The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35

'Let him stay where he is,'' Madge said, having bobbed her curtsey.

'Oh, if he's not to get a welcome!' said the earl; and he could now fix a
steadier look on his countess, who would have animated him with either a
hostile face or a tender. She had no expression of a feeling. He bent to
her formally.

Carinthia's words were: 'Adieu, my lord.'

'I have only to say, that Esslemont is ready to receive you,' he
remarked, bowed more curtly, and walked out. . .

Gower followed him. They might as well have been silent, for any effect
from what was uttered between them. They spoke opinions held by each of
them--adverse mainly; speaking for no other purpose than to hold their
positions.

'Oh, she has courage, no doubt; no one doubted it,' Fleetwood said, out
of all relation to the foregoing.

Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting in him.

Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly
indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the
priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and
withering in her allegiance. He did allude to his personal sentiment.
'One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute
to our debts.' But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present
thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.

'I pledged myself to that yacht,' said Fleetwood, by way of reply, 'or
you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days! I shall have you
in mind. Now turn back. Do the best you can.'

They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast of
the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled,
impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are
mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights before
vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.

Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive
smartly. He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the having
been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from these
parts for him to regain his proper stature. Had he misconducted himself
at the moment of danger? It is a ghastly thought, that the craven impulse
may overcome us. But no, he could reassure his repute for manliness. He
had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.

At the same time, he had done less than the woman.

Needed she to have gone so far? Why precipitate herself into the jaws of
the beast?

Now she, proposes to burn the child's wound. And she will do it if they
let her. One, sees her at the work,--pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the
terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work. All because her old
father recommended it. Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that is
juster. This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of duty.
She can be feminine, too,--there is one who knows. She can be
particularly distant, too. If in timidity, she has a modest view of
herself--or an enormous conception of the magi that married her. Will she
take the world's polish a little?

Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will
consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .

But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort
and pass it. As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental
creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and
caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal
and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of
them, if it was not for their union. She wrestled with him where the
darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of
the netherworld. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat,
to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they chased,
battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of
their deeds, compared them,--and name the one crushed! It was the one
weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by
his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman's frame
would 'take polish a little.'

Why should it be a contention between them? For this reason: he was
reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without
respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he
worshipped. Therefore she had him at her feet. At the feet of any woman,
except for the trifling object! But at the feet of 'It is my husband!'
That would be a reversal of things.

Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of
him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre's
adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new
morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the
worshipper's posture? Yes, and when Gower Woodseer's 'Malady of the
Wealthy,' as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling
world upon the favoured of Fortune's habits and tastes, promises to quit
its fell clutch on him?

Another voice in the young nobleman cried: Pooh, dolt and dupe! and
surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of
a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw. But it
was not the ascendant' voice. It growled underneath, much like the deadly
beast at Carinthia's gown while she stood:--an image of her to dominate
the princeliest of men.

The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield
other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his
dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds
only are the title. Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not
yet performed the deeds.

Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed. A man
may outrun us; it is the fortune of war. Eclipsed behind the skirts of a
woman waving her upraised hands, with, 'Back, pray!'--no, that ignominy
is too horribly abominable! Be sure, the situation will certainly recur
in some form; will constantly recur. She will usurp the lead; she will
play the man.

Let matters go on as they are. We know our personal worth.

Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia
had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of
wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself. He enjoyed repose; knowing
it might be but a truce. Matters might go on as they were. Still, he
wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont. There she
might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:--'the
gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,'
that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not
exploring it. Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive. Fleetwood knew his
large capacities; he had proved them and could again. In case a certain
half foreseen calamity should happen:--imagine it a fact, imagine him
seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person! Why,
then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character on her
portion of understanding. The battle for domination would then begin.

Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young
man's pride of being and his warmer feelings. Had he been free of the
dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the
statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death
that tore at her skirts.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF
FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT

A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of
Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her,
autocratically concealed her lord's impatience to have her there; and by
the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked,
as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find
preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother's mind
on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father's hatred,
second to his hatred of the mother. But the mother could defend herself,
the child was prey the child of a detested wife was heir to his title
and estates. His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her
innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his
path. His indifference to the child's Christian names pointed darkly over
its future.

The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her
thoughts. She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend
Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her
till breath was gone. Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of
maltreating this woman of women. 'But when you do leave Wales,' he said,
'you shall be guarded up to your haven.'

Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then. She sent a short letter of
reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was
unable to leave Wales because of her friend's illness and her part as
nurse. Regrets were unmentioned.

Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and
more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the
drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for
Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal
wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and
restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no
husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and
spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise
or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be
heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining one chance
of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to
hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich
interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find.
Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other
people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her
brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as
vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she
read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months
old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had
made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green
coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of
Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.
of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on
whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of
Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give
the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had intimations
of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the
interests of the national humour: which is the English way of exalting to
criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore,
ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an
eccentric person, not devoid of merit.

These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were
furze-fires among the Welsh. But where the latter heard Bardic strings
inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their
humorous conductor's baton for an outburst from the ribs or below. And it
was really funny to hear of Whitechapel's titled heroine roaming
Taffyland at her old pranks.

Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to
the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a
subject for steaks, that is no common feat.

Her performances down mines were things of the underworld. England
clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for
the picador's or matador's, before she seized the bull. Wales adopted and
was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the
nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the
next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and
mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe
her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the dais;
hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen
Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other. A splendid
scene; she might well insist to be present.

There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious
lord's capacity to stand. Peremptory orders from England arrive,
commanding her return. She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to have
the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod. My lord's orders
are imperatively repeated, and very blunt. He will not have her 'continue
playing the fool down there.' She holds her ground from August into
February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process of her
taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and
Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of Owen
Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her lord's
responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine's person at
the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.

Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion.
But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique
time. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about it for
squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a glove or
give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and tilt
compliments with the Whitechapel Countess's green cavaliers, rally their
sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of dignity,
as exhibited by their 'haviour under something of a trial; and satisfy
also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by (among other
matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play upon the Saxon
tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until their ready store
of native pepper seasons it; which may require a corresponding English
condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.

Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen
is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic,
in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have
made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in
precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of
courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.
Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,
countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame's ballad authorities.
She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may
create in others an enjoyment of what has been called 'the Mackrell fry.'

Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of
feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied
infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly
antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in more
than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next
we have the countess for a disputed Helen.

The lady's lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a
dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:

'Where'er I go I make a name,
And leave a song to follow.'

Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power
was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact)
denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the
position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is
less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The
Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the
devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive
matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.

Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February
morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of
Fleetwood's intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose
them to have gone at his bidding. That they met the procession of the
Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess's carriage, near the
Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly
acceptable.

Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from
the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from
Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from
Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine
North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.

Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman,
clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood's livery, rode up
to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the
earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them. England's
hospitality was offered on a princely scale. Cleverer fencing could not
be.

The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre
meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious
exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see
powder-magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys.
Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.

Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic
regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.

Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of
their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.

Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for a
word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently
spacious meadow. They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the channel
of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim: 'His nob!' and all
of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back, at the
English party's cost.

Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a
common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it. The Dame
professes to believe that 'Carinthia Jane' had to intervene as
peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont's
dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of
veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us
follow. Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the point
of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise from it.
Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English engaged,
Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the fray.

You may imagine! says the Dame. She cites the old butler at Esslemont,
'as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative,
Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the
facts,'--and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh
gentlemen and the English gentlemen, 'whatever their united number,'
consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before
they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five
of the morning.

Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, 'a much enfeebled old man,'
retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best
wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of
elegiacal feelings.

'They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,' she quotes him, after a
minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black
suit, pensioner though he had become. He had grown, during the interval,
to be more communicative as to particulars. The wines were four. Sherry
led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne
the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance
for the enforced finish. All these wines, except the sparkling, had their
date of birth in the precedent century. 'They went like water.'

Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial
attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished. They did not sit
in blocks. The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them. Each
English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm;
both fell together. The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the
guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.
All drank equally. Often the voices were high, the talk was loud. The
gentlemen were too serious to sing.

At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a
'fracassy,' he said. One of the foreign party--and they all spoke
English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the
English themselves--remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry, that
'it had a Madeira flavour.' He spoke it approvingly. Thereupon Lord Simon
Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him 'why Madeira had been supplied
instead of Esslemont's renowned old Sherry?' A second Welsh gentleman
gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was Madeira. But Lord
Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a venerable Old Brown
Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it. Then another Welsh
gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion, that the
attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment. At this, which
smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the name of
their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old Brown
Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction. Chumley
Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish blindfold at a
single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old Brown or Pale.
'Single sip or smell!' Ambrose Mallard cried, either for himself or his
comrade, Queeney could not say which.

Of all Lord Fleetwood's following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the
Dame informs us, Queeney's favourites, because they were so genial; and
he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by 'poor
young Mr. Mallard's melancholy end and Mr. Potts's grief!'

The Welsh gentlemen, after paying their devoirs to the countess next
morning, rode on in fresh health and spirits at mid-day to Barlings, the
seat of Mr. Mason Fennell, a friend of Mr. Owain Wythan's. They shouted,
in an unseemly way, Queeney thought, at their breakfast-table, to hear
that three of the English party, namely, Captain Abrane, Mr. Mallard, and
Mr. Potts, had rung for tea and toast in bed. Lord Simon Pitscrew, Lord
Brailstone, and the rest of the English were sore about it; for it
certainly wore a look of constitutional inferiority on the English side,
which could boast of indubitably stouter muscles. The frenzied spirits of
the Welsh gentlemen, when riding off, let it be known what their opinion
was. Under the protection of the countess's presence, they were so cheery
as to seem triumphantly ironical; they sent messages of condolence to the
three in bed.

With an undisguised reluctance, the countess, holding Mr. Owain Wythan's
hand longer than was publicly decent, calling him by his Christian name,
consented to their departure. As they left, they defiled before her; the
vow was uttered by each, that at the instant of her summons he would
mount and devote himself to her service, individually or collectively.
She waved her hand to them. They ranged in line and saluted. She kissed
her hand. Sweeping the cavaliers' obeisance, gallantest of bows, they
rode away.

A striking scene, Dame Gossip says; but raises a wind over the clipped
adventure, and is for recounting what London believed about it. Enough
has been conceded for the stoppage of her intrusion; she is left in the
likeness of a full-charged pistol capless to the clapping trigger.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35