The Amazing Marriage, v5

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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.

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.

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