The Amazing Marriage, v4
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George Meredith >> The Amazing Marriage, v4
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'You are the mistress to invite or exclude.'
'I am ready to go in a few hours for a small income of money, for my
child and me.'
'--Our child.'
'Yes.'
'It is our child.'
'It is.'
'Any sum you choose to name. But where would you live?'
'Near my brother I would live.'
'Three thousand a year for pin-money, or more, are at your disposal.
Stay here, I beg. You have only to notify your wants. And we'll talk
familiarly now, as we're together. Can I be of aid to your brother?
Tell me, pray. I am disposed in every way to subscribe to your wishes.
Pray, speak, speak out.'
So the earl said. He had to force his familiar tone against the rebuke
of her grandeur of stature; and he was for inducing her to deliver her
mind, that the mountain girl's feebleness in speech might reinstate him.
She rejoined unhesitatingly: 'My brother would not accept aid from you,
my lord. I will take no money more than for my needs.'
'You spoke of certain sums down in Wales.'
'I did then.' Her voice was dead.
'Ah! You must be feeling the cold North-wind here.'
'I do not. You may feel the cold, my lord. Will you enter the house?'
' Do you invite me?'
'The house is your own.'
'Will the mistress of the house honour me so far?'
'I am not the mistress of the house, my lord.'
'You refuse, Carinthia?'
'I would keep from using those words. I have no right to refuse the
entry of the house to you.'
'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.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Be the woman and have the last word!
Charity that supplied the place of justice was not thanked
Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting
Deeds only are the title
Detested titles, invented by the English
He did not vastly respect beautiful women
Look backward only to correct an error of conduct in future
Meditations upon the errors of the general man, as a cover
Not to be the idol, to have an aim of our own
Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism
One idea is a bullet
Quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding
Religion is the one refuge from women
Scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices
The divinely damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments
The embraced respected woman
The habit of the defensive paralyzes will
The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet
Their sneer withers
Tighter than ever I was tight I'll be to-night
With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself
You want me to flick your indecision
[The End]
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