A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>		S	>>		T
U	>>		V			>>		W

Georg Ebers - "Joshua, Volume 1."

Sarah J. Eddy - "Friends and Helpers"

Unknown - "The Bible, Douay Rheims, Book 67: 1 Peter"

Unknown - "The Bible, Douay Rheims, Book 56: Ephesians"

The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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




The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.
Carinthia and her lord were alone together. This had been his burning
wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might
have moved the wife's. But she had formed her estimate of him there: she
had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate
the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of an
allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her brother--stop
her breathing of fresh air. Sensationally, too, her ardour for the
exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her father's
daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a husband,
hounded by a mother's terrors. The influences environing her and pressing
her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small object largely
endowed by circumstances to demand it. She stood calmly discoursing, with
a tempered smile: no longer a novice in the social manner. An equal whom
he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready replies; and he, bowing
to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of inferiority following his
acknowledgement of it. He was alone with her, and next to dumb; she froze
a full heart. As for his heart, it could not speak at all, it was a
swinging lump. The rational view of the situation was exposed to her; and
she listened to that favourably, or at least attentively; but with an
edge to her civil smile when he hinted of entertainments, voyages,
travels, an excursion to her native mountain land. Her brother would then
be facing death. The rational view, she admitted, was one to be
considered. Yes, they were married; they had a son; they were bound to
sink misunderstandings, in the interests of their little son. He ventured
to say that the child was a link uniting them; and she looked at him. He
blinked rapidly, as she had seen him do of late, but kept his eyes on her
through the nervous flutter of the lids; his pride making a determined
stand for physical mastery, though her look was but a look. Had there
been reproach in it, he would have found the voice to speak out. Her look
was a cold sky above a hungering man. She froze his heart from the marble
of her own.

And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of
civil war in the pay of a foreign government!--he found a short refuge in
that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh
scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody
work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed. Right
then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the
martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his
reason, subjected him to admire--on to worship of the woman, whatever she
might do. Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his
younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to
impose it. His heart broke the frost she breathed. Yet, if he gave way to
the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of
superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to
speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.

'Carinthia--so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the
position. I regret over and over again--we'll discuss all that when we
meet after this Calesford affair. I shall have things to say. You will
overlook, I am sure--well, men are men!--or try to. Perhaps I'm not worse
than--we'll say, some. You will, I know,--I have learnt it,--be of great
service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double it. You
will receive me--here? Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone together,
as now, I beg.'

That was what he said. Having said it, his escape from high tragics in
the comfortable worldly tone rejoiced him; to some extent also the
courteous audience she gave him. And her hand was not refused. Judging by
her aspect, the plain common-sense ground of their situation was accepted
for the best opening step to their union; though she must have had her
feelings beneath it, and God knew that he had! Her hand was friendly. He
could have thanked her for yielding her hand without a stage scene; she
had fine breeding by nature. The gracefullest of trained ladies could not
have passed through such an interview so perfectly in the right key; and
this was the woman he had seen at the wrestle with hideous death to save
a muddy street-child! She touched the gentleman in him. Hard as it was
while he held the hand of the wife, his little son's mother, who might be
called his bride, and drew him by the contact of their blood to a memory,
seeming impossible, some other world's attested reality,--she the angel,
he the demon of it,--unimaginable, yet present, palpable, a fact beyond
his mind, he let her hand fall scarce pressed. Did she expect more than
the common sense of it to be said? The 'more' was due to her, and should
partly be said at their next meeting for the no further separating; or
else he would vow in his heart to spread it out over a whole life's
course of wakeful devotion, with here and there a hint of his younger
black nature. Better that except for a desire seizing him to make
sacrifice of the demon he had been, offer him up hideously naked to her
mercy. But it was a thing to be done by hints, by fits, by small doses.
She could only gradually be brought to the comprehension of how the man
or demon found indemnification under his yoke of marriage in snatching
her, to torment, perhaps betray; and solace for the hurt to his pride in
spreading a snare for the beautiful Henrietta. A confession! It could be
to none but the priest.

Knowledge of Carinthia would have urged him to the confession
straightway. In spite of horror, the task of helping to wash a black soul
white would have been her compensation for loss of companionship with her
soldier brother. She would have held hot iron to the rabid wound and come
to a love of the rescued sufferer.

It seemed to please her when he spoke of Mr. Rose Mackrell's applications
to get back his volume of her father's Book of Maxims.

'There is mine,' she said.

For the sake of winning her quick gleam at any word of the bridal couple,
he conjured a picture of her Madge and his Gower, saying: 'That
marriage--as you will learn--proves him honest from head to foot; as she
is in her way, too.'

'Oh, she is,' was the answer.

'We shall be driving down to them very soon, Carinthia.'

'It will delight them to see either of us, my lord.'

'My lady, adieu until I am over with this Calesford,' he gestured, as in
fetters.

She spared him the my lording as she said adieu, sensitive as she was,
and to his perception now.

Lady Arpington had a satisfactory two minutes with him before he left the
house. London town, on the great day at Calesford, interchanged
communications, to the comforting effect, that the Countess of Fleetwood
would reign over the next entertainment.




CHAPTER XLVII

THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING WORD BY THE DAME

It is of seemingly good augury for the cause of a suppliant man, however
little for the man himself, when she who has much to pardon can depict
him in a manner that almost smiles, not unlike a dandling nurse the
miniature man-child sobbing off to sleep after a frenzy; an example of a
genus framed for excuses, and he more than others. Chillon was amused up
to inquisitive surprise by Carinthia's novel idea of her formerly dreaded
riddle of a husband. As she sketched the very rational alliance proposed
to her, and his kick at the fetters of Calesford, a shadowy dash for an
image of the solicitous tyrant was added perforce to complete the scene;
following which, her head moved sharply, the subject was flung over her
shoulder.

She was developing; she might hold her ground with the husband, if the
alliance should be resumed; and she would be a companion for Henrietta in
England: she was now independent, as to money, and she could break an
intolerable yoke without suffering privation. He kept his wrath under,
determined not to use his influence either way, sure though he was of her
old father's voting for her to quit the man and enter the field where
qualities would be serviceable. The man probably feared a scandal more
than the loss of his wife in her going. He had never been thrashed--the
sole apology Chillon discovered for him, in a flushed review of the
unavenged list of injuries Carinthia had sustained. His wise old father
insisted on the value of an early thrashing to trim and shape the growth
of most young men. There was no proof of Lord Fleetwood's having schemed
to thwart his wager, so he put that accusation by: thinking for an
instant, that if the man desired to have his wife with him, and she left
the country with her brother, his own act would recoil; or if she stayed
to hear of a villany, Carinthia's show of scorn could lash. Henrietta
praised my lord's kindness. He had been one of the adorers--as what man
would not be!--and upon her at least (he could hardly love her husband)
he had not wreaked his disappointment. A young man of huge wealth, having
nothing to do but fatten his whims, is the monster a rich country breeds
under the blessing of peace. His wife, if a match for him, has her work
traced out:--mean work for the child of their father, Chillon thought.
She might be doing braver, more suitable to the blood in her veins. But
women have to be considered as women, not as possible heroines; and
supposing she held her own with this husband of hers, which meant,
judging by the view of their unfolded characters at present, a certain
command of the freakish beast; she, whatever her task, would not be the
one set trotting. He came to his opinion through the estimate he had
recently formed of Lord Fleetwood, and a study of his changed sister.

Her brows gloomed at a recurrence to that subject. Their business of the
expedition absorbed her, each detail, all the remarks he quoted of his
chief, hopeful or weariful; for difficulties with the Spanish Government,
and with the English too, started up at every turn; and the rank and file
of the contingent were mostly a rough lot, where they were rather better
than soaked weeds. A small body of trained soldiers had sprung to the
call to arms; here and there an officer could wheel a regiment.

Carinthia breasted discouragement. 'English learn from blows, Chillon.'

'He might have added, they lose half their number by having to learn from
blows, Carin.'

'He said, "Let me lead Britons!"'

'When the canteen's fifty leagues to the rear, yes!'

'Yes, it is a wine country,' she sighed. 'But would the Spaniards have
sent for us if their experience told them they could not trust us?'

Chillon brightened rigorously: 'Yes, yes; there's just a something about
our men at their best, hard to find elsewhere. We're right in thinking
that. And our chief 's the right man.'

'He is Owain's friend and countryman,' said Carinthia, and pleased, her
brother for talking like a girl, in the midst of methodical calculations
of the cost of this and that, to purchase the supplies he would need. She
had an organizing head. On her way down from London she had drawn on
instructions from a London physician of old Peninsula experience to
pencil a list of the medical and surgical stores required by a
campaigning army; she had gained information of the London shops where
they were to be procured; she had learned to read medical prescriptions
for the composition of drugs. She was at her Spanish still, not behind
him in the ordinary dialogue, and able to correct him on points of
Spanish history relating to fortresses, especially the Basque. A French
bookseller had supplied her with the Vicomte d'Eschargue's recently
published volume of a Travels in Catalonia. Chillon saw paragraphs
marked, pages dog-eared, for reference. At the same time, the question of
Henrietta touched her anxiously. Lady Arpington's hints had sunk into
them both.

'I have thought of St. Jean de Luz, Chillon, if Riette would consent to
settle there. French people are friendly. You expect most of your work in
and round the Spanish Pyrenees.'

'Riette alone there?' said he, and drew her by her love of him into his
altered mind; for he did not object to his wife's loneliness at Cadiz
when their plan was new.

London had taught her that a young woman in the giddy heyday of her
beauty has to be guarded; her belonging to us is the proud burden
involving sacrifices. But at St. Jean de Luz, if Riette would consent to
reside there, Lord Fleetwood's absence and the neighbourhood of the war
were reckoned on to preserve his yokefellow from any fit of the
abominated softness which she had felt in one premonitory tremor during
their late interview, and deemed it vile compared with the life of action
and service beside, almost beside, her brother, sharing his dangers at
least. She would have had Chillon speak peremptorily to his wife
regarding the residence on the Spanish borders, adding, in a despair:
'And me with her to protect her!'

'Unfair to Riette, if she can't decide voluntarily,' he said.

All he refrained from was, the persuading her to stay in England and live
reconciled with the gaoler of the dungeon, as her feelings pictured it.

Chillon and Carinthia journeyed to London for purchases and a visit to
lawyer, banker, and tradesmen, on their way to meet his chief and Owain
Wythan at Southampton. They lunched with Livia. The morrow was the great
Calesford day; Henrietta carolled of it. Lady Arpington had been
afllictingly demure on the theme of her presence at Calesford within her
term of mourning. 'But I don't mourn, and I'm not related to the defunct,
and I can't be denied the pleasure invented for my personal
gratification,' Henrietta's happy flippancy pouted at the prudish
objections. Moreover, the adored Columelli was to be her slave of song.
The termination of the London season had been postponed a whole week for
Calesford: the utmost possible strain; and her presence was understood to
represent the Countess of Fleetwood, temporarily in decorous retirement.
Chillon was assured by her that the earl had expressed himself satisfied
with his wife's reasonableness. 'The rest will follow.' Pleading on the
earl's behalf was a vain effort, but she had her grounds for painting
Lord Fleetwood's present mood to his countess in warm colours. 'Nothing
short of devotion, Chillon!' London's extreme anxiety to see them united,
and the cause of it, the immense good Janey could do to her country,
should certainly be considered by her, Henrietta said. She spoke
feverishly. A mention of St. Jean de Luz for a residence inflicted, it
appeared, a more violent toothache than she had suffered from the
proposal of quarters in Cadiz. And now her husband had money? . . . she
suggested his reinstatement in the English army. Chillon hushed that: his
chief had his word. Besides, he wanted schooling in war. Why had he
married! His love for her was the answer; and her beauty argued for the
love. But possessing her, he was bound to win her a name. So his
reasoning ran to an accord with his military instincts and ambition.
Nevertheless, the mournful strange fact she recalled, that they had never
waltzed together since they were made one, troubled his countenance in
the mirror of hers. Instead of the waltz, grief, low worries, dulness, an
eclipse of her, had been the beautiful creature's portion.

It established mighty claims to a young husband's indulgence. She hummed
a few bars of his favourite old Viennese waltz, with 'Chillon!'
invitingly and reproachfully. His loathing of Lord Fleetwood had to
withstand an envious jump at the legs in his vison of her partner on the
morrow. He said: 'You'll think of some one absent.'

'You really do wish me to go, my darling? It is Chillon's wish?' She
begged for the words; she had them, and then her feverishness abated to a
simple sparkling composure.

Carinthia had observed her. She was heart-sick under pressure of thoughts
the heavier for being formless. They signified in the sum her doom to see
her brother leave England for the war, and herself crumble to pieces from
the imagined figure of herself beside him on or near the field. They
could not be phrased, for they accused the beloved brother of a weakness
in the excessive sense of obligation to the beautiful woman who had
wedded him. Driving down to Southampton by the night-coach, her
tenderness toward Henrietta held other thoughts unshaped, except one,
that moved in its twilight, murmuring of how the love of pleasure keeps
us blind children. And how the innocents are pushed by it to snap at
wicked bait, which the wealthy angle with, pointed a charitable index on
some of our social story. The Countess Livia, not an innocent like
Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues by contracting a third
marriage--'in time!' Lady Arpington said; and the knotty question was
presented to a young mind: Why are the innocents tempted to their ruin,
and the darker natures allowed an escape? Any street-boy could have told
her of the virtue in quick wits. But her unexercised reflectiveness was
on the highroad of accepted doctrines, with their chorus of the moans of
gossips for supernatural intervention to give us justice. She had not
learnt that those innocents, pushed by an excessive love of pleasure, are
for the term lower in the scale than their wary darker cousins, and must
come to the diviner light of intelligence through suffering.

However, the result of her meditations was to show her she was directed
to be Henrietta's guardian. After that, she had no thoughts; travelling
beside Chillon, she was sheer sore feeling, as of a body aching for its
heart plucked out. The bitterness of the separation to come between them
prophesied a tragedy. She touched his hand. It was warm now.

During six days of travels from port to port along the Southern and
Western coasts, she joined in the inspection of the English contingent
about to be shipped. They and their chief and her brother were plain to
sight, like sample print of a book's first page, blank sheets for the
rest of the volume. If she might have been one among them, she would have
dared the reckless forecast. Her sensations were those of a bird that has
flown into a room, and beats wings against the ceiling and the
window-panes. A close, hard sky, a transparent prison wall, narrowed her
powers, mocked her soul. She spoke little; what she said impressed
Chillon's chief, Owain Wythan was glad to tell her. The good friend had
gone counter to the tide of her breast by showing satisfaction with the
prospect that she would take her rightful place in the world. Her
concentrated mind regarded the good friend as a phantom of a man, the
world's echo. His dead Rebecca would have understood her passion to be
her brother's comrade, her abasement in the staying at home to guard his
butterfly. Owain had never favoured her project; he could not now
perceive the special dangers Chillon would be exposed to in her
separation from him. She had no means of explaining what she felt
intensely, that dangers, death, were nothing to either of them, if they
shared the fate together.

Her rejected petition to her husband for an allowance of money, on the
day in Wales, became the vivid memory which brings out motives in its
glow. Her husband hated her brother; and why? But the answer was lighted
fierily down another avenue. A true husband, a lord of wealth, would have
rejoiced to help the brother of his wife. He was the cause of Chillon's
ruin and this adventure to restore his fortunes. Could she endure a close
alliance with the man while her brother's life was imperilled? Carinthia
rebuked her drowsy head for not having seen his reason for refusing at
the time. 'How long I am before I see anything that does not stare in my
face!' She was a married woman, whose order of mind rendered her
singularly subject to the holiness of the tie; and she was a weak woman,
she feared. Already, at intervals, now that action on a foreign field of
the thunders and lightnings was denied, imagination revealed her
dissolving to the union with her husband, and cried her comment on
herself as the world's basest of women for submitting to it while
Chillon's life ran risks; until finally she said: 'Not before I have my
brother home safe!' an exclamation equal to a vow.

That being settled, some appearance of equanimity returned; she talked of
the scarlet business as one she participated in as a distant spectator.
Chillon's chief was hurrying the embarkation of his troops; within ten
days the whole expedition would be afloat. She was to post to London for
further purchases, he following to take leave of his wife and babe.
Curiously, but hardly remarked on during the bustle of work, Livia had
been the one to send her short account of the great day at Calesford;
Henrietta, the born correspondent, pencilling a couple of lines; she was
well, dreadfully fatigued, rather a fright from a trip of her foot and
fall over a low wire fence. Her message of love thrice underlined the
repeated word.

Henrietta was the last person Carinthia would have expected to meet
midway on the London road. Her name was called from a carriage as she
drove up to the door of the Winchester hostlery, and in the lady, over
whose right eye and cheek a covering fold of silk concealed a bandage,
the voice was her sister Riette's. With her were two babes and their
nursemaids.

'Chillon is down there--you have left him there?' Henrietta greeted her,
saw the reply, and stepped out of her carriage. 'You shall kiss the
children afterwards; come into one of the rooms, Janey.'

Alone together, before an embrace, she said, in the voice of tears
hardening to the world's business, 'Chillon must not enter London. You
see the figure I am. My character's in as bad case up there--thanks to
those men! My husband has lost his "golden Riette." When you see beneath
the bandage! He will have the right to put me away. His "beauty of
beauties"! I'm fit only to dress as a page-boy and run at his heels. My
hero! my poor dear! He thinking I cared for nothing but amusement,
flattery. Was ever a punishment so cruel to the noblest of generous
husbands! Because I know he will overlook it, make light of it, never
reproach his Riette. And the rose he married comes to him a shrivelled
leaf of a potpourri heap. You haven't seen me yet. I was their "beautiful
woman." I feel for my husband most.'

She took breath. Carinthia pressed her lips on the cheek sensible to a
hiss, and Henrietta pursued, in words liker to sobs: 'Anywhere, Cadiz,
St. Jean de Luz, hospital work either, anywhere my husband likes,
anything! I want to work, or I'll sit and rock the children. I'm awake at
last. Janey, we're lambs to vultures with those men. I don't pretend I
was the perfect fool. I thought myself so safe. I let one of them squeeze
my hand one day, he swears. You know what a passion is; you have it for
mountains and battles, I for music. I do remember, one morning before
sunrise, driving back to town out of Windsor,--a dance, the officers of
the Guards,--and my lord's trumpeter at the back of the coach blowing
notes to melt a stone, I found a man's hand had mine. I remember Lord
Fleetwood looking over his shoulder and smiling hard and lashing his
horses. But listen--yes, at Calesford it happened. He--oh, hear the name,
then; Chillon must never hear it;--Lord Brailstone was denied the right
to step on Lord Fleetwood's grounds. The Opera company had finished
selections from my Pirata. I went out for cool air; little Sir Meeson
beside me. I had a folded gauze veil over my head, tied at the chin in a
bow. Some one ran up to me--Lord Brailstone. He poured forth their
poetry. They suppose it the wine for their "beautiful woman." I dare say
I laughed or told him to go, and he began a tirade against Lord
Fleetwood. There's no mighty difference between one beast of prey and
another. Let me get away from them all! Though now! they would not lift
an eyelid. This is my husband's treasure returning to him. We have to be
burnt to come to our senses. Janey--oh! you do well!--it was fiendish;
old ballads, melodrama plays, I see they were built on men's deeds.
Janey, I could not believe it, I have to believe, it is forced down my
throat;--that man, your husband, because he could not forgive my choosing
Chillon, schemed for Chillon's ruin. I could not believe it until I saw
in the glass this disfigured wretch he has made of me. Livia serves him,
she hates him for the tyrant he is; she has opened my eyes. And not for
himself, no, for his revenge on me, for my name to be as my face is. He
tossed me to his dogs; fair game for them! You do well, Janey; he is
capable of any villany. And has been calling at Livia's door twice a day,
inquiring anxiously; begs the first appointment possible. He has no
shame; he is accustomed to buy men and women; he thinks his money will
buy my pardon, give my face a new skin, perhaps. A woman swears to you,
Janey, by all she holds holy on earth, it is not the loss of her
beauty--there will be a wrinkled patch on the cheek for life, the surgeon
says; I am to bear a brown spot, like a bruised peach they sell at the
fruit-shops cheap. Chillon's Riette! I think of that, the miserable wife
I am for him without the beauty he loved so! I think of myself as guilty,
a really guilty woman, when I compare my loss with my husband's.'