The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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

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'If I come in?'

'I guard my rooms.'

She had been awake, then, to the thrusting and parrying behind masked
language.

'Good. You are quite decided, I may suppose.'

'I will leave them when I have a little money, or when I know of how I
may earn some.'

'The Countess of Fleetwood earning a little money?'

'I can put aside your title, my lord.'

'No, you can't put it aside while the man with the title lives, not even
if you're running off in earnest, under a dozen Welsh names. Why should
you desire to do it? The title entitles you to the command of half my
possessions. As to the house; don't be alarmed; you will not have to
guard your rooms. The extraordinary wild animal you--the impression may
have been produced; I see, I see. If I were in the house, I should not be
rageing at your doors; and it is not my intention to enter the house.
That is, not by right of ownership. You have my word.'

He bowed to her, and walked to the stables.

She had the art of extracting his word from him. The word given, she went
off with it, disengaged mistress of Esslemont. And she might have the
place for residence, but a decent courtesy required that she should
remain at the portico until he was out of sight. She was the first out of
sight, rather insolently.

She returned him without comment the spell he had cast on her, and he was
left to estimate the value of a dirited piece of metal not in the
currency, stamped false coin. An odd sense of impoverishment chilled him.
Chilly weather was afflicting the whole country, he was reminded, and he
paced about hurriedly until his horses were in the shafts. After all, his
driving away would be much more expected of him than a stay at the house
where the Whitechapel Countess resided, chill, dry, talking the language
of early Exercises in English, suitable to her Welshmen. Did she 'Owain'
them every one?

As he whipped along the drive and left that glassy stare of Esslemont
behind him, there came a slap of a reflection:--here, on the box of this
coach, the bride just bursting her sheath sat, and was like warm wax to
take impressions. She was like hard stone to retain them, pretty
evidently. Like women the world over, she thinks only of her side of the
case. Men disdain to plead theirs. Now money is offered her, she declines
it. Formerly, she made it the principal subject of her conversation.

Turn the mind to something brighter. Fleetwood strung himself to do so,
and became agitated by the question whether the bride sat to left or to
right of him when the South-wester blew-a wind altogether preferable to
the chill North-east. Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder
than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands. Of course
she sat to left of him. In the line of the main road, he remembered a
look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.

She never had a wooing: she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the
show of it. How to begin? But was she worth an effort? Turn to something
brighter. Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says: his Roman
Catholic recipe. The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women into his
religion, and purifies them by the process,--fancies he does. He gets
them to wear an air. Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature, with
free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away from
them, leering sheepishly. No, Feltre's' rigid monastic system is the sole
haven. And what a world, where we have no safety except in renouncing it!
The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure their sex before
they gain 'The Peace,' as Feltre says, impressively, if absurdly. He will
end a monk if he has the courage of his logic. A queer spectacle--an
English nobleman a shaven monk!

Fleetwood shuddered. We are twisted face about to discover our being
saved by women from that horror--the joining the ranks of the nasal
friars. By what women? Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a
North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.

He was hungry; he waxed furious with the woman who had flung him out upon
the roads. He was thirsty as well. The brightest something to refresh his
thoughts grew and glowed in the form of a shiny table, bearing tasty
dishes, old wines; at an inn or anywhere. But, out of London, an English
inn to furnish the dishes and the wines for a civilized and
self-respecting man is hard to seek, as difficult to find as a perfect
skeleton of an extinct species. The earl's breast howled derision of his
pursuit when he drew up at the sign of the Royal Sovereign, in the dusky
hour, and handed himself desperately to Mrs. Rundles' mercy.

He could not wait for a dinner, so his eating was cold meat. Warned by a
sip, that his drinking, if he drank, was to be an excursion in chemical
acids, the virtues of an abstainer served for his consolation. Tolerant
of tobacco, although he did not smoke, he fronted the fire, envying Gower
Woodseer the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs wafted him
to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways with the
swallow thoughts above him, down the Past, into the Future. A pipe is
pleasant dreams at command. A pipe is the concrete form of philosophy.
Why, then, a pipe is the alternative of a friar's frock for an escape
from women. But if one does not smoke! . . . Here and there a man is
visibly in the eyes of all men cursed: let him be blest by Fortune; let
him be handsome, healthy, wealthy, courted, he is cursed.

Fleetwood lay that night beneath the roof of the Royal Sovereign. Sleep
is life's legitimate mate. It will treat us at times as the faithless
wife, who becomes a harrying beast, behaves to her lord. He had no sleep.
Having put out his candle, an idea took hold of him, and he jumped up to
light it again and verify the idea that this room . . . He left the bed
and strode round it, going in the guise of an urgent somnambulist, or
ghost bearing burden of an imperfectly remembered mission. This was the
room.

Reason and cold together overcame his illogical scruples to lie down on
that bed soliciting the sleep desired. He lay and groaned, lay and
rolled. All night the Naval Monarch with the loose cheeks and jelly smile
of the swinging sign-board creaked. Flaws of the North-easter swung and
banged him. He creaked high, in complaint,--low, in some partial
contentment. There was piping of his boatswain, shrill piping--shrieks of
the whistle. How many nights had that most ill-fated of brides lain
listening to the idiotic uproar! It excused a touch of craziness. But how
many? Not one, not two, ten, twenty:--count, count to the exact number of
nights the unhappy girl must have heard those mad colloquies of the
hurricane boatswain and the chirpy king. By heaven! Whitechapel, after
one night of it, beckons as a haven of grace.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

A DIP INTO THE SPRING'S WATERS

The night Lord Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia
dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman. Seated on his
coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and
saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of
parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under his
eye. She had never been courted: she deserved a siege. She was a daughter
of the racy highlands. And she, who could say to her husband, 'I guard my
rooms,' without sign of the stage-face of scorn or defiance or flinging
of the glove, she would have to be captured by siege, it was clear. She
wore an aspect of the confident fortress, which neither challenges nor
cries to treat, but commands respect. How did she accomplish this miracle
of commanding respect after such a string of somersaults before the
London world?

He had to drive North-westward: his word was pledged to one of his donkey
Ixionides--Abrane, he recollected--to be a witness at some contemptible
exhibition of the fellow's muscular skill: a match to punt against a
Thames waterman: this time. Odd how it should come about that the giving
of his word forced him now to drive away from the woman once causing him
to curse his luck as the prisoner of his word! However, there was to be
an end of it soon--a change; change as remarkable as Harry Monmouth's at
the touching of his crown. Though in these days, in our jog-trot Old
England, half a step on the road to greatness is the utmost we can hop;
and all England jeers at the man attempting it. He caps himself with this
or that one of their titles. For it is not the popular thing among
Englishmen. Their hero, when they have done their fighting, is the
wealthy patron of Sport. What sort of creatures are his comrades? But he
cannot have comrades unless he is on the level of them. Yet let him be
never so high above them, they charge him and point him as a piece of
cannon; assenting to the flatteries they puff into him, he is their
engine. 'The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet, and the doing
of the popular thing seed of no harvest,' Gower Woodseer says, moderately
well, snuffing incense of his happy delivery. Not to be the idol, to have
an aim of our own, there lies the truer pride, if we intend respect of
ourselves.

The Mr. Pulpit young men have in them, until their habits have fretted
him out, was directing Lord Fleetwood's meditations upon the errors of
the general man, as a cover for lateral references to his hitherto
erratic career: not much worse than a swerving from the right line, which
now seemed the desirable road for him, and had previously seemed so
stale, so repulsive. He was, of course, only half-conscious of his
pulpitizing; he fancied the serious vein of his thoughts attributable to
a tumbled night. Nevertheless, he had the question whether that
woman--poor girl!--was influencing his thoughts. For in a moment, the
very word 'respect' pitched him upon her character; to see it a character
that emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won suffrages, won
a reluctant husband's admiration, pricked him from distaste to what might
really be taste for her companionship, or something more alarming to
contemplate in the possibilities,--thirst for it. He was driving away,
and he longed to turn back. He did respect her character: a character
angular as her features were, and similarly harmonious, splendid in
action.

Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires. He had to
say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women. Have they all the
poetry? Know them well, and where is it?

The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry of woman.
She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men acknowledge it;
and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of beauty. She has more
of it than we have. Then name it.

Well, the flowers of the field are frail things. Pluck one, and you have
in your hand the frailest of things. But reach through the charm of
colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the
flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than
does that poetry of your little flower. Lord Feltre, at the heels of St.
Francis, agrees in that.

Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet. We do
homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no
longer courted, are the test of men. When the embraced woman breathes
respect into us, she wings a beast. We have from her the poetry of the
tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth
by purest early bloom. Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her
character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young
man's needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so
fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot
be for our nerving contentment. She brings us to the union of body and
soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven. Secret of all human
aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for
the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected
woman.

Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this end;
accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across the
varied scenes. Ridicule vanished. Could it ever have existed? If London
had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would laugh at
the Whitechapel Countess.

He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views,
on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your
sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled
conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him
dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested
titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the
excesses of their higher moods. But, reflection telling him that he had
done injury to Carinthia--had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young
woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of
misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.

As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against
our native prosiness. Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically
sincere? Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering! Extracts of
poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a
lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein. Gower Woodseer would
have any number handy to spout. Or Felter:--your convinced and fervent
Catholic has quotations of images and Latin hymns to his Madonna or one
of his Catherines, by the dozen, to suit an enthusiastic fit of the
worship of some fair woman, and elude the prosy in commending her. Feltre
is enviable there. As he says, it is natural to worship, and only the
Catholics can prostrate themselves with dignity. That is matter for
thought. Stir us to the depths, it will be found that we are poor soupy
stuff. For estimable language, and the preservation of self-respect in
prostration, we want ritual, ceremonial elevation of the visible object
for the soul's adoring through the eye. So may we escape our foul or
empty selves.

Lord Feltre seemed to Fleetwood at the moment a more serviceable friend
than Gower Woodseer preaching 'Nature'--an abstraction, not inspiring to
the devout poetic or giving us the tongue above our native prosy. He was
raised and refreshed by recollected lines of a Gregorian chant he and
Feltre had heard together under the roof of that Alpine monastery.

The Dame collapses. There is little doubt of her having the world to back
her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a young
man's intricacies or cavities. Let her not forget the fact she has
frequently impressed upon us, that he was 'the very wealthiest nobleman
of his time,' instructive to touch inside as well as out. He had his
share of brains, too. And also she should be mindful of an alteration of
English taste likely of occurrence in the remote posterity she vows she
is for addressing after she has exhausted our present hungry generation.
The posterity signified will, it is calculable, it is next to certain,
have studied a developed human nature so far as to know the composition
of it a not unequal mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and that
credible realism is to be produced solely by an involvement of those two
elements. Or else, she may be sure, her story once out of the mouth, goes
off dead as the spirits of a vapour that has performed the stroke of
energy. She holds a surprising event in the history of 'the wealthiest
nobleman of his time,' and she would launch it upon readers unprepared,
with the reference to our mysterious and unfathomable nature for an
explanation of the stunning crack on the skull.

This may do now. It will not do ten centuries hence. For the English,
too, are a changeable people in the sight of ulterior Time.

One of the good pieces of work Lord Fleetwood could suppose he had
performed was recalled to him near the turning to his mews by the
handsome Piccadilly fruit-shop. He jumped to the pavement, merely to
gratify. Sarah Winch with a word of Madge; and being emotional just then,
he spoke of Lady Fleetwood's attachment to Madge; and he looked at Sarah
straight, he dropped his voice: 'She said, you remember, you were sisters
to her.'

Sarah remembered that he had spoken of it before. Two brilliant drops
from the deepest of woman's ready well stood in her eyes.

He carried the light of them away. They were such pure jewels of tribute
to the Carinthia now seen by him as worshipping souls of devotees offer
to their Madonna for her most glorious adornment.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE RED WARNING FROM A SON OF VAPOUR

Desiring loneliness or else Lord Feltre's company, Fleetwood had to grant
a deferred audience at home to various tradesmen, absurdly fussy about
having the house of his leased estate of Calesford furnished complete and
habitable on the very day stipulated by his peremptory orders that the
place should be both habitable and hospitable. They were right, they were
excused; grand entertainments of London had been projected, and he fell
into the weariful business with them, thinking of Henrietta's insatiable
appetite for the pleasures. He had taken the lease of this burdensome
Calesford, at an eight-miles' drive from the Northwest of town, to
gratify the devouring woman's taste which was, to have all the luxuries
of the town in a framework of country scenery.

Gower Woodseer and he were dining together in the evening. The
circumstance was just endurable, but Gower would play the secretary, and
doggedly subjected him to hear a statement of the woeful plight of
Countess Livia's affairs. Gower, commissioned to examine them, remarked:
'If we have all the figures!'

'If we could stop the bleeding!' Fleetwood replied. 'Come to the Opera
to-night; I promised. I promised Abrane for to-morrow. There's no end to
it. This gambling mania's a flux. Not one of them except your old enemy,
Corby, keeps clear of it; and they're at him for subsidies, as they are
at me, and would be at you or any passenger on the suspected of a purse.
Corby shines among them.'

That was heavy judgement enough, Gower thought. No allusion to Esslemont
ensued. The earl ate sparely, and silently for the most part.

He was warmed a little at the Opera by hearing Henrietta's honest
raptures over her Columelli in the Pirata. But Lord Brailstone sat behind
her, and their exchange of ecstasies upon the tattered pathos of

E il mio tradito amor,

was not moderately offensive.

His countenance in Henrietta's presence had to be studied and interpreted
by Livia. Why did it darken? The demurest of fuliginous intriguers argued
that Brail stone was but doing the spiriting required of him, and would
have to pay the penalty unrewarded, let him Italianize as much as he
pleased. Not many months longer, and there would be the bit of an
outburst, the whiff of scandal, perhaps a shot, and the rupture of an
improvident alliance, followed by Henrietta's free hand to the moody
young earl, who would then have possession of the only woman he could
ever love: and at no cost. Jealousy of a man like Brailstone, however
infatuated the man, was too foolish. He must perceive how matters were
tending? The die-away acid eyeballs-at-the-ceiling of a pair of fanatics
per la musica might irritate a husband, but the lover should read and
know. Giddy as the beautiful creature deprived of her natural aliment
seems in her excuseable hunger for it, she has learnt her lesson, she is
not a reeling libertine.

Brailstone peered through his eyelashes at the same shadow of a frown
where no frown sat on his friend's brows. Displeasure was manifest, and
why? Fleetwood had given him the dispossessing shrug of the man out of
the run, and the hint of the tip for winning, with the aid of operatic
arias; and though he was in Fleetwood's books ever since the prize-fight,
neither Fleetwood nor the husband nor any skittishness of a timorous wife
could stop the pursuer bent to capture the fairest and most inflaming
woman of her day.

'I prefer your stage Columelli,' Fleetwood said.

'I come from exile!' said Henrietta; and her plea in excuse of ecstatics
wrote her down as confessedly treasonable to the place quitted.

Ambrose Mallard entered the box, beholding only his goddess Livia. Their
eyebrows and inaudible lips conversed eloquently. He retired like a
trumped card on the appearance of M. de St. Ombre. The courtly Frenchman
won the ladies to join him in whipping the cream of the world for five
minutes, and passed out before his flavour was exhausted. Brailstone took
his lesson and departed, to spy at them from other boxes and heave an
inflated shirt-front. Young Cressett, the bottle of effervescence, dashed
in, and for him Livia's face was motherly. He rattled a tale of the
highway robbery of Sir Meeson Corby on one of his Yorkshire moors. The
picture of the little baronet arose upon the narration, and it amused.
Chumley Potts came to 'confirm every item,' as he said. 'Plucked Corby
clean. Pistol at his head. Quite old style. Time, ten P.M. Suspects Great
Britain, King, Lords and Commons, and buttons twenty times tighter.
Brosey Mallard down on him for a few fighting men. Perfect answer to
Brosey.'

'Mr. Mallard did not mention the robbery,' Henrietta remarked.

'Feared to shock: Corby such a favoured swain,' Potts accounted for the
omission.

'Brosey spilling last night?' Fleetwood asked.

'At the palazzo, we were,' said Potts. 'Luck pretty fair first off.
Brosey did his trick, and away and away and away went he! More old Brosey
wins, the wiser he gets. I stayed.' He swung to Gower: 'Don't drink dry
Sillery after two A.M. You read me?'

'Egyptian, but decipherable,' said Gower.

The rising of the curtain drew his habitual groan from Potts, and he fled
to collogue with the goodly number of honest fellows in the house of
music who detested 'squallery.' Most of these afflicted pilgrims to the
London conservatory were engaged upon the business of the Goddess richly
inspiring the Heliconian choir, but rendering the fountain-waters heady.
Here they had to be, if they would enjoy the spectacle of London's
biggest and choicest bouquet: and in them, too, there was an unattached
air during Potts' cooling discourse of turf and tables, except when he
tossed them a morsel of tragedy, or the latest joke, not yet past the
full gallop on its course. Their sparkle was transient; woman had them
fast. Compelled to think of them as not serious members of our group, he
assisted at the crush-room exit, and the happy riddance of the beautiful
cousins dedicated to the merry London midnights' further pastures.

Fleetwood's word was extracted, that he would visit the 'palazzo' within
a couple of hours.

Potts exclaimed: 'Good. You promise. Hang me, if I don't think it 's the
only certain thing a man can depend upon in this world.'

He left the earl and Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk. He still had
his ideas about the association of the pair. 'Hard-headed player of his
own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle kind of talk.'

Mallard's turn of luck downward to the deadly drop had come under Potts'
first inspection of the table. Admiring his friend's audacity, deploring
his rashness, reproving his persistency, Potts allowed his verdict to go
by results; for it was clear that Mallard and Fortune were in opposition.
Something like real awe of the tremendous encounter kept him from a
plunge or a bet. Mallard had got the vertigo, he reported the gambler's
launch on dementedness to the earl. Gower's less experienced optics
perceived it. The plainly doomed duellist with the insensible Black
Goddess offered her all the advantages of the Immortals challenged by
flesh. His effort to smile was a line cut awry in wood; his big eyes were
those of a cat for sociability; he looked cursed, and still he wore the
smile. In this condition, the gambler runs to emptiness of everything he
has, his money, his heart, his brains, like a coal-truck on the incline
of the rails to a collier.

Mallard applied to the earl for a loan of fifty guineas. He had them and
lost them, and he came, not begging, blustering for a second supply;
quite in the wrong tone, Potts knew. Fleetwood said: 'Back it with
pistols, Brosey'; and, as Potts related subsequently, 'Old Brosey had the
look of a staked horse.'

Fortune and he having now closed the struggle, perforce of his total
disarmament, he regained the wits we forfeit when we engage her. He said
to his friend Chummy: 'Abrane tomorrow? Ah, yes, punts a Thames waterman.
Start of--how many yards? Sunbury-Walton: good reach. Course of two
miles: Braney in good training. Straight business? I mayn't be there. But
you, Chummy, you mind, old Chums, all cases of the kind, safest back the
professional. Unless--you understand!'

Fleetwood could not persuade Gower to join the party. The philosopher's
pretext of much occupation masked a bashfully sentimental dislike of the
flooding of quiet country places by the city's hordes. 'You're right,
right,' said Fleetwood, in sympathy, resigned to the prospect of
despising his associates without a handy helper. He named Esslemont once,
shot up a look at the sky, and glanced it Eastward.

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