The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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

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Her reason for not fearing Roman Catholic encroachments was, she said,
her having known good Catholics in the country she came from. For
herself, she should die professing the faith of her father and mother.
Behind her correct demeanour a rustic intelligence was exhibited. She
appreciated her duty to her marriage oath: 'My husband's honour is quite
safe with me.' Neither England nor religion, nor woman's proper devotion
to a husband's temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling her
devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that instigated
her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm; and it was
coldly spoken; in the tone referring to 'her husband's honour.' Her
brother's enterprise had her approval because 'her mother's prayer was
for him to serve in the English army.' By running over to take a side in
a Spanish squabble? she was asked and answered: 'He will learn war; my
Chillon will show his value; he will come back a tried soldier.'

She counted on his coming back? She did.

'I cannot take a step forward without counting on success. We know the
chances we are to meet. My father has written of death. We do not fear
it, so it is nothing to us. We shall go together; we shall not have to
weep for one another.'

The strange young woman's avoidance of any popular sniffle of the
pathetic had a recognized merit.

'Tell me,' Lady Arpington said abruptly; 'this maid of yours, who is to
marry the secretary, or whatever he was--you are satisfied with her?'

'She is my dear servant Madge.' A cloud opened as Carinthia spoke the
name. 'She will be a true wife to him. They will always be my friends!'

Nothing against the earl in that direction, apparently; unless his
countess was blest with the density of frigidity.

Society's emissary sketched its perils for unprotected beautiful woman;
an outline of the London quadrille Henrietta danced in; and she glanced
at Carinthia and asked: 'Have you thought of it?'

Carinthia's eyes were on the great lady's. Their meaning was, 'You hit my
chief thought.' They were read as her farthest thought. For the hint of
Henrietta's weakness deadened her feelings with a reminder of warm and
continued solicitations rebutted; the beautiful creature's tortures at
the idea of her exile from England. An outwearied hopelessness expressed
a passive sentiment very like indifference in the clear wide gaze. She
replied: 'I have. My proposal to her was Cadiz, with both our young ones.
She will not.'

And there is an end to that part of the question! Lady Arpington
interpreted it, by the gaze more than the words, under subjection of the
young woman's character. Nevertheless, she bore away Carinthia's consent
to a final meeting with the earl at her house in London, as soon as
things were settled at Croridge. Chillon, whom she saw, was just as hard,
unforgiving, careless of his country's dearest interests; brother and
sister were one heart of their one blood. She mentioned the general
impression in town, that the countess and only she could save the earl
from Rome. A flash of polite laughter was Chillon's response. But after
her inspection of the elegant athlete, she did fancy it possible for a
young wife, even for Henrietta, to bear his name proudly in his
absence--if that was worth a moment's consideration beside the serious
issues involved in her appeal to the countess; especially when the
suggestion regarding young wives left unprotected, delicately conveyed to
the husband, had failed of its purpose. The handsome husband's brows
fluttered an interrogation, as if her clear-obscure should be further
lighted; and it could not be done. He weighed the wife by the measure of
the sister, perhaps; or his military head had no room for either. His
callousness to the danger of his country's disintegration, from the
incessant, becoming overt, attacks of a foreign priesthood might--an
indignant great lady's precipitation to prophecy said would--bring
chastisement on him. She said it, and she liked Henrietta, vowing to
defeat her forecast as well as she could in a land seeming forsaken by
stable principles; its nobles breaking up its national church, going over
to Rome, embracing the faith of the impostor Mahomet.

Gossip fed to the starvation bone of Lady Arpington's report, until one
late afternoon, memorable for the breeding heat in the van of elemental
artillery, newsboys waved damp sheets of fresh print through the streets,
and society's guardians were brought to confess, in shame and gladness,
that they had been growing sceptical of the active assistance of
Providence. At first the 'Terrible explosion of gunpowder at Croridge'
alarmed them lest the timely Power should have done too much. A day later
the general agitation was pacified; Lady Arpington circulated the word
'safe,' and the world knew the disaster had not engulphed Lady
Fleetwood's valuable life. She had the news by word of mouth from the
lovely Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, sister-in-law to the countess. We are
convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when some terrific
event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing and no more
than the thing desired. Pitiful though it may seem for a miserly old lord
to be blown up in his bed, it is necessarily a subject of congratulation
if the life, or poor remnant of a life, sacrificed was an impediment to
our righteous wishes. But this is a theme for the Dame, who would full
surely have committed another breach of the treaty, had there not been
allusion to her sisterhood's view of the government of human affairs.

On the day preceding the catastrophe, Chillon's men returned to work. He
and Carinthia and Mr. Wythan lunched with Henrietta at Stoneridge.
Walking down to Lekkatts, they were astounded to see the figure of the
spectral old lord on the plank to the powder store, clad in his long
black cloak, erect. He was crossing, he told them, to count his barrels;
a dream had disturbed him. Chillon fell to rapid talk upon various points
of business, and dispersed Lord Levellier's memory relating to his
errand. Leaning on Carinthia's arm, he went back to the house, where he
was put to bed in peace of mind. His resuscitated physical vigour blocked
all speculation for the young people assembled at Stoneridge that night.
They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae of wishes.
Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington's next day, Mr. Wythan to
Wales. The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two whom they
were leaving to the clock's round of desert sameness. About ten at night
Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night's watch beside
her uncle, down to Lekkatts. It was midway that the knocks on air, as of
a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of caverns, smote their
ears and shook the ground.

After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her
brother's arm; and Chillon said:

'Not my powder!'

They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight. A half moon showed the house;
it stood. Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe
and stretch a languid flag. The 'rouse' promised to Lord Levellier by
Daniel Charner's humorous mates had hit beyond its aim. Intended to give
him a start--or 'One-er in return,' it surpassed his angry shot at the
body of them in effect.

Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched restfully.
She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch, reading her
Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been a woman for
tears. Her duty to stay in England with Chillon's fair wife crossed the
beckoning pages like a black smoke. Her passion to go and share her
brother's dangers left the question of its righteousness at each fall of
the big breath.

Her uncle's grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under
her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.

CHAPTER XLVI

A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES

Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a place in
England's book of her historical popular jests; conceived ingeniously, no
bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be allowed
indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury--more a feint than a real
stroke--gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut Chillon's knot.

Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had
been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his
grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained
upright. Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which
it had despatched him. The man who started the 'rouse for old Griphard'
was named: nor did he shuffle his honours off. Chillon accused him, and
he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited by
the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject thing,
that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words. He lacked
them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply the
defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord, who
wanted a few pounds of blasting powder, like anything else in everybody's
way. Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show some degree of
chivalry upon occasions like the present. He was too young to perceive
how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed direction drives it
storming in another, not the one closely expressing us. Carinthia liked
the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got the sack summarily,
when he might have had a further month of service or a month's pay. Had
not the workmen's forbearance been much tried? And they had not stolen,
they had bought the powder, only intending to startle.

She touched her brother's native sense of fairness and vexed him with his
cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common man,
and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as her
father would have--treated the matter, she said: 'Are we sorry for what
has happened, Chillon?' The man had gone, the injustice was done; the
master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of the
half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord
Levellier's memory. Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge. But the
position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance. Knowing
a part of Lord Fleetwood's message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the
bride's brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no
importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her
his full guess at the reading of it: or so his racked mind understood it
now. His old father had said: A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and,
Lies are usurers' coin we pay for ten thousand per cent. His harshness in
the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not intended
serious mischief was Chillon's unsounded motive for the resolution to be
out of debt to the man he loathed. There is a Muse that smiles aloft
surveying our acts from the well-springs.

Carinthia heard her brother's fuller version of the earl's communication
to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage. 'Not particularly
fitted for the married state,' Chillon phrased it, saying: 'He seems to
have known himself, he was honest so far.' She was advised to think it
over, that the man was her husband.

She had her brother's heart in her breast, she could not misread him. She
thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the reluctant
bridegroom. That was a stretch long leagues distant from love with her;
the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she had in her
childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her. He was a weak
young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he had no glory
about his head. Why had he not chosen a woman to sit beside him who would
have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a kindness? But the poor
young nobleman did not choose! The sadly comic of his keeping to the
pledge of his word--his real wife--the tyrant of the tyrant--clothed him;
the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach, and at the Royal
Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a placidly smiling recollection
met a curtain and lost the smile.

Suppose that her duty condemned her to stay in England on guard over
Chillon's treasure! The perpetual struggle with a weak young nobleman of
aimless tempers and rightabout changes, pretending to the part of
husband, would, she foresaw, raise another figure of duty, enchaining a
weak young woman. The world supported his pretension; and her passion to
serve as Chillon's comrade sank at a damping because it was flame.
Chillon had done that; Lady Arpington, to some extent; Henrietta more. A
little incident, pointing in no direction, had left a shadow of a cloud,
consequent upon Lady Arpington's mention of Henrietta's unprotectedness.
Stepping up the hill to meet her sister, on the morning of Henrietta's
departure for London under the convoy of Mr. Wythan, Carinthia's long
sight spied Kit Ines, or a man like him, in the meadow between Lekkatts
and Croridge. He stood before Henrietta, and vanished light-legged at a
gesture. Henrietta was descending to take her leave of her busied
husband; her cheeks were flushed; she would not speak of the fellow,
except to reply, 'oh, a beggar,' and kept asking whether she ought not to
stay at Stoneridge. And if she did she would lose the last of the Opera
in London! How could she help to investigate the cause of an explosion so
considerate to them? She sang snatches of melodies, clung to her husband,
protested her inability to leave him, and went, appearing torn away. As
well bid healthy children lie abed on a bright summer morning, as think
of holding this fair young woman bound to the circle of safety when she
has her view of pleasure sparkling like the shore-sea mermaid's mirror.

Suspicions were not of the brood Carinthia's bosom harboured. Suspicion
of Chillon's wife Carinthia could not feel. An uncaptained vessel in the
winds on high seas was imagined without a picturing of it. The apparition
of Ives, if it was he, would not fit with any conjecture. She sent a
warning to Madge, and at the same time named the girl's wedding day for
her; pained in doing it. She had given the dear girl her word that she
would be present at this of all marriages. But a day or two days or more
would have to be spent away from Chillon; and her hunger for every hour
beside her brother confessed to the war going on within her, as to which
was her holier duty, the one on the line of her inclinations, or that one
pointing to luxury-choice between a battle-horse and a cushioned-chair;
between companionship with her glorious brother facing death, and
submission to a weak young nobleman claiming his husband's rights over
her. She had submitted, had forgotten his icy strangeness, had thought
him love; and hers was a breast for love, it was owned by the sobbing
rise of her breast at the thought. And she might submit again--in honour?
scorning the husband? Chillon scorned him. Yet Chillon left the decision
to her, specified his excuses. And Henrietta and Owain, Lady Arpington,
Gower Woodseer, all the world--Carinthia shuddered at the world's blank
eye on what it directs for the acquiescence of the woman. That shred of
herself she would become, she felt herself becoming it when the view of
her career beside her brother waned. The dead Rebecca living in her heart
was the only soul among her friends whose voice was her own against the
world's.

But there came a turn where she and Rebecca separated. Rebecca's
insurgent wishes taking shape of prophecy, robbed her of her friend
Owain, to present her an impossible object, that her mind could not
compass or figure. She bade Rebecca rest and let her keep the fancy of
Owain as her good ghost of a sun in the mist of a frosty morning; sweeter
to her than an image of love, though it were the very love, the love of
maidens' dreams, bursting the bud of romance, issuing its flower.
Delusive love drove away with a credulous maiden, under an English
heaven, on a coach and four, from a windy hill-top, to a crash below, and
a stunned recovery in the street of small shops, mud, rain, gloom,
language like musket-fire and the wailing wounded.

No regrets, her father had said; they unman the heart we want for
to-morrow. She kept her look forward at the dead wall Chillon had thrown
up. He did not reject her company; his prospect of it had clouded; and
there were allusions to Henrietta's loneliness. 'His Carin could do her
service by staying, if she decided that way.' Her enthusiasm dropped to
the level of life's common ground. With her sustainment gone, she beheld
herself a titled doll, and had sternly to shut her eyes on the behind
scenes, bar any shadowy approaches of womanly softness; thinking her
father's daughter dishonoured in the submissive wife of the weak young
nobleman Chillon despised as below the title of man.

Madge and Gower came to Stoneridge on their road to London three days
before their union. Madge had no fear of Ines, but said: 'I never let Mr.
Gower out of my sight.' Perforce of studying him with the thirsty wonder
consequent upon his proposal to her, she had got fast hold of the skirts
of his character; she 'knew he was happy because he was always making her
laugh at herself.' Her manner of saying, 'She hoped to give him a
comfortable home, so that he might never be sorry for what he had done,'
was toned as in a church, beautiful to her mistress. Speaking of my
lord's great kindness, her eyes yearned for a second and fell humbly. She
said of Kit Ives, 'He's found a new "paytron," Sarah says Mr. Woodseer
tells her, my lady. It's another nobleman, Lord Brailstone, has come into
money lately and hired him for his pugilist when it's not horseracing.'
Gower spoke of thanks to Lord Fleetwood for the independence allowing him
to take a wife and settle to work in his little Surrey home. He, too,
showed he could have said more and was advised not to push at a shut
gate. My lord would attend their wedding as well as my lady, Carinthia
heard from Madge; counting it a pity that wealthy noblemen had no
professions to hinder the doing of unprofitable things.

Her sensibility was warmer on the wedding-day of these two dear ones. He
graced the scene, she admitted, when reassured by his perfect reserve
toward her personally. He was the born nobleman in his friendliness with
the bridal pair and respectfulness to Mr. Woodseer. High social breeding
is an exquisite performance on the instrument we are, and his behaviour
to her left her mind at liberty for appreciation of it. Condescension was
not seen, his voice had no false note. During the ceremony his eyelids
blinked rapidly. At the close, he congratulated the united couple,
praising them each for the wisdom of their choice. He said to his
countess:

'This is one of the hopeful marriages; chiefly of your making.'

She replied: 'My prayers will be for them always.'

'They are fortunate who have your prayers,' he said, and turned to Sarah
Winch. She was to let him know when she also had found her 'great
philosopher.' Sarah was like a fish on a bank, taking gasps at the marvel
of it all; she blushed the pale pink of her complexion, and murmured of
'happiness.' Gower had gone headlong into happiness, where philosophers
are smirkers and mouthers of ordinary stuff. His brightest remark was to
put the question to his father: 'The three good things of the Isle of
Britain?' and treble the name of Madge Woodseer for a richer triad than
the Glamorgan man could summon. Pardonably foolish; but mindful of a past
condition of indiscipline, Nature's philosopher said to the old minister:
'Your example saved me for this day at a turn of my road, sir.' Nature's
poor wild scholar paid that tribute to the regimental sectarian. Enough
for proud philosophy to have done the thing demonstrably right, Gower's
look at his Madge and the world said. That 'European rose of the
coal-black order,' as one of his numerous pictures of her painted the
girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at her cheeks. Her
responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had flashed a distant
scene through Lord Fleetwood. Quaint to notice was her reverence for the
husband she set on a towering monument, and her friendly, wifely;
whispered jogs at the unpractical creature's forgetfulness of his wraps,
his books; his writing-desk--on this tremendous occasion, his pipe. Again
the earl could have sworn, that despite her antecedents, she brought her
husband honest dower, as surely as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole
heart; and had a remarkably fine bust to house the organ, too; and a
clarionet of a voice, curiously like her, mistress's. And not a bad
fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper of Nature, walked off with the
girl, whose voice had the ring of Carinthia's. The Powers do not explain
their dispensations.

These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood
himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage awaited
them by his orders, in the town of London's race-course. As soon as they
were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove back,
leaving them puzzled. But his countess had not so very coldly seen him
start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair. His impulses to
kindness could be politic. Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with
Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables. They found it
shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of it by
recent purchase, and would not lease it. He had to say why; for the
countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in the
occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople. She was little
flattered. The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there
dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his
toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.

How it might occur, she heard hourly from her hostess, Lady Arpington;
from Henrietta as well, in different terms. He seemed to her no longer
the stationed nobleman, but one of other idle men, and the saddest of
young men. His weakness cast a net on her. Worse than that drag of
compassion, she foresaw the chance of his having experience of her own
weakness, if she was to be one among idle women: she might drop to the
love of him again. Chillon's damping of her enthusiasm sank her to a mere
breathing body, miserably an animal body, no comrade for a valiant
brother; this young man's feeble consort, perhaps: and a creature
thirsting for pleasure, disposed to sigh in the prospect of caresses.
Enthusiasm gone, her spirited imagination of active work on the field of
danger beside her brother flapped a broken wing.

She fell too low in her esteem to charge it upon Henrietta that she stood
hesitating, leaning on the hated side of the debate; though she could
almost have blamed Chillon for refusing her his positive counsel, and not
ordering his wife to follow him. Once Lady Arpington, reasoning with her
on behalf of the husband who sought reconciliation, sneered at her
brother's project, condemned it the more for his resolve to carry it out
now that he had means. The front of a shower sprang to Carinthia's
eyelids. Now that her brother had means, he from whom she might be
divided was alert to keep his engagement and study war on the field, as
his father had done in foreign service, offering England a trained
soldier, should his country subsequently need him. The contrast of her
heroic brother and a luxurious idle lord scattering blood of bird or
stag, and despising the soldier's profession, had a singular bitter
effect, consequent on her scorn of words to defend the man her heart
idolized. This last of young women for weeping wept in the lady's
presence.

The feminine trick was pardoned to her because her unaccustomed betrayal
of that form of enervation was desired. It was read as woman's act of
self-pity over her perplexity: which is a melting act with the woman when
there is no man to be dissolved by it. So far Lady Arpington judged
rightly; Carinthia's tears, shed at the thought of her brother under the
world's false judgement of him, left her spiritless to resist her
husband's advocates. Unusual as they were, almost unknown, they were
thunder-drops and shook her.

All for the vivid surface, the Dame frets at stresses laid on
undercurrents. There is no bridling her unless the tale be here told of
how Lord Brailstone in his frenzy of the disconcerted rival boasted over
town the counterstroke he had dealt Lord Fleetwood, by sending Mrs.
Levellier a statement of the latter nobleman's base plot to thwart her
husband's wager, with his foul agent, the repentant and well-paid ruffian
in person, to verify every written word. The town's conception of the
necessity for the reunion of the earl and countess was too intense to let
exciting scandal prosper. Moreover, the town's bright anticipation of its
concluding festivity on the domain of Calesford argued such tattle down
to a baffled adorer's malice. The Countess of Cressett, having her
cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, in her house, has denied Lord
Brailstone admission at her door, we can affirm. He has written to her
vehemently, has called a second time, has vowed publicly that Mrs.
Levellier shall have her warning against Lord Fleetwood. The madness of
jealousy was exhibited. Lady Arpington pronounced him in his conduct
unworthy the name of gentleman. And how foolish the scandal he
circulates! Lord Fleetwood's one aim is to persuade his offended wife to
take her place beside him. He expresses regret everywhere, that the death
of her uncle Lord Levellier withholds her presence from Calesford during
her term of mourning; and that he has given his word for the fete on a
particular day, before London runs quite dry. His pledge of his word is
notoriously inviolate. The Countess of Cressett--an extraordinary
instance of a thrice married woman corrected in her addiction to play by
her alliance with a rakish juvenile--declares she performs the part of
hostess at the request of the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly
convincing. The more so (if you have the gossips' keen scent of a
deduction) since Lord Fleetwood and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit
Lord Feltre have been seen confabulating with very sacerdotal
countenances indeed. Three English noblemen! not counting eighty years
for the whole three! And dear Lady Cressett fears she may be called on to
rescue her boy-husband from a worse enemy than the green tables, if Lady
Fleetwood should unhappily prove unyielding, as it shames the gentle sex
to imagine she will be. In fact, we know through Mrs. Levellier, the
meeting of reconciliation between the earl and the countess comes off at
Lady Arpington's, by her express arrangement, to-morrow: 'none too soon,'
the expectant world of London declared it.

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