--done it!' he
said, sinking back. 'Now seal, you'll find wax--the ring at my
watch-chain.'

He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of
the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.

Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address of
Lady Arpington's town house.

'You have a letter for her?' said Livia, and held her hand for it in a
way not to be withstood.

'There's no superscription,' he remarked.

'I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.'

'I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.'

'By no means.' She touched his arm. 'You are Lord Fleetwood's friend.'

A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral's shirt-collar at his
ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in
overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had wits
alive enough, just to perceive a duty.

'The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.'

'You are afraid to entrust it to the post?'

'I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.'

'You will entrust it to me.'

'Anything on earth of my own.'

'The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care.'

'It is important.'

'No.'

'Indeed it is.'

'Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important that
it should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood's friend? Lady
Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and me.
Besides, I don't think she has come to town yet. She generally sees out
the end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go. You,
with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle has
not his whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case. Lord
Fleetwood's friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up to
his enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I drive
back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my
carriage.'

He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.

They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was
a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him. He
spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby's
reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and
seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him again would
not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the head
testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to
conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of
admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.

Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
admiral's chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.
Admiral Baldwin's condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages
downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest's departure until they two
could make the journey together next day. The tortured and blissful young
man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher's cloak, hung conscience-ridden
in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of the
vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and mixed
with his cup of amorous worship.

CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR
YOUNGER MAN

The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded
his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly
after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one
of Gower's crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a dying
man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him,
contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary
bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had
been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of
the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge,
besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no
comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to him. For
Nature is the Truth.

He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the
petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;
and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the
right to a sense of honour. 'We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
Woodseer,' she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it
manifested. There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common
grounds between them, accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the
letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to
bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it. A
face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he, so
clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.

She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed to
London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;
enamoured of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the
journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing
observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a
flowing river.

The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house. We are
perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart
of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower
with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too, reproached
him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a
bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration of a woman
takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to say sheer
donkey, he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say worse in this
case; for the words are, liar and traitor.

Carinthia's attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect
for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight of
her lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go the
rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke of the
scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having
only the wish to assist in ministering. Probably the great wretchedness
bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of
Admiral Baldwin's end; her bosom sprang up: 'He was next to father,' was
all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the
lodgings of poverty. She had descended on the world. There was of course
a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her; the nests
of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an urchin who had
amused her.

As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
'They have no mornings here'; and the childish remark set her quivering
on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower's memory. Scarce
anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she
had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
brother's return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of
Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and
its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter
need of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not
of so halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was
planted.

Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father
similarly at work: 'A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of
souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all
she--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake
her on the day of their nuptials.

She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the
doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?'

Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:

'Yes, I can imagine it, I'm doing it myself. I shall be doing it till
I've written a letter and paid a visit.'

He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the
plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because
of the insensibility to beauty. Out of which he passed to the writing of
the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended
immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from
Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood. A
duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of
conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence
to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman's recollection,
ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man
suspecting them of the bite of rabies.

An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.

She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat
for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance
with the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand
beside her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the
conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.

'Really, really, that young man's freaks appear designed for the express
purpose of heightening our amazement!' she exclaimed. 'He won't easily
get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there's no
knowing. Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's I hold sacred. At least I
can see for myself. You can't tell me more of the facts? If Lord
Fleetwood's in town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to
this address you give me. She is a civil person?'

'Her breeding is perfect,' said Gower.

'Perfect breeding, you say?' Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur. She
considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting
self-possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She
was of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance
of an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied
to his clothing. Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of
the complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as
the humblest who bear the main elements of it must be. Certain humorous
turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to
leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.

One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer's brief
words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great
lady's plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the
paternal side.

He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
Marriage, turning over documents, here say. He went to Lady Arpington
disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum
of the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way. When
very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had
spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another
fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his
latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had
plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic
life--'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer
said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,
moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young
and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a
Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a
lifelong bondage to the 'beautiful Gorgon,' under cover of a white
flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains of
a woman, to redeem his word.

But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered might
have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to
chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could, he
now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil
inhabiting him had at least been easier, 'up in a corner.'

He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual
feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our
heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of
her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for
compensation the exorcising of a devil.

Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil. It was alert and frisky,
flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in
the thought it made Carinthia's intimate charm appear as no better than a
thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command
the charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta's incomparable beauty
and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the
world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married
woman--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--'It is
my husband.' The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not
love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at
the hint of her loving the man she had married. Did she? It might be
tried.

She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a
ship that will not sail a sea.

Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
country' beside that golden Henrietta's.

Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,
apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of
the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How
they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal
his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
was rather better than not withered by it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the
veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she
had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined
with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of
love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of the
currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the
running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter's
heart with pity.

Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor's
patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug of
healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have
rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken
the intonation of good words.

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