The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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

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Three coaches were bound for Sunbury from a common starting-point at nine
of the morning. Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and Lord Simon Pitscrew
were the whips. Two hours in advance of them, the earl's famous purveyors
of picnic feasts bowled along to pitch the riverside tent and spread the
tables. Our upper and lower London world reported the earl as out on
another of his expeditions: and, say what we will, we must think kindly
of a wealthy nobleman ever to the front to enliven the town's dusty eyes
and increase Old England's reputation for pre-eminence in the Sports.

He is the husband of the Whitechapel Countess--got himself into that
mess; but whatever he does, he puts the stamp of style on it. He and the
thing he sets his hand to, they're neat, they're finished, they're fitted
to trot together, and they've a shining polish, natural, like a lily of
the fields; or say Nature and Art, like the coat of a thoroughbred led
into the paddock by his groom, if you're of that mind.

Present at the start in Piccadilly, Gower took note of Lord Fleetwood's
military promptitude to do the work he had no taste for, and envied the
self-compression which could assume so pleasant an air. He heard here and
there crisp comments on his lordship's coach and horses and personal
smartness; the word 'style,' which reflects handsomely on the connoisseur
conferring it, and the question whether one of the ladies up there was
the countess. His task of unearthing and disentangling the monetary
affairs of 'one of the ladies' compelled the wish to belong to the party
soon to be towering out of the grasp of bricks, and delightfully gay,
spirited, quick for fun. A fellow, he thought, may brood upon Nature, but
the real children of Nature--or she loves them best--are those who have
the careless chatter, the ready laugh, bright welcome for a holiday. In
catching the hour, we are surely the bloom of the hour? Why, yes, and no
need to lose the rosy wisdom of the children when we wrap ourselves in
the patched old cloak of the man's.

On he went to his conclusions; but the Dame will have none of them,
though here was a creature bent on masonry-work in his act of thinking,
to build a traveller's-rest for thinkers behind him; while the volatile
were simply breaking their bubbles.

He was discontented all day, both with himself and the sentences he
coined. A small street-boy at his run along the pavement nowhither,
distanced him altogether in the race for the great Secret; precipitating
the thought, that the conscious are too heavily handicapped. The
unburdened unconscious win the goal. Ay, but they leave no legacy. So we
must fret and stew, and look into ourselves, and seize the brute and
scourge him, just to make one serviceable step forward: that is, utter a
single sentence worth the pondering for guidance.

Gower imagined the fun upon middle Thames: the vulcan face of Captain
Abrane; the cries of his backers, the smiles of the ladies, Lord
Fleetwood's happy style in the teeth of tattlean Aurora's chariot for
overriding it. One might hope, might almost see, that he was coming to
his better senses on a certain subject. As for style overriding the worst
of indignities, has not Scotia given her poet to the slack dependant of
the gallows-tree, who so rantingly played his jig and wheeled it round in
the shadow of that institution? Style was his, he hit on the right style
to top the situation, and perpetually will he slip his head out of the
noose to dance the poet's verse.

In fact, style is the mantle of greatness; and say that the greatness is
beyond our reach, we may at least pray to have the mantle.

Strangest of fancies, most unphilosophically, Gower conceived a woman's
love as that which would bestow the gift upon a man so bare of it as he.
Where was the woman? He embraced the idea of the sex, and found it
resolving to a form of one. He stood humbly before the one, and she waned
into swarms of her sisters. So did she charge him with the loving of her
sex, not her. And could it be denied, if he wanted a woman's love just to
give him a style? No, not that, but to make him feel proud of himself.
That was the heart's way of telling him a secret in owning to a weakness.
Within it the one he had thought of forthwith obtained her lodgement. He
discovered this truth, in this roundabout way, and knew it a truth by the
warm fireside glow the contemplation of her cast over him.

Dining alone, as he usually had to do, he was astonished to see the earl
enter his room.

'Ah, you always make the right choice!' Fleetwood said, and requested him
to come to the library when he had done eating.

Gower imagined an accident. A metallic ring was in the earl's voice.

One further mouthful finished dinner, for Gower was anxious concerning
the ladies. He joined the earl and asked.

'Safe. Oh yes. We managed to keep it from them,' said Fleetwood. 'Nothing
particular, perhaps you'll think. Poor devil of a fellow! Father and
mother alive, too! He did it out of hearing, that 'a one merit. Mallard:
Ambrose Mallard. He has blown his brains out.'

Seated plunged in the armchair, with stretched legs and eyes at the black
fire-grate, Fleetwood told of the gathering under the tent, and Mallard
seen, seen drinking champagne; Mallard no longer seen, not missed.

'He killed himself three fields off. He must have been careful to deaden
the sound. Small pocket-pistol hardly big enough to--but anything serves.
Couple of brats came running up to Chummy Potts:--"Gentleman's body
bloody in a ditch." Chummy came to me, and we went. Clean dead;--in the
mouth, pointed up; hole through the top of the skull. We're crockery!
crockery! I had to keep Chummy standing. I couldn't bring him back to our
party. We got help at a farm; the body lies there. And that's not the
worst. We found a letter to me in his pocket pencilled his last five
minutes. I don't see what he could have done except to go. I can't tell
you more. I had to keep my face, rowing and driving back. "But where is
Mr. Potts? Where can Mr. Mallard be?" Queer sensation, to hear the ladies
ask! Give me your hand.'

The earl squeezed Gower's hand an instant; and it was an act unknown for
him to touch or bear a touch; it said a great deal.

Late at night he mounted to Gower's room. The funeral of the day's
impressions had not been skaken off. He kicked at it and sunk under it as
his talk rambled. 'Add five thousand,' he commented, on the spread of
Livia's papers over the table. 'I've been having an hour with her. Two
thousand more, she says. Better multiply by two and a half for a woman's
confession. We have to trust to her for some of the debts of honour. See
her in the morning. No one masters her but you. Mind, the first to be
clear of must be St. Ombre. I like the fellow; but these Frenchmen--they
don't spare women. Ambrose,'--the earl's eyelids quivered. 'Jealousy
fired that shot. Quite groundless. She 's cool as a marble Venus, as you
said. Go straight from her house to Esslemont. I don't plead a case. Make
the best account you can of it. Say--you may say my eyes are opened. I
respect her. If you think that says little, say more. It can't mean more.
Whatever the Countess of Fleetwood may think due to her, let her name it.
Say my view of life, way of life, everything in me, has changed. I shall
follow you. I don't expect to march over the ground. She has a heap to
forgive. Her father owns or boasts, in that book of his Rose Mackrell
lent me, he never forgave an injury.'

Gower helped the quotation, rubbing his hands over it, for cover of his
glee at the words he had been hearing. 'Never forgave an injury without a
return blow for it. The blow forgives. Good for the enemy to get it. He
called his hearty old Pagan custom "an action of the lungs" with him. And
it's not in nature for injuries to digest in us. They poison the blood,
if we try. But then, there's a manner of hitting back. It is not to go an
inch beyond the exact measure, Captain Kirby warns us.'

Fleetwood sighed down to a low groan.

'Lord Feltre would have an answer for you. She's a wife; and a wife
hitting back is not a pleasant--well, petticoats make the difference. If
she's for amends, she shall exact them; and she may be hard to satisfy,
she shall have her full revenge. Call it by any other term you like. I
did her a wrong. I don't defend myself; it 's not yet in the Law Courts.
I beg to wipe it out, rectify it--choose your phrase--to the very
fullest. I look for the alliance with her to . . .'

He sprang up and traversed the room: 'We're all guilty of mistakes at
starting: I speak of men. Women are protected; and if they're not,
there's the convent for them, Feltre says. But a man has to live it on
before the world; and this life, with these flies of fellows . . . I fell
into it in some way. Absolutely like the first bird I shot as a
youngster, and stood over the battered head and bloody feathers,
wondering! There was Ambrose Mallard--the same splintered
bones--blood--come to his end; and for a woman; that woman the lady
bearing the title of half-mother to me. God help me! What are my sins?
She feels nothing, or about as much as the mortuary paragraph of the
newspapers, for the dead man; and I have Ambrose Mallard's look at her
and St. Ombre talking together, before he left the tent to cross the
fields. Borrow, beg, or steal for money to play for her! and not a
glimpse of the winning post.

St. Ombre 's a cool player; that 's at the bottom of the story. He's cool
because play doesn't bite him, as it did Ambrose. I should say the other
passion has never bitten him. And he's alive and presentable; Ambrose
under a sheet, with Chummy Potts to watch. Chummy cried like a brat in
the street for his lost mammy. I left him crying and sobbing. They have
their feelings, these "children of vapour," as you call them. But how did
I fall into the line with a set I despised? She had my opinion of her
gamblers, and retorted that young Cressett's turn for the fling is my
doing. I can't swear it's not. There's one of my sins. What's to wipe
them out! She has a tender feeling for the boy; confessed she wanted
governing. Why; she's young, in a way. She has that particular vice of
play. She might be managed. Here's a lesson for her! Don't you think she
might? The right man,--the man she can respect, fancy incorruptible! He
must let her see he has an eye for tricks. She's not responsible for--his
mad passion was the cause, cause of everything he did. The kind of woman
to send the shaft. You called her "Diana seated." You said, "She doesn't
hunt, she sits and lets fly her arrow." Well, she showed feeling for
young Cressett, and her hit at me was an answer. It struck me on the
mouth. But she's an eternal anxiety. A man she respects! A man to govern
her!'

Fleetwood hurried his paces. 'I couldn't have allowed poor Ambrose.
Besides, he had not a chance--never had in anything. It wants a head,
wants the man who can say no to her. "The Reveller's Aurora," you called
her. She has her beauty, yes. She respects you. I should be relieved--a
load off me! Tell her, all debts paid; fifty thousand invested, in her
name and her husband's. Tell her, speak it, there's my consent--if only
the man to govern her! She has it from me, but repeat it, as from me.
That sum and her portion would make a fair income for the two. Relieved?
By heaven, what a relief! Go early. Coach to Esslemont at eleven. Do my
work there. I haven't to repeat my directions. I shall present myself two
days after. I wish Lady Fleetwood to do the part of hostess at Calesford.
Tell her I depute you to kiss my son for me. Now I leave you. Good-night.
I shan't sleep. I remember your saying, "bad visions come under the
eyelids." I shall keep mine open and read--read her father's book of the
Maxims; I generally find two or three at a dip to stimulate. No wonder
she venerates him. That sort of progenitor is your "permanent
aristocracy." Hard enemy. She must have some of her mother in her, too.
Abuse me to her, admit the justice of reproaches, but say, reason, good
feeling--I needn't grind at it. Say I respect her. Advise her to swallow
the injury--not intended for insult. I don't believe anything higher than
respect can be offered to a woman. No defence of me to her, but I'll tell
you, that when I undertook to keep my word with her, I plainly
said--never mind; good-night. If we meet in the morning, let this
business rest until it 's done. I must drive to help poor Chums and see
about the Inquest.'

Fleetwood nodded from the doorway. Gower was left with humming ears.

CHAPTER XL

RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS

They went to their beds doomed to lie and roam as the solitaries of a
sleepless night. They met next day like a couple emerging from sirocco
deserts, indisposed for conversation or even short companionship, much of
the night's dry turmoil in their heads. Each would have preferred the
sight of an enemy; and it was hardly concealed by them, for they inclined
to regard one another as the author of their infernal passage through the
drear night's wilderness.

Fleetwood was the civiller; his immediate prospective duties being clear,
however abhorrent. But he had inflicted a monstrous disturbance on the
man he meant in his rash, decisive way to elevate, if not benefit.
Gower's imagination, foreign to his desires and his projects, was playing
juggler's tricks with him, dramatizing upon hypotheses, which mounted in
stages and could pretend to be soberly conceivable, assuming that the
earl's wild hints overnight were a credible basis. He transported himself
to his first view of the Countess Livia, the fountain of similes born of
his prostrate adoration, close upon the invasion and capture of him by
the combined liqueurs in the giddy Batlen lights; and joining the Arabian
magic in his breast at the time with the more magical reality now
proposed as a sequel to it, he entered the land where dreams confess they
are outstripped by revelations.

Yet it startled him to hear the earl say: 'You'll get audience at ten;
I've arranged; make the most of the situation to her. I refuse to help. I
foresee it 's the only way of solving this precious puzzle. You do me and
every one of us a service past paying. Not a man of her set worth. . . .
She--but you'll stop it; no one else can. Of course, you've had your
breakfast. Off, and walk yourself into a talkative mood, as you tell me
you do.'

'One of the things I do when I've nobody to hear,' said Gower,
speculating whether the black sprite in this young nobleman was for
sending him as a rod to scourge the lady: an ingenious device, that smelt
of mediaeval Courts and tickled his humour.

'Will she listen?' he said gravely.

'She will listen; she has not to learn you admire. You admit she has
helped to trim and polish, and the rest. She declares you're
incorruptible. There's the ground open. I fling no single sovereign more
into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject. I
follow you to Esslemont. Pray, go.'

Fleetwood pushed into the hall. A footman was ordered to pack and deposit
Mr. Woodseer's portmanteau at the coach-office.

'The principal point is to make sure we have all the obligations,' Gower
said.

'You know the principal point,' said the earl. 'Relieve me.'

He faced to the opening street door. Lord Feltre stood in the framing of
it--a welcome sight. The 'monastic man of fashion,' of Gower's phrase for
him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for his
friend, a partial nod for Nature's worshipper--inefficient at any serious
issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.

Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings. Happily for him,
philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities,
turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand. Considering the
Countess Livia, and himself, and the tyrant, who benevolently and
providentially, or sardonically, hurled them to their interview, the
situation was comic, certainly, in the sense of its being an illumination
of this life's odd developments. For thus had things come about, that if
it were possible even to think of the lady's condescending, he, thanks to
the fair one he would see before evening, was armed and proof against his
old infatuation or any renewal of it. And he had been taught to read
through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held
at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an
intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on
such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties
were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but
his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to
become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a
review of every personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an
array of limping deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with
ideas of the power he had in spite of them.

In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to
tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the
purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin
from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that
has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was a
lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at a
push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of
agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries
into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked
material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if
she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the
road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would
take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but
equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway. Gower
looked signally Captain Abrane's 'fiddler' while he waited at Livia's
house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the
exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer's telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found
mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite
secondary in Dr. Glossop's voluminous papers. She as vehemently prohibits
a narration of Gower Woodseer's proposal some hours later, for the hand
of the Countess of Fleetwood's transfixed maid Madge, because of the
insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of an
affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous,
tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The girl was a
creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her
constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery. She
had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit
reverential, devotion to her mistress. The plainly worded terms of his
asking a young woman of her position and her reputation to marry him came
on her like an intrusion of dazzling day upon the closed eyelids of the
night, requiring time, and her mistress's consent, and his father's
expressed approval, before she could yield him an answer that might
appear a forgetfulness of her station, her ignorance, her damaged
character. Gower protested himself, with truth, a spotted pard, an
ignoramus, and an outcast of all established classes, as the worshipper
of Nature cannot well avoid being.

'But what is it you like me for, Mr. Gower?' Madge longed to know, that
she might see a way in the strange land where he had planted her after a
whirl; and he replied: 'I 've thought of you till I can say I love you
because you have naturally everything I shoot at.'

The vastness of the compliment drove her to think herself empty of
anything.

He named courage, and its offspring, honesty, and devotedness, constancy.
Her bosom rose at the word.

'Yes, constancy,' he repeated; and 'growing girls have to "turn corners,"
as you told me once.'

'I did?' said she, reddening under a memory, and abashed by his
recollection of a moment she knew to have been weak with her, or noisy of
herself.

Madge went straightway to her mistress and related her great event, in
the tone of a confession of crime. Her mistress's approbation was timidly
suggested rather than besought.

It came on a flood. Carinthia's eyes filled; she exclaimed: 'Oh, that
good man!--he chooses my Madge for wife. She said it, Rebecca said it.
Mrs. Wythan saw and said Mr. Woodseer loved my Madge. I hear her saying
it. Then yes, and yes, from me for both your sakes, dear girl. He will
have the faithfullest, he will have the kindest--Oh! and I shall know
there can be a happy marriage in England.'

She summoned Gower; she clasped his hand, to thank him for appreciating
her servant and sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it; and
she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately,
encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the
poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed
cottage and an agricultural labourer's widow for cook and housemaid;
Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to
praise him, Madge to correct his vanity.

Love was out of the count, but Carinthia's leaping sympathy decorated the
baldness of the sketch and spied his features through the daubed mask he
chose to wear as a member of the order of husbands, without taking it for
his fun. Dry material statements presented the reality she doated to
think of. Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her belief in true
marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of love.

'My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,' she
said. 'I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her first--the
day, it was then!'

She stopped. Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in her
breast. She slipped away.

'It's a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,' said
Gower. 'If you will. Will you not? He has had a blow--the death of a
friend, violent death. It has broken him. He wants a month or so in your
mountains. I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane. His
enormous wealth has been his tempter. Madge and I will owe him our means
of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way. His feelings
are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen. He
will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it. He has had
heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet. He needs a helper; I mean,
one allied to him. You forgive me? I left him with a Catholic lord for
comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when we're in
grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled greens.
Silver and ivory images are more consoling. Neither he nor I can offer
the right thing for Lord Fleetwood. It will be found here. And then your
mountains. More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a poet's ardour for
mountain land. He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to understand one
another on that head, if not as to management of mines.'

The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of
stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her
to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach
her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of
benignness, might speak pardon's word to him, on a late autumn evening
years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he would
considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her
brother's more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty of
his refusal to speak pardon's empty word or touch an offending hand,
without their father's warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had
no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the
word.

For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating
heart of Carinthia's mind. Her husband was a shadow there. He did obscure
it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion. He sat there
somewhat like Youth's apprehension of Death:--the dark spot seen mistily
at times through people's tears, or visioned as in an ambush beyond the
hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate recklessness; oftener
overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote of life's conditions,
life's evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and if it was in his power
to burst out of his corner and be terrible to her, she could bring up a
force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the blood of her father in her
veins. Having done her utmost to guard her babe, she said her prayers;
she stood for peace or the struggle.

'Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?' she said.

'To-morrow.'

'I go to Croridge to-morrow.'

'Your ladyship returns?'

'Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for
dinner.'

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