The Amazing Marriage, v5
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George Meredith >> The Amazing Marriage, v5
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Gower Woodseer's engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for
expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and
where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher
practically philosophizing.
'The girl shall have a dowry from me,' he said; and the sum named was
large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her
now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.
He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a semi-
ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She had
a well-bred mother.
Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend,
and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had
ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to
follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of
the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded.
Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his.
They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed
outright at Chummy Potts's nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it,
and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard's family. So much
is owing to our friend.
Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men
of the world?
A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the
worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.
These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle
worked in Fleetwood's head. He defended the men of the world. Lord
Feltre oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory
blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence
of them. Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness of
sins, if sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of
necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he
took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was
a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said
she knew more of him than they knew.
He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would
have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing
it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the
apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to
propitiate--and his lips pecked the baby's cheek. Its mother held arms
for it immediately.
Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with
little of a mind to see.
The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to
snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular
experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he
said once: 'If you mean to marry, you'll be wanting to marry soon, of
course,' and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to
signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us.
Honest though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque,
the philosopher's day had come to an end. How can Philosophy minister
to raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered
to right and left! Religion has a nourishing breast: Philosophy is
breastless. Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness,
is an untenanted confessional: 'wide air to a cry in anguish,' Feltre
says.
All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk
when he would.
He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and
spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and
insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning
for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the
ointment brought comfort.
It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard's grave;
where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts
should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have the
secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity,
why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts's hearing was not addressed;
nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that
merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.
Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days
further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate
grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for
whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere
or other--when felon spectres were abroad over earth--been conceived.
He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with
intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he
liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!
Whatever the earl's inferiors did, their inferior station was not
suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism
to Woodseer's philosophy--which the fellow carried through with perpetual
scorings of satisfaction--caused him to set a hard eye on the damsel
under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom, after
once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and he chose
to consider the winning of the prize-fighter's lass the final triumph or
flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy. Vain to ask how he had
come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly conceited,
pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him! We sow and we
reap; 'plant for sugar and taste the cane,' some one says--this Woodseer,
probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the ears of the worldlings.
And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff to nourish: Feltre's
'wisdom of our fathers,' rightly named Religion.
More in the country, when he traversed sweep and rise of open land,
Carinthia's image began to shine, and she threw some of her light on
Madge, who made Woodseer appear tolerable, sagacious, absurdly enviable,
as when we have the fit to wish we were some four-foot. The fellow's
philosophy wore a look of practical craft.
He was going to the girl he liked, and she was, one could swear, an
honest girl; and she was a comely girl, a girl to stick to a man. Her
throwing over a sot was creditable. Her mistress loved her. That said
much for any mortal creature. Man or woman loved by Carinthia could not
be cowardly, could not be vile, must have high qualities. Next to
Religion, she stood for a test of us. Had she any strong sense of
Religion, in addition to the formal trooping to one of their pallid
Protestant churches? Lord Feltre might prove useful to her. For merely
the comprehension of the signification of Religion steadies us. It had
done that for him, the earl owned.
He broke a prolonged silence by remarking to Gower 'You haven't much to
say to-day'; and the answer was 'Very little. When I'm walking, I'm
picking up; and when I'm driving, I'm putting together.'
Gower was rallied on the pursuit of the personal object in both cases.
He pointed at sheep, shepherd, farmer, over the hedge, all similarly
occupied; and admitted shamelessly, that he had not a thought for
company, scarce a word to fling. 'Ideas in gestation are the dullest
matter you can have.'
'There I quite agree with you,' said Fleetwood. Abrane, Chummy Potts,
Brailstone, little Corby, were brighter comrades. And these were his
Ixionides! Hitherto his carving of a way in the world had been
sufficiently ill-considered. Was it preferable to be a loutish
philosopher? Since the death of Ambrose Mallard, he felt Woodseer's
title for that crew grind harshly; and he tried to provoke a repetition
of it, that he might burst out in wrathful defence of his friends--to be
named friends when they were vilified: defence of poor Ambrose at least,
the sinner who, or one as bad, might have reached to pardon through the
priesthood.
Gower offered him no chance..
Entering Esslemont air, Fleetwood tossed his black mood to the winds.
She breathed it. She was a mountain girl, and found it hard to forgive
our lowlands. She would learn tolerance, taking her flights at seasons.
The yacht, if she is anything of a sailor, may give her a taste of
England's pleasures. She will have a special allowance for distribution
among old Mr. Woodseer's people. As to the rest of the Countess of
Fleetwood's wishes, her family ranks with her husband's in claims of any
kind on him. There would be--she would require and had a right to
demand--say, a warm half-hour of explanations: he knew the tone for them,
and so little did he revolve it apprehensively, that his mind sprang
beyond, to the hearing from her mouth of her not intending further to
'guard her rooms.' How quietly the words were spoken! There was a charm
in the retrospect of her mouth and manner. One of the rare women who
never pout or attitudinize, she could fling her glove gracefully--
one might add, capturingly under every aspect, she was a handsome
belligerent. The words he had to combat pleased his memory. Some good
friend, Lady Arpington probably, had instructed her in the art of
dressing to match her colour.
Concerning himself, he made no stipulation, but he reflected on Lord
Feltre's likely estimate of her as a bit of a heathen. And it might be
to her advantage, were she and Feltre to have some conversations.
Whatever the faith, a faith should exist, for without the sentiment of
religion, a woman, he says, is where she was when she left the gates of
Eden. A man is not much farther. Feltre might have saved Ambrose
Mallard. He is, however, right in saying, that the woman with the
sentiment of religion in her bosom is a box of holy incense
distinguishing her from all other women. Empty of it, she is devil's
bait. At best, she is a creature who cannot overlook an injury, or must
be exacting God knows what humiliations before she signs the treaty.
Informed at the house that her ladyship had been staying up on Croridge
for the last two days, Fleetwood sent his hardest shot of the eyes at
Gower. Let her be absent: it was equal to the first move of war, and
absolved him from contemplated proposals to make amends. But the
enforced solitary companionship with this ruminator of a fellow set him
asking whether the godless dog he had picked up by the wayside was not
incarnate another of the sins he had to expiate. Day after day, almost
hourly, some new stroke fell on him. Why? Was he selected for
persecution because he was wealthy? The Fates were driving him in one
direction, no doubt of that.
This further black mood evaporated, and like a cessation of English
storm-weather bequeathed him gloom. Ashamed of the mood, he was
nevertheless directed by its final shadows to see the ruminating
tramp in Gower, and in Madge the prize-fighter's jilt: and round about
Esslemont a world eyeing an Earl of Fleetwood, who painted himself the
man he was, or was held to be, by getting together such a collection,
from the daughter of the Old Buccaneer to the ghastly corpse of Ambrose
Mallard. Why, clearly, wealth was the sole origin and agent of the
mischief. With somewhat less of it, he might have walked in his place
among the nation's elect, the 'herd of the gilt horns,' untroubled by
ambitions and ideas.
Arriving thus far, he chanced to behold Gower and Madge walking over the
grounds near the western plantation, and he regretted the disappearance
of them, with the fellow talking hard into the girl's ear. Those two
could think he had been of some use. The man pretending to philosophical
depth was at any rate honest; one could swear to the honesty of the girl,
though she had been a reckless hussy. Their humble little hopes and
means to come to union approached, after a fashion, hymning at his ears.
Those two were pleasanter to look on than amorous lords and great ladies,
who are interesting only when they are wicked.
Four days of desolate wanderings over the estate were occupied chiefly in
his decreeing the fall of timber that obstructed views, and was the more
imperatively doomed for his bailiff's intercession. 'Sound wood' the
trees might be: they had to assist in defraying the expense of separate
establishments. A messenger to Queeney from Croridge then announced the
Countess's return 'for a couple of hours.' Queeney said it was the day
when her ladyship examined the weekly bills of the household. That was
in the early morning. The post brought my lord a letter from Countess
Livia, a most infrequent writer. She had his word to pay her debts;
what next was she for asking? He shrugged, opened the letter, and stared
at the half dozen lines. The signification of them rapped on his
consciousness of another heavy blow before he was perfectly intelligent.
All possible anticipation seemed here outdone: insomuch that he held
palpable evidence of the Fates at work to harass and drive him. She was
married to the young Earl of Cressett!'
Fleetwood printed the lines on his eyeballs. They were the politely
flowing feminine of a statement of the fact, which might have been in one
line. They flourished wantonly: they were deadly blunt. And of all men,
this youngster, who struck at him through her lips with the reproach,
that he had sped the good-looking little beast upon his road to ruin:--
perhaps to Ambrose Mallard's end!
CHAPTER XLII
THE RETARDED COURTSHIP
Carinthia reached Esslemont near noon. She came on foot, and had come
unaccompanied, stick in hand, her dress looped for the roads. Madge
bustled her shorter steps up the park beside her; Fleetwood met her on
the terrace.
'No one can be spared at Croridge,' she said. 'I go back before dark.'
Apology was not thought of; she seemed wound to the pitch.
He bowed; he led into the morning-room. 'The boy is at Croridge?'
'With me. He has his nurse. Madge was at home here more than there.'
'Why do you go back?'
'I am of use to my brother.'
'Forgive me--in what way?'
'He has enemies about him. They are the workmen of Lord Levellier.
They attacked Lekkatts the other night, and my uncle fired at them out
of a window and wounded a man. They have sworn they will be revenged.
Mr. Wythan is with my brother to protect him.'
'Two men, very well; they don't want, if there's danger, a woman's aid in
protecting him?'
She smiled, and her smile was like the hint of the steel blade an inch
out of sheath.
'My brother does not count me a weak woman.'
'Oh no! No one would think that,' Fleetwood said hurriedly and heartily.
'Least of all men, I, Carinthia. But you might be rash.'
'My brother knows me cautious.'
'Chillon?'
'It is my brother's name.'
'You used to call him by his name.
'I love his name.'
'Ah, well! I may be pardoned for wishing to hear what part you play
there.'
'I go the rounds with my brother.'
'Armed?'
'We carry arms.'
'Queer sight to see in England. But there are rascals in this country,
too.'
She was guilty of saying, though not pointedly: 'We do not hire
defenders.'
'In civilized lands . . .' he began and stopped 'You have Mr. Wythan?'
'Yes, we are three.'
'You call him, I think, Owain?'
'I do.'
'In your brother's hearing?'
'Yes, my lord; it would be in your hearing if you were near.'
'No harm, no doubt.'
'There is none.'
'But you will not call your brother Chillon to me.'
'You dislike the name.'
'I learn to like everything you do and say; and every person you like.'
'It is by Mr. Wythan's dead wife's request that I call him by his name.
He is our friend. He is a man to trust.'
'The situation . . .' Fleetwood hung swaying between the worldly view
of it and the white light of this woman's nature flashed on his emotion
into his mind. 'You shall be trusted for judging. If he is your friend,
he is my friend. I have missed the sight of our boy. You heard I was at
Esslemont?'
'I heard from Madge!'
'It is positive you must return to Croridge?'
'I must be with my brother, yes.'
'Your ladyship will permit me to conduct you.'
Her head assented. There was nothing to complain of, but he had not
gained a step.
The rule is, that when we have yielded initiative to a woman, we are
unable to recover it without uncivil bluster. So, therefore, women
dealing with gentlemen are allowed unreasonable advantages. He had never
granted it in colloquy or act to any woman but this one. Consequently,
he was to see, that if the gentleman in him was not put aside, the lady
would continue moving on lines of the independence he had likewise
yielded, or rather flung, to her. Unless, as a result, he besieged and
wooed his wife, his wife would hold on a course inclining constantly
farther from the union he desired. Yet how could he begin to woo her if
he saw no spark of womanly tenderness? He asked himself, because the
beginning of the wooing might be checked by the call on him for words of
repentance only just possible to conceive. Imagine them uttered, and she
has the initiative for life.
She would not have it, certainly, with a downright brute. But he was not
that. In an extremity of bitterness, he fished up a drowned old thought,
of all his torments being due to the impulsive half-brute he was. And
between the good and the bad in him, the sole point of strength was a
pride likely, as the smooth simplicity of her indifference showed him,
soon to be going down prostrate beneath her feet. Wholly a brute--well?
He had to say, that playing the perfect brute with any other woman he
would have his mastery. The summoning of an idea of personal power to
match this woman in a contest was an effort exhausting the idea.
They passed out of Esslemont gates together at that hour of the late
afternoon when South-westerly breezes, after a summer gale, drive their
huge white flocks over blue fields fresh as morning, on the march to pile
the crown of the sphere, and end a troubled day with grandeur. Up the
lane by the park they had open land to the heights of Croridge.
'Splendid clouds,' Fleetwood remarked.
She looked up, thinking of the happy long day's walk with her brother to
the Styrian Baths. Pleasure in the sight made her face shine superbly.
'A flying Switzerland, Mr. Woodseer says,' she replied. 'England is
beautiful on days like these.--For walking, I think the English climate
very good.'
He dropped a murmur: 'It should suit so good a walker,' and burned to
compliment--her spirited easy stepping, and scorned himself for the
sycophancy it would be before they were on the common ground of a
restored understanding. But an approval of any of her acts threatened
him with enthusiasm for the whole of them, her person included; and a dam
in his breast had to keep back the flood.
'You quote Woodseer to me, Carinthia. I wish you knew Lord Feltre.
He can tell you of every cathedral, convent, and monastery in Europe and
Syria. Nature is well enough; she is, as he says, a savage. Men's
works, acting under divine direction to escape from that tangle, are
better worthy of study, perhaps. If one has done wrong, for example.'
'I could listen to him,' she said.
'You would not need--except, yes, one thing. Your father's book speaks
of not forgiving an injury.'
'My father does. He thinks it weakness to forgive an injury. Women do,
and are disgraced, they are thought slavish. My brother is much stronger
than I am. He is my father alive in that.'
'It is anti-Christian, some would think.'
'Let offending people go. He would not punish them. They may go where
they will be forgiven. For them our religion is a happy retreat; we are
glad they have it. My father and my brother say that injury forbids us
to be friends again. My father was injured by the English Admiralty: he
never forgave it; but he would have fought one of their ships and offered
his blood any day, if his country called to battle.'
'You have the same feeling, you mean.'
'I am a woman. I follow my brother, whatever he decides. It is not to
say he is the enemy of persons offending him; only that they have put the
division.'
'They repent?'
'If they do, they do well for themselves.'
'You would see them in sackcloth and ashes?'
'I would pray to be spared seeing them.'
'You can entirely forget--well, other moments, other feelings?'
'They may heighten the injury.'
'Carinthia, I should wish to speak plainly, if I could, and tell you....'
'You speak quite plainly, my lord.'
'You and I cannot be strangers or enemies.'
'We cannot be, I would not be. To be friends, we should be separate.'
'You say you are a woman; you have a heart, then?'--for, if not, what
have you? was added in the tone.
'My heart is my brother's,' she said.
'All your heart?'
'My heart is my brother's until one of us drops.'
'There is not another on earth beside your brother Chillon?'
'There is my child.'
The dwarf square tower of Croridge village church fronted them against
the sky, seen of both.
'You remember it,' he said; and she answered: 'I was married there.'
'You have not forgotten that injury, Carinthia?'
'I am a mother.'
'By all the saints! you hit hard. Justly. Not you. Our deeds are the
hard hitters. We learn when they begin to flagellate, stroke upon
stroke! Suppose we hold a costly thing in the hand and dash it to the
ground--no recovery of it, none! That must be what your father meant.
I can't regret you are a mother. We have a son, a bond. How can I
describe the man I was!' he muttered,--'possessed! sort of werewolf!
You are my wife?'
'I was married to you, my lord.'
'It's a tie of a kind.'
'It binds me.'
'Obey, you said.'
'Obey it. I do.'
'You consider it holy?'
'My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie. I read the
service before I stood at the altar. It is holy. It is dreadful.
I will be true to it.'
'To your husband?'
'To his name, to his honour.'
'To the vow to live with him?'
'My husband broke that for me.'
'Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it? God knows what you may
save me from!'
'Pray to God. Do not beg of me, my lord. I have my brother and my
little son. No more of husband for me! God has given me a friend, too,
--a man of humble heart, my brother's friend, my dear Rebecca's husband.
He can take them from me: no one but God. See the splendid sky we have.'
With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she
bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red
of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the
line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of
anguish swell an ecstasy. So he felt it, for his mood was now the
lover's. A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that
voice at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.
'I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,' he
said. 'The name of his house?'
'My brother is not now any more in the English army,' she replied. 'He
has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.'
'He will receive me, I presume?'
'My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.'
'Here is the church, and here we have to part for today. Do we?'
'Good-bye to you, my lord,' she said.
He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.
'Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?'
'For the present,' was her strange answer.
She bowed, she stepped on. On she sped, leaving him at the stammered
beginning of his appeal to her.
Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was
what the world would class as curious. To him it was a further and a
well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the
graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a
puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her
vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the
phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.
There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family had
given him at his request. He felt the lump. It had an answer for all
perplexities. It had been charged and emptied since it was in his
possession; and it could be charged again. The thing was a volume as
big as the world to study. For the touch of a finger, one could have
its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night
wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.
He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes
bent inward. They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as
the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre's Madonna.
But whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the
pain for having inflicted it. Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether
of anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated
ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to
lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until
priestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull
consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her
injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She
is a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make
him feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him
from her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go
in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is, here
are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the
heathen.
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