The Amazing Marriage _ Complete George Meredith 52043 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Amazing Marriage —
Complete
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: The Amazing Marriage — Complete

Author: George Meredith

Release date: November 5, 2004 [eBook #4488]
Most recently updated: January 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4488

Credits: Produced by David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING
MARRIAGE — COMPLETE ***

THE AMAZING MARRIAGE

By George Meredith

1895

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. ENTER DAME GOSSIP AS CHORUS

CHAPTER II. MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF THE
ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF CRESSETT WITH
THE OLD BUCCANEER

CHAPTER III. CONTINUATION OF THE
INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME GOSSIP,
TOGETHER WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION

CHAPTER IV. MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD
HOME

CHAPTER V. A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND
SUNSHINE

CHAPTER VI. THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

CHAPTER VII. THE LADY’S LETTER

CHAPTER VIII. OF THE ENCOUNTER OF TWO
STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR CONSORTING

CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS
FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER

CHAPTER X. SMALL CAUSES

CHAPTER XI. THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD

CHAPTER XII. HENRIETTA’S LETTER TREATING OF
THE GREAT EVENT

CHAPTER XIII. AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP
IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION

CHAPTER XIV. A PENDANT OF THE FOREGOING

CHAPTER XV. OPENING STAGE OF THE
HONEYMOON

CHAPTER XVI. IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM
FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD ENGLAND

CHAPTER XVII. RECORDS A SHADOW CONTEST
CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING

CHAPTER XVIII. DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY

CHAPTER XIX. THE GIRL MADGE

CHAPTER XX. STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD
SEAMAN, AND A LOVELY SERPENT

CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER
GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR

YOUNGER MAN

CHAPTER XXII. A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY

CHAPTER XXIII. IN DAME GOSSIP’S VEIN

CHAPTER XXIV. A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT
HARM

CHAPTER XXV. THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION

CHAPTER XXVI. AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME
PASSES OUR GUARD

CHAPTER XXVII. WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER’S
ENGINE-ROOM

CHAPTER XXVIII. BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS
GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS AVERTED

CHAPTER XXIX. CARINTHIA IN WALES

CHAPTER XXX. REBECCA WYTHAN

CHAPTER XXXI. WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE
EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

CHAPTER XXXII. IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT
IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER’S LESSONS

CHAPTER XXXIII. A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE

CHAPTER XXXIV. A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE
WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF
FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT

CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY

BE DISCERNED

CHAPTER XXXVI. BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE

CHAPTER XXXVII. BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER
LORD

CHAPTER XXXVIII. A DIP INTO THE SPRING’S
WATERS

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE RED WARNING FROM A SON
OF VAPOUR

CHAPTER XL. RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS

CHAPTER XLI. IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND
A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM

CHAPTER XLII. THE RETARDED COURTSHIP

CHAPTER XLIII. ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF
PENANCE

CHAPTER XLIV. BETWEEN THE EARL, THE
COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER
CROSS

CHAPTER XLV. CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS
FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED

CHAPTER XLVI. A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS
AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES

CHAPTER XLVII. THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING
WORD BY THE DAME

CHAPTER I. ENTER DAME GOSSIP AS
CHORUS
Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one
of the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running
over Europe, crying out for charity’s sake to be amused after their tiresome
work of slaughter: and you know what a dread they have of moping. She
was famous for her fun and high spirits besides her good looks, which you
may judge of for yourself on a walk down most of our great noblemen’s
collections of pictures in England, where you will behold her as the goddess
Diana fitting an arrow to a bow; and elsewhere an Amazon holding a spear;
or a lady with dogs, in the costume of the day; and in one place she is a
nymph, if not Diana herself, gazing at her naked feet before her attendants
loosen her tunic for her to take the bath, and her hounds are pricking their
ears, and you see antlers of a stag behind a block of stone. She was a
wonderful swimmer, among other things, and one early morning, when she
was a girl, she did really swim, they say, across the Shannon and back to
win a bet for her brother Lord Levellier, the colonel of cavalry, who left an
arm in Egypt, and changed his way of life to become a wizard, as the
common people about his neighbourhood supposed, because he foretold the
weather and had cures for aches and pains without a doctor’s diploma. But
we know now that he was only a mathematician and astronomer, all for
inventing military engines. The brother and sister were great friends in their
youth, when he had his right arm to defend her reputation with; and she
would have done anything on earth to please him.
There is a picture of her in an immense flat white silk hat trimmed with
pale blue, like a pavilion, the broadest brim ever seen, and she simply sits
on a chair; and Venus the Queen of Beauty would have been extinguished
under that hat, I am sure; and only to look at Countess Fanny’s eye beneath
the brim she has tipped ever so slightly in her artfulness makes the absurd
thing graceful and suitable. Oh! she was a cunning one. But you must be on
your guard against the scandalmongers and collectors of anecdotes, and
worst of any, the critic, of our Galleries of Art; for she being in almost all of
them (the principal painters of the day were on their knees for the favour of

a sitting), they have to speak of her pretty frequently, and they season their
dish, the coxcombs do, by hinting a knowledge of her history.
‘Here we come to another portrait of the beautiful but, we fear, naughty
Countess of Cressett.’
You are to imagine that they know everything, and they are so indulgent
when they drop their blot on a lady’s character.
They can boast of nothing more than having read Nymriey’s Letters and
Correspondence, published, fortunately for him, when he was no longer to
be called to account below for his malicious insinuations, pretending to
decency in initials and dashes: That man was a hater of women and the
clergy. He was one of the horrid creatures who write with a wink at you,
which sets the wicked part of us on fire: I have known it myself, and I own
it to my shame; and if I happened to be ignorant of the history of Countess
Fanny, I could not refute his wantonness. He has just the same benevolent
leer for a bishop. Give me, if we are to make a choice, the beggar’s breech
for decency, I say: I like it vastly in preference to a Nymney, who leads you
up to the curtain and agitates it, and bids you to retire on tiptoe. You cannot
help being angry with the man for both reasons. But he is the writer society
delights in, to show what it is composed of. A man brazen enough to declare
that he could hold us in suspense about the adventures of a broomstick, with
the aid of a yashmak and an ankle, may know the world; you had better not
know him—that is my remark; and do not trust him.
He tells the story of the Old Buccaneer in fear of the public, for it was
general property, but of course he finishes with a Nymney touch: ‘So the
Old Buccaneer is the doubloon she takes in exchange for a handful of silver
pieces.’ There is no such handful to exchange—not of the kind he
sickeningly nudges at you. I will prove to you it was not Countess Fanny’s
naughtiness, though she was indeed very blamable. Women should walk in
armour as if they were born to it; for these cold sneerers will never waste
their darts on cuirasses. An independent brave young creature, exposing
herself thoughtlessly in her reckless innocence, is the victim for them. They
will bring all society down on her with one of their explosive sly words
appearing so careless, the cowards. I say without hesitation, her conduct
with regard to Kirby, the Old Buccaneer, as he was called, however
indefensible in itself, warrants her at heart an innocent young woman, much
to be pitied. Only to think of her, I could sometimes drop into a chair for a

good cry. And of him too! and their daughter Carinthia Jane was the pair of
them, as to that, and so was Chillon John, the son.
Those critics quoting Nymney should look at the portrait of her in the
Long Saloon of Cresset Castle, where she stands in blue and white,
completely dressed, near a table supporting a couple of holster pistols, and
then let them ask themselves whether they would speak of her so if her little
hand could move.
Well, and so the tale of her swim across the Shannon river and back
drove the young Earl of Cresset straight over to Ireland to propose for her,
he saying; that she was the girl to suit his book; not allowing her time to
think of how much he might be the man to suit hers. The marriage was what
is called a good one: both full of frolic, and he wealthy and rather
handsome, and she quite lovely and spirited.
No wonder the whole town was very soon agog about the couple, until at
the end of a year people began to talk of them separately, she going her
way, and he his. She could not always be on the top of a coach, which was
his throne of happiness.
Plenty of stories are current still of his fame as a four-in-hand coachman.
They say he once drove an Emperor and a King, a Prince Chancellor and a
pair of Field Marshals, and some ladies of the day, from the metropolis to
Richmond Hill in fifty or sixty odd minutes, having the ground cleared all
the way by bell and summons, and only a donkey-cart and man, and a deaf
old woman, to pay for; and went, as you can imagine, at such a tearing
gallop, that those Grand Highnesses had to hold on for their lives and lost
their hats along the road; and a publican at Kew exhibits one above his bar
to the present hour. And Countess Fanny was up among them, they say. She
was equal to it. And some say, that was the occasion of her meeting the Old
Buccaneer.
She met him at Richmond in Surrey we know for certain. It was on
Richmond Hill, where the old King met his Lass. They say Countess Fanny
was parading the hill to behold the splendid view, always admired so much
by foreigners, with their Achs and Hechs! and surrounded by her crowned
courtiers in frogged uniforms and moustachioed like sea-horses, a little
before dinner time, when Kirby passed her, and the Emperor made a remark
on him, for Kirby was a magnificent figure of a man, and used to be
compared to a three-decker entering harbour after a victory. He stood six

feet four, and was broad-shouldered and deep-chested to match, and walked
like a king who has humbled his enemy. You have seen big dogs. And so
Countess Fanny looked round. Kirby was doing the same. But he had
turned right about, and appeared transfixed and like a royal beast angry,
with his wound. If ever there was love at first sight, and a dreadful love,
like a runaway mail-coach in a storm of wind and lightning at black
midnight by the banks of a flooded river, which was formerly our
comparison for terrible situations, it was when those two met.
And, what! you exclaim, Buccaneer Kirby full sixty-five, and Countess
Fanny no more than three and twenty, a young beauty of the world of
fashion, courted by the highest, and she in love with him! Go and gaze at
one of our big ships coming out of an engagement home with all her flags
flying and her crew manning the yards. That will give you an idea of a
young woman’s feelings for an old warrior never beaten down an inch by
anything he had to endure; matching him, I dare say, in her woman’s heart,
with the Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of battle.
She did rarely admire a valiant man. Old as Methuselah, he would have
made her kneel to him. She was all heart for a real hero.
The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby,
at the emperor’s request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she struck
her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the bravest man in
the king’s dominions; which the emperor scarce crediting, and observing
that the man must be, then, a superhuman being to be so distinguished in a
nation of the brave, Countess Fanny related the well-known tale of Captain
Kirby and the shipful of mutineers; and how when not a man of them stood
by him, and he in the service of the first insurgent State of Spanish America,
to save his ship from being taken over to the enemy,—he blew her up,
fifteen miles from land: and so he got to shore swimming and floating
alternately, and was called Old Sky-high by English sailors, any number of
whom could always be had to sail under Buccaneer Kirby. He fought on
shore as well; and once he came down from the tops of the Andes with a
black beard turned white, and went into action with the title of Kirby’s
Ghost.
But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a
ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never
forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval captains:

which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge against his
country.
Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since. He was a
mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will beat
Grim Death if we have enough of them. He was a standing example of the
lessons of his own MAXIMS FOR MEN, a very curious book, that fetches
a rare price now wherever a copy is put up for auction. I shudder at them as
if they were muzzles of firearms pointed at me; but they were not addressed
to my sex; and still they give me an interest in the writer who would
declare, that ‘he had never failed in an undertaking without stripping bare to
expose to himself where he had been wanting in Intention and
Determination.’
There you may see a truly terrible man.
So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby’s method of
preserving discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman,
‘Your strait-waistcoat is my easy-chair’) monarchs have a great love of
discipline, he begged Countess Fanny’s permission that he might invite
Captain Kirby to his table; and Countess Fanny (she had the name from the
ballad

‘I am the star of Prince and Czar,
My light is shed on many,
But I wait here till my bold Buccaneer
Makes prize of Countess Fanny’:—

for the popular imagination was extraordinarily roused by the elopement,
and there were songs and ballads out of number), Countess Fanny
despatched her husband to Captain Kirby again, meaning no harm, though
the poor man is laughed at in the songs for going twice upon his mission.
None of the mighty people repented of having the Old Buccaneer—for
that night, at all events. He sat in the midst of them, you may believe, like
the lord of that table, with his great white beard and hair—not a lock of it
shed—and his bronze lion-face, and a resolute but a merry eye that he had.
He was no deep drinker of wine, but when he did drink, and the wine
champagne, he drank to show his disdain of its powers; and the emperor
wishing for a narrative of some of his exploits, particularly the blowing up
of his ship, Kirby paid his Majesty the compliment of giving it him as
baldly as an official report to the Admiralty. So disengaged and calm was

he, with his bottles of champagne in him, where another would have been
sparkling and laying on the colours, that he was then and there offered
Admiral’s rank in the Imperial navy; and the Old Buccaneer, like a courtier
of our best days, bows to Countess Fanny, and asks her, if he is a free man
to go: and, No, says she, we cannot spare you! And there was a pretty
wrangle between Countess Fanny and the emperor, each pulling at the Old
Buccaneer to have possession of him.
He was rarely out of her sight after their first meeting, and the ridiculous
excuse she gave to her husband’s family was, she feared he would be
kidnapped and made a Cossack of! And young Lord Cressett, her husband,
began to grumble concerning her intimacy with a man old enough to be her
grandfather. As if the age were the injury! He seemed to think it so, and
vowed he would shoot the old depredator dead, if he found him on the
grounds of Cressett: ‘like vermin,’ he said, and it was considered that he
had the right, and no jury would have convicted him. You know what those
days were.
He had his opportunity one moonlight night, not far from the castle, and
peppered Kirby with shot from a fowling-piece at, some say, five paces’
distance, if not point-blank.
But Kirby had a maxim, Steady shakes them, and he acted on it to
receive his enemy’s fire; and the young lord’s hand shook, and the Old
Buccaneer stood out of the smoke not much injured, except in the coat-
collar, with a pistol cocked in his hand, and he said:
‘Many would take that for a declaration of war, but I know it ‘s only your
lordship’s diplomacy’; and then he let loose to his mad fun, astounding
Lord Cressett and his gamekeeper, and vowed, as the young lord tried to
relate subsequently, as well as he could recollect the words—here I have it
in print:—‘that he was a man pickled in saltpetre when an infant, like
Achilles, and proof against powder and shot not marked with cross and key,
and fetched up from the square magazine in the central depot of the infernal
factory, third turning to the right off the grand arcade in Kingdom-come,
where the night-porter has to wear wet petticoats, like a Highland chief, to
make short work of the sparks flying about, otherwise this world and many
another would not have to wait long for combustion.’
Kirby had the wildest way of talking when he was not issuing orders
under fire, best understood by sailors. I give it you as it stands here printed.

I do not profess to understand.
So Lord Cressett said: ‘Diplomacy and infernal factories be hanged!
Have your shot at me; it’s only fair.’ And Kirby discharged his pistol at the
top twigs of an old oak tree, and called the young lord a Briton, and
proposed to take him in hand and make a man of him, as nigh worthy of his
wife as any one not an Alexander of Macedon could be.
So they became friendly, and the young lord confessed it was his family
that had urged him to the attack; and Kirby abode at the castle, and all three
were happy, in perfect honour, I am convinced: but such was not the
opinion of the Cressetts and Levelliers. Down they trooped to Cressett
Castle with a rush and a roar, crying on the disgrace of an old desperado
like Kirby living there; Dukes, Marchionesses, Cabinet Ministers, leaders of
fashion, and fire-eating colonels of the King’s body-guard, one of whom
Captain John Peter Kirby laid on his heels at ten paces on an April morning,
when the duel was fought, as early as the blessed heavens had given them
light to see to do it. Such days those were!
There was talk of shutting up the infatuated lady. If not incarcerated, she
was rigidly watched. The earl her husband fell altogether to drinking and
coaching, and other things. The ballad makes her say:

‘My family my gaolers be,
My husband is a zany;
Naught see I clear save my bold Buccaneer
To rescue Countess Fanny!’

and it goes on:

‘O little lass, at play on the grass,

Come earn a silver penny,
And you’ll be dear to my bold Buccaneer
For news of his Countess Fanny.’

In spite of her bravery, that poor woman suffered!
We used to learn by heart the ballads and songs upon famous events in
those old days when poetry was worshipped.
But Captain Kirby gave provocation enough to both families when he
went among the taverns and clubs, and vowed before Providence over his
big fist that they should rue their interference, and he would carry off the
lady on a day he named; he named the hour as well, they say, and that was

midnight of the month of June. The Levelliers and Cressetts foamed at the
mouth in speaking of him, so enraged they were on account of his age and
his passion for a young woman. As to blood, the Kirbys of Lincolnshire
were quite equal to the Cressetts of Warwick. The Old Buccaneer seems to
have had money too. But you can see what her people had to complain of:
his insolent contempt of them was unexampled. And their tyranny had
roused my lady’s high spirit not a bit less; and she said right out: ‘When he
comes, I am ready and will go with him.’
There was boldness for you on both sides! All the town was laughing and
betting on the event of the night in June: and the odds were in favour of
Kirby; for though, Lord Cressett was quite the popular young English
nobleman, being a capital whip and free of his coin, in those days men who
had smelt powder were often prized above titles, and the feeling, out of
society, was very strong for Kirby, even previous to the fight on the heath.
And the age of the indomitable adventurer must have contributed to his
popularity. He was the hero of every song.

“‘What’s age to me!” cries Kirby;
“Why, young and fresh let her be,
But it ‘s mighty better reasoned
For a man to be well seasoned,
And a man she has in me,” cries Kirby.’

As to his exact age:

“‘Write me down sixty-three,” cries Kirby.’

I have always maintained that it was an understatement. We must
remember, it was not Kirby speaking, but the song-writer. Kirby would not,
in my opinion, have numbered years he was proud of below their due
quantity. He was more, if he died at ninety-one; and Chillon Switzer John
Kirby, born eleven months after the elopement, was, we know, twenty-three
years old when the old man gave up the ghost and bequeathed him little
besides a law-suit with the Austrian Government, and the care of Carinthia
Jane, the second child of this extraordinary union; both children born in
wedlock, as you will hear. Sixty-three, or sixty-seven, near upon seventy,
when most men are reaping and stacking their sins with groans and weak
knees, Kirby was a match for his juniors, which they discovered.
Captain John Peter Avason Kirby, son of a Lincolnshire squire of an
ancient stock, was proud of his blood, and claimed descent from a chief of

the Danish rovers.

‘“What’s rank to me!” cries Kirby;
“A titled lass let her be,
But unless my plans miscarry,
I’ll show her when we marry;
As brave a pedigree,” cries Kirby.’

That was the song-writer’s answer to the charge that the countess had
stooped to a degrading alliance.
John Peter was fourth of a family of seven children, all males, and hard at
the bottle early in life: ‘for want of proper occupation,’ he says in his
Memoirs, and applauds his brother Stanson, the clergyman, for being ahead
of him in renouncing strong dunks, because he found that he ‘cursed better
upon water.’ Water, however, helped Stanson Kirby to outlive his brothers
and inherit the Lincolnshire property, and at the period of the great scandal
in London he was palsied, and waited on by his grandson and heir Ralph
Thorkill Kirby, the hero of an adventure celebrated in our Law courts and
on the English stage; for he took possession of his coachman’s wife, and
was accused of compassing the death of the husband. He was not hanged
for it, so we are bound to think him not guilty.
The stage-piece is called ‘Saturday Night’, and it had an astonishing run,
but is only remembered now for the song of ‘Saturday,’ sung by the poor
coachman and labourers at the village ale-house before he starts to capture
his wife from the clutches of her seducer and meets his fate. Never was
there a more popular song: you heard it everywhere. I recollect one verse:

‘O Saturday money is slippery metal,
And Saturday ale it is tipsy stuff
At home the old woman is boiling her kettle,
She thinks we don’t know when we’ve tippled enough.
We drink, and of never a man are we jealous,
And never a man against us will he speak
For who can be hard on a set of poor fellows
Who only see Saturday once a week!

You chorus the last two lines.
That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in
singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved. He
believed in her virtue to the very last.
‘The ravished wife of my bosom,’ he calls her all through the latter half
of the play. It is a real tragedy. The songs of that day have lost their effect

now, I suppose. They will ever remain pathetic to me; and to hear the poor
coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear stolen wife
Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song of Saturday, was
a most moving thing. You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out all over the
theatre. What it is that has gone from our drama, I cannot tell: I am never
affected now as I was then; and people in a low station of life could affect
me then, without being flung at me, for I dislike an entire dish of them, I
own. We were simpler in our habits and ways of thinking. Elizabeth Martin,
according to report, was a woman to make better men than Ralph Thorkill
act evilly—as to good looks, I mean. She was not entirely guiltless, I am
afraid; though in the last scene, Mrs. Kempson, who played the part (as,
alas, she could do to the very life!), so threw herself into the pathos of it
that there were few to hold out against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had
been misled. So much for morality in those days!
And now for the elopement.

CHAPTER II. MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF
THE ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF
CRESSETT WITH THE OLD BUCCANEER,
AND OF CHARLES DUMP THE POSTILLION
CONDUCTING
THEM, AND OF A GREAT COUNTY FAMILY
The twenty-first of June was the day appointed by Captain Kirby to carry
off Countess Fanny, and the time midnight: and ten minutes to the stroke of
twelve, Countess Fanny, as if she scorned to conceal that she was in a
conspiracy with her grey-haired lover, notwithstanding that she was
watched and guarded, left the Marchioness of Arpington’s ball-room and
was escorted downstairs by her brother Lord Levellier, sworn to baffle
Kirby. Present with him in the street and witness to the shutting of the
carriage-door on Countess Fanny, were brother officers of his, General
Abrane, Colonel Jack Potts, and Sir Upton Tomber.
The door fast shut, Countess Fanny kissed her hand to them and drew up
the window, seeming merry, and as they had expected indignation and
perhaps resistance, for she could be a spitfire in a temper and had no fear
whatever of firearms, they were glad to have her safe on such good terms;
and so General Abrane jumped up on the box beside the coachman, Jack
Potts jumped up between the footmen, and Sir Upton Tomber and the one-
armed lord, as soon as the carriage was disengaged from the ruck two deep,
walked on each side of it in the road all the way to Lord Cressett’s town
house. No one thought of asking where that silly young man was—probably
under some table.
Their numbers were swelled by quite a host going along, for heavy bets
were on the affair, dozens having backed Kirby; and it must have appeared
serious to them, with the lady in custody, and constables on the look-out,
and Kirby and his men nowhere in sight. They expected an onslaught at
some point of the procession, and it may be believed they wished it, if only
that they might see something for their money. A beautiful bright moonlight

night it happened to be. Arm in arm among them were Lord Pitscrew and
Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, a great friend of Kirby’s; for it was a device of
the Old Buccaneer’s that helped the earl to win the great Welsh heiress who
made him, even before he took to hoarding and buying,—one of the
wealthiest noblemen in England; but she was crazed by her marriage or the
wild scenes leading to it; she never presented herself in society. She would
sit on the top of Estlemont towers—as they formerly spelt it—all day and
half the night in midwinter, often, looking for the mountains down in her
native West country, covered with an old white flannel cloak, and on her
head a tall hat of her Welsh women-folk; and she died of it, leaving a son in
her likeness, of whom you will hear. Lord Fleetwood had lost none of his
faith in Kirby, and went on booking bets giving him huge odds, thousands!
He accepted fifty to one when the carriage came to a stop at the steps of
Lord Cressett’s mansion; but he was anxious, and well he might be, seeing
Countess Fanny alight and pass up between two lines of gentlemen all
bowing low before her: not a sign of the Old Buccaneer anywhere to right
or left! Heads were on the look out, and vows offered up for his appearance.
She was at the door and about to enter the house. Then it was; that with a
shout of the name of some dreadful heathen god, Colonel Jack Potts roared
out, ‘She’s half a foot short o’ the mark!’
He was on the pavement, and it seems he measured her as she slipped by
him, and one thing and another caused him to smell a cheat; and General
Abrane, standing beside her near the door, cried: ‘Where art flying now,
Jack?’ But Jack Potts grew more positive and bellowed, ‘Peel her wig!
we’re done!’
And she did not speak a word, but stood huddled-up and hooded; and
Lord Levellier caught her up by the arm as she was trying a dash into the
hall, and Sir Upton Tomber plucked at her veil and raised it, and whistled:
‘Phew!’—which struck the rabble below with awe of the cunning of the
Old Buccaneer; and there was no need for them to hear General Abrane say:
‘Right! Jack, we’ve a dead one in hand,’ or Jack Potts reply:
‘It’s ten thousand pounds clean winged away from my pocket, like a
string of wild geese!’
The excitement of the varletry in the square, they say, was fearful to hear.
So the principal noblemen and gentlemen concerned thought it prudent to
hurry the young woman into the house and bar the door; and there she was

very soon stripped of veil and blonde false wig with long curls, the whole
framing of her artificial resemblance to Countess Fanny, and she proved to
be a good-looking foreign maid, a dark one, powdered, trembling very
much, but not so frightened upon hearing that her penalty for the share she
had taken in the horrid imposture practised upon them was to receive and
return a salute from each of the gentlemen in rotation; which the hussy did
with proper submission; and Jack Potts remarked, that ‘it was an honest
buss, but dear at ten thousand!’
When you have been the victim of a deceit, the explanation of the
simplicity of the trick turns all the wonder upon yourself, you know, and the
backers of the Old Buccaneer and the wagerers against him crowed and
groaned in chorus at the maid’s narrative of how the moment Countess
Fanny had thrown up the window of her carriage, she sprang out to a
carriage on the off side, containing Kirby, and how she, this little French
jade, sprang in to take her place. One snap of the fingers and the
transformation was accomplished. So for another kiss all round they let her
go free, and she sat at the supper-table prepared for Countess Fanny and the
party by order of Lord Levellier, and amused the gentlemen with stories of
the ladies she had served, English and foreign. And that is how men are
taught to think they know our sex and may despise it! I could preach them a
lesson. Those men might as well not believe in the steadfastness of the very
stars because one or two are reported lost out of the firmament, and now
and then we behold a whole shower of fragments descending. The truth is,
they have taken a stain from the life they lead, and are troubled puddles,
incapable of clear reflection. To listen to the tattle of a chatting little slut,
and condemn the whole sex upon her testimony, is a nice idea of justice.
Many of the gentlemen present became notorious as woman-scorners,
whether owing to Countess Fanny or other things. Lord Levellier was, and
Lord Fleetwood, the wicked man! And certainly the hearing of naughty
stories of us by the light of a grievous and vexatious instance of our
misconduct must produce an impression. Countess Fanny’s desperate
passion for a man of the age of Kirby struck them as out of nature. They
talked of it as if they could have pardoned her a younger lover.
All that Lord Cressett said, on the announcement of the flight of his wife,
was: ‘Ah! Fan! she never would run in my ribbons.’

He positively declined to persue. Lord Levellier would not attempt to
follow her up without him, as it would have cost money, and he wanted all
that he could spare for his telescopes and experiments. Who, then, was the
gentleman who stopped the chariot, with his three mounted attendants, on
the road to the sea, on the heath by the great Punch-Bowl?
That has been the question for now longer than half a century, in fact
approaching seventy mortal years. No one has ever been able to say for
certain.
It occurred at six o’clock on the summer morning. Countess Fanny must
have known him,—and not once did she open her mouth to breathe his
name. Yet she had no objection to talk of the adventure and how Simon
Fettle, Captain Kirby’s old ship’s steward in South America, seeing
horsemen stationed on the ascent of the high road bordering the Bowl,
which is miles round and deep, made the postillion cease jogging, and sang
out to his master for orders, and Kirby sang back to him to look to his
priming, and then the postillion was bidden proceed, and he did not like it,
but he had to deal with pistols behind, where men feel weak, and he went
bobbing on the saddle in dejection, as if upon his very heart he jogged; and
soon the fray commenced. There was very little parleying between
determined men.
Simon Fettle was a plain kindly creature without a thought of malice,
who kept his master’s accounts. He fired the first shot at the foremost man,
as he related in after days, ‘to reduce the odds.’ Kirby said to Countess
Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she would be afraid,
‘The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to mangle,’ for they had been
arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on the Continent, and Simon Fettle to
do the washing. She could not help laughing outright. But when the Old
Buccaneer was down striding in the battle, she took a pistol and descended
likewise; and she used it, too, and loaded again.
She had not to use it a second time. Kirby pulled the gentleman off his
horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess Fanny to
crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor gentleman in the
breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and Simon and he disarmed
the servant who had fired. One was insensible, one flying, and those two on
the ground. All in broad daylight; but so lonely is that spot, nothing might
have been heard of it, if at the end of the week the postillion who had been

bribed and threatened with terrible threats to keep his tongue from wagging,
had not begun to talk. So the scene of the encounter was examined, and on
one spot, carefully earthed over, blood-marks were discovered in the green
sand. People in the huts on the hill-top, a quarter of a mile distant, spoke of
having heard sounds of firing while they were at breakfast, and a little boy
named Tommy Wedger said he saw a dead body go by in an open coach that
morning; all bloody and mournful. He had to appear before the magistrates,
crying terribly, but did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed.
Time came when the boy learned to swear, and he did, and that he had seen
a beautiful lady firing and killing men like pigeons and partridges; but that
was after Charles Dump, the postillion, had been telling the story.
Those who credited Charles Dump’s veracity speculated on dozens of
great noblemen—and gentlemen known to be dying in love with Countess
Fanny. And this brings us to another family.
I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we
have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of trying
to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she had
bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.
About eleven miles distant, as the crow flies and a bold huntsman will
ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the mounds
and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who intermarried
with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the wealthiest of the old
county families until Curtis Fakenham entered upon his inheritance. Money
with him was like the farm-wife’s dish of grain she tosses in showers to her
fowls. He was more than what you call a lady-killer, he was a woman-eater.
His pride was in it as well as his taste, and when men are like that, indeed
they are devourers!
Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose
offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain Kirby’s
children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear. And these two brothers were
sons of Geoffrey Fakenham, celebrated for his devotion to the French
Countess Jules d’Andreuze, or some such name, a courtly gentleman, who
turned Papist on his death-bed in France, in Brittany somewhere, not to be
separated from her in the next world, as he solemnly left word; wickedly,
many think.

To show the oddness of things and how opposite to one another brothers
may be, his elder, the uncle of Curtis, and Baldwin, was the renowned old
Admiral Fakenham, better known along our sea-coasts and ports among
sailors as ‘Old Showery,’ because of a remark he once made to his flag-
captain, when cannon-balls were coming thick on them in a hard-fought
action. ‘Hot work, sir,’ his captain said. ‘Showery,’ replied the admiral, as
his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of a cannon-ball. He lost both
legs before the war was over, and said merrily, ‘Stumps for life’ while they
were carrying him below to the cockpit. In my girlhood the boys were
always bringing home anecdotes of old Admiral Showery: not all of them
true ones, perhaps, but they fitted him. He was a rough seaman, fond, as
they say, of his glass and his girl, and utterly despising his brother Geoffrey
for the airs he gave himself, and crawling on his knees to a female
Parleyvoo; and when Geoffrey died, the admiral drank to his rest in the
grave: ‘There’s to my brother Jeff,’ he said, and flinging away the dregs of
his glass: ‘There ‘s to the Frog!’ and flinging away the glass to shivers:
‘There’s to the Turncoat!’
He salted his language in a manner I cannot repeat; no epithet ever stood
by itself. When I was young the boys relished these dreadful words because
they seemed to smell of tar and battle-smoke, when every English boy was
for being a sailor and daring the Black Gentleman below. In all truth, the
bad words came from him; though an excellent scholar has assured me they
should be taken for aspirates, and mean no harm; and so it may be, but
heartily do I rejoice that aspirates, have been dropped by people of birth; for
you might once hear titled ladies guilty of them in polite society, I do assure
you.
We have greatly improved in that respect. They say the admiral’s
reputation as a British sailor of the old school made him, rather his name, a
great favourite at Court; but to Court he could not be got to go, and if the
tale be true, their Majesties paid him a visit on board his ship, in harbour
one day, and sailors tell you that Old Showery gave his liege lord and lady a
common dish of boiled beef with carrots and turnips, and a plain dumpling,
for their dinner, with ale and port wine, the merit of which he swore to; and
he became so elate, that after the cloth was removed, he danced them a
hornpipe on his pair of wooden legs, whistling his tune, and holding his full
tumbler of hot grog in his hand all the while, without so much as the
spilling of a drop!—so earnest was he in everything he did. They say his

limit was two bottles of port wine at a sitting, with his glass of hot grog to
follow, and not a soul could induce him to go beyond that. In addition to
being a great seaman, he was a very religious man and a stout churchman.
Well, now, the Curtis Fakenham of Captain Kirby’s day had a good deal
of his uncle as well as his father in him, the spirit of one and the outside, of
the other; and, favoured or not, he had been distinguished among Countess
Fanny’s adorers: she certainly chose to be silent about the name of the
assailant. And it has been attested on oath that two days and a night
subsequent to the date furnished by Charles Dump, Curtis Fakenham was
brought to his house, Hollis Grange, lame of a leg, with a shot in his breast,
that he carried to the family vault; and his head gamekeeper, John Wiltshire,
a resolute fellow, was missing from that hour. Some said they had a quarrel,
and Curtis was wounded and John Wiltshire killed. Curtis was known to
have been extremely attached to the man. Yet when Wiltshire was inquired
for, he let fall a word of ‘having more of Wiltshire than was agreeable to
Hampshire’—his county. People asked what that meant. Yet, according to
the tale, it was the surviving servant, by whom he, or whoever it may have
been, was accidentally shot.
We are in a perfect tangle. On the other hand, it was never denied that
Curtis and John Wiltshire were in London together at the time of Countess
Fanny’s flight: and Curtis Fakenham was one of the procession of armed
gentleman conducting her in her carriage, as they supposed; and he was
known to have started off, on the discovery of the cheat, with horrible
imprecations against Frenchwomen. It became known, too; that horses of
his were standing saddled in his innyard at midnight. And more, Charles
Dump the postillion was taken secretly to set eyes on him as they wheeled
him in his garden-walk, and he vowed it was the identical gentleman. But
this coming by and by to the ear of Curtis, he had Charles Dump fetched
over to confront him; and then the man made oath that he had never seen
Mr. Curtis Fakenham anywhere but there, in his own house at Hollis! One
does not really know what, to think of it.
This postillion made a small fortune. He was everywhere in request.
People were never tired of asking him how he behaved while the fight was
going on, and he always answered that he sat as close to his horse as he
could, and did not dream of dismounting; for, he said, ‘he was a figure on a
horse, and naught when off it.’ His repetition of the story, with some

adornments, and that same remark, made him the popular man of the
county; people said he might enter Parliament, and I think at one time it was
possible. But a great success is full of temptations. After being hired at inns
to fill them with his account of the battle, and tipped by travellers from
London to show the spot, he set up for himself as innkeeper, and would
have flourished, only he had contracted habits on his rounds, and he fell to
contradicting himself, so that he came to be called Lying Charley; and the
people of the country said it was ‘he who drained the Punch-Bowl, for
though he helped to put the capital into it, he took all the interest out of it.’
Yet we have the doctor of the village of Ipley, Dr. Cawthorne, a noted
botanist, assuring us of the absolute credibility of Charles Dump, whom he
attended in the poor creature’s last illness, when Charles Dump confessed
he had lived in mortal terror of Squire Curtis, and had got the trick of lying,
through fear of telling the truth. Hence his ruin.
So he died delirious and contrite. Cawthorne, the great Turf man,
inherited a portrait of him from his father the doctor. It was often the
occasion of the story being told over again, and used to hang in the patients’
reception room, next to an oil-painting of the Punch-Bowl, an admired
landscape picture by a local artist, highly-toned and true to every particular
of the scene, with the bright yellow road winding uphill, and the banks of
brilliant purple heath, and a white thorn in bloom quite beautiful, and the
green fir trees, and the big Bowl black as a cauldron,—indeed a perfect
feast of harmonious contrasts in colours.
And now you know how it is that the names of Captain Kirby and Curtis
Fakenham are alive to the present moment in the district.
We lived a happy domestic life in those old coaching days, when county
affairs and county people were the topics of firesides, and the country
enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance. My opinion is,
that men and women grow to their dimensions only where such is the case.
We had our alarms from the outside now and again, but we soon relapsed to
dwell upon our private business and our pleasant little hopes and
excitements; the courtships and the crosses and the scandals, the tea-parties
and the dances, and how the morning looked after the stormy night had
passed, and the coach coming down the hill with a box of news and perhaps
a curious passenger to drop at the inn. I do believe we had a liking for the
very highwaymen, if they had any reputation for civility. What I call human

events, things concerning you and me, instead of the deafening catastrophes
now afflicting and taking all conversation out of us, had their natural
interest then. We studied the face of each morning as it came, and
speculated upon the secret of the thing it might have in store for us or our
heroes and heroines; we thought of them more than of ourselves. Long after
the adventures of the Punch-Bowl, our county was anxious about Countess
Fanny and the Old Buccaneer, wondering where they were and whether
they were prospering, whether they were just as much in love as ever, and
which of them would bury the other, and what the foreign people abroad
thought of that strange pair.

CHAPTER III. CONTINUATION OF THE
INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME
GOSSIP, TOGETHER WITH HER SUDDEN
EXTINCTION
I have still time before me, according to the terms of my agreement with
the person to whom I have, I fear foolishly, entrusted the letters and
documents of a story surpassing ancient as well as modern in the
wonderment it causes, that would make the Law courts bless their hearts,
judges no less than the barristers, to have it running through them day by
day, with every particular to wrangle over, and many to serve as a text for
the pulpit. So to proceed.
It should be mentioned that the postillion Charles Dump is not
represented, and I have no conception of the reason why not, sitting on
horseback, in the portrait in the possession of the Cawthorne family. I have
not seen it, I am bound to admit. We had offended Dr. Cawthorne, by once
in an urgent case calling in another doctor, who, he would have it, was a
quack, that ought to have killed us, and we ceased to visit; but a gentleman
who was an established patient of Dr. Cawthorne’s and had frequent
opportunities of judging the portrait, in the course of a chronic malady,
describes Charles Dump on his legs as a small man looking diminished
from a very much longer one by shrinkage in thickish wrinkles from the
shoulders to the shanks. His hat is enormous and very gay. He is rather of
sad countenance. An elevation of his collar behind the ears, and pointed at
the neck, gives you notions of his having dropped from some hook. He
stands with his forefinger extended, like a disused semaphore-post, that
seems tumbling and desponding on the hill by the highroad, in his attitude
while telling the tale; if standing it may be called, where the whole figure
appears imploring for a seat. That was his natural position, as one would
suppose any artist must have thought, and a horse beneath him. But it has
been suggested that the artist in question was no painter of animals. Then
why did he not get a painter of animals to put in the horse? It is vain to ask,
though it is notorious that artists combine without bickering to do these

things; and one puts his name on the animal, the other on the human being
or landscape.
My informant adds, that the prominent feature, telling a melancholy tale
of its own, is of sanguine colour, and while plainly in the act of speaking,
Charles Dump might be fancied about to drop off to sleep. He was
impressed by the dreaminess of the face; and I must say I regard him as an
interesting character. During my girlhood Napoleon Bonaparte alone would
have been his rival for filling an inn along our roads. I have known our boys
go to bed obediently and get up at night to run three miles to THE
WHEATSHEAF, only to stand on the bench or traveller’s-rest outside the
window and look in at Charles Dump reciting, with just room enough in the
crowd to point his finger, as his way was.
He left a child, Mary Dump, who grew up to become lady’s maid to Livia
Fakenham, daughter of Curtis, the beauty of Hampshire, equalled by no one
save her cousin Henrietta Fakenham, the daughter of Commodore Baldwin;
and they were two different kinds of beauties, not to be compared, and
different were their fortunes; for this lady was likened to the sun going
down on a cloudy noon, and that lady to the moon riding through a stormy
night. Livia was the young widow of Lord Duffield when she accepted the
Earl of Fleetwood, and was his third countess, and again a widow at eight-
and-twenty, and stepmother to young Croesus, the Earl of Fleetwood of my
story. Mary Dump testifies to her kindness of heart to her dependents. If we
are to speak of goodness, I am afraid there are other witnesses.
I resent being warned that my time is short and that I have wasted much
of it over ‘the attractive Charles.’ What I have done I have done with a
purpose, and it must be a storyteller devoid of the rudiments of his art who
can complain of my dwelling on Charles Dump, for the world to have a
pause and pin its faith to him, which it would not do to a grander person—
that is, as a peg. Wonderful events, however true they are, must be attached
to something common and familiar, to make them credible. Charles Dump,
I say, is like a front-page picture to a history of those old quiet yet exciting
days in England, and when once you have seized him the whole period is
alive to you, as it was to me in the delicious dulness I loved, that made us
thirsty to hear of adventures and able to enjoy to the utmost every thing
occurring. The man is no more attractive to me than a lump of clay. How
could he be? But supposing I took up the lump and told you that there

where I found it, that lump of clay had been rolled over and flung off by the
left wheel of the prophet’s Chariot of Fire before it mounted aloft and
disappeared in the heavens above!—you would examine it and cherish it
and have the scene present with you, you may be sure; and magnificent
descriptions would not be one-half so persuasive. And that is what we call,
in my profession, Art, if you please.
So to continue: the Earl of Cressett fell from his coach-box in a fit, and
died of it, a fortnight after the flight of his wife; and the people said she
might as well have waited. Kirby and Countess Fanny were at Lucerne or
Lausanne, or some such place, in Switzerland when the news reached them,
and Kirby, without losing an hour, laid hold of an English clergyman of the
Established Church and put him through the ceremony of celebrating his
lawful union with the beautiful young creature he adored. And this he did,
he said, for the world to guard his Fan in a wider circle than his two arms
could compass, if not quite so well.
So the Old Buccaneer was ever after that her lawful husband, and as his
wedded wife, not wedded to a fool, she was an example to her sex, like
many another woman who has begun badly with a light-headed mate. It is
hard enough for a man to be married to a fool, but a man is only half-
cancelled by that burden, it has been said; whereas a woman finds herself
on board a rudderless vessel, and often the desperate thing she does is to
avoid perishing! Ten months, or eleven, some say, following the
proclamation of the marriage-tie, a son was born to Countess Fanny, close
by the castle of Chillon-on-the-lake, and he had the name of Chillon
Switzer John Kirby given to him to celebrate the fact.
Two years later the girl was born, and for the reason of her first seeing
the light in that Austrian province, she was christened Carinthia Jane. She
was her old father’s pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the boy. She had
fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign of coming; and
they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in Prospect of
Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of others in a similar situation.
I have never been able to procure the book or pamphlet, but I know she
was the best of mothers, and of wives too. And she, with her old husband,
growing like a rose out of a weather-beaten rock, proved she was that,
among those handsome foreign officers poorly remarkable for their morals.
Not once had the Old Buccaneer to teach them a lesson. Think of it and you

will know that her feet did not stray—nor did her pretty eyes. Her heart was
too full for the cravings of vanity. Innocent ladies who get their husbands
into scrapes are innocent, perhaps; but knock you next door in their bosoms,
where the soul resides, and ask for information of how innocence and
uncleanness may go together. Kirby purchased a mine in Carinthia, on the
borders of Styria, and worked it himself. His native land displeased him, so
that he would not have been unwilling to see Chillon enter the Austrian
service, which the young man was inclined for, subsequent to his return to
his parents from one of the English public schools, notwithstanding his
passionate love for Old England. But Lord Levellier explained the mystery
in a letter to his half-forgiven sister, praising the boy for his defence of his
mother’s name at the school, where a big brutal fellow sneered at her, and
Chillon challenged him to sword or pistol; and then he walked down to the
boy’s home in Staffordshire to force him to fight; and the father of the boy
made him offer an apology. That was not much balm to Master Chillon’s
wound. He returned to his mother quite heavy, unlike a young man; and the
unhappy lady, though she knew, him to be bitterly sensitive on the point of
honour, and especially as to everything relating to her, saw herself
compelled to tell him the history of her life, to save him, as she thought,
from these chivalrous vindications of her good name. She may have even
painted herself worse than she was, both to excuse her brother’s miserliness
to her son and the world’s evil speaking of her. Wisely or not, she chose this
course devotedly to protect him from the perils she foresaw in connection
with the name of the once famous Countess Fanny in the British Isles. And
thus are we stricken by the days of our youth. It is impossible to moralize
conveniently when one is being hurried by a person at one’s elbow.
So the young man heard his mother out and kissed her, and then he went
secretly to Vienna and enlisted and served for a year as a private in the
regiment of Hussars, called, my papers tell me, Liechtenstein, and what
with his good conduct and the help of Kirby’s friends, he would have
obtained a commission from the emperor, when, at the right moment to
keep a sprig of Kirby’s growth for his country, Lord Levellier sent word
that he was down for a cornetcy in a British regiment of dragoons. Chillon
came home from a garrison town, and there was a consultation about his
future career. Shall it be England? Shall it be Austria? Countess Fanny’s
voice was for England, and she carried the vote, knowing though she did
that it signified separation, and it might be alienation—where her son would

chance to hear things he could not refute. She believed that her son by such
a man as Kirby would be of use to his country, and her voice, against
herself, was for England.
It broke her heart. If she failed to receive the regular letter, she pined and
was disconsolate. He has heard more of me! was in her mind. Her husband
sat looking at her with his old large grey glassy eyes. You would have
fancied him awaiting her death as the signal for his own release. But she,
poor mother, behind her weeping lids beheld her son’s filial love of her
wounded and bleeding. When there was anything to be done for her, old
Kirby was astir. When it was nothing, either in physic or assistance, he was
like a great corner of rock. You may indeed imagine grief in the very rock
that sees its flower fading to the withered shred. On the last night of her life
this old man of past ninety carried her in his arms up a flight of stairs to her
bed.
A week after her burial, Kirby was found a corpse in the mountain forest.
His having called the death of his darling his lightning-stroke must have
been the origin of the report that he died of lightning. He touched not a
morsel of food from the hour of the dropping of the sod on her coffin of
ebony wood. An old crust of their mahogany bread, supposed at first to be a
specimen of quartz, was found in one of his coat pockets. He kissed his girl
Carinthia before going out on his last journey from home, and spoke some
wandering words. The mine had not been worked for a year. She thought
she would find him at the mouth of the shaft, where he would sometimes be
sitting and staring, already dead at heart with the death he saw coming to
the beloved woman. They had to let her down with ropes, that she might
satisfy herself he was not below. She and her great dog and a faithful man-
servant discovered the body in the forest. Chillon arrived from England to
see the common grave of both his parents.
And now good-bye to sorrow for a while. Keep your tears for the living.
And first I am going to describe to you the young Earl of Fleetwood, son of
the strange Welsh lady, the richest nobleman of his time, and how he
persued and shunned the lady who had fascinated him, Henrietta, the
daughter of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham; and how he met Carinthia
Jane; and concerning that lovely Henrietta and Chillon Kirby-Levellier; and
of the young poet of ordinary parentage, and the giant Captain Abrane, and
Livia the widowed Countess of Fleetwood, Henrietta’s cousin, daughter of

Curtis Fakenham; and numbers of others; Lord Levellier, Lord Brailstone,
Lord Simon Pitscrew, Chumley Potts, young Ambrose Mallard; and the
English pugilist, such a man of honour though he drank; and the adventures
of Madge, Carinthia Jane’s maid. Just a few touches. And then the marriage
dividing Great Britain into halves, taking sides. After that, I trust you may
go on, as I would carry you were we all twenty years younger, had I but
sooner been in possession of these treasured papers. I promise you
excitement enough, if justice is done to them. But I must and will describe
the wedding. This young Earl of Fleetwood, you should know, was a very
powder-magazine of ambition, and never would he break his word: which is
right, if we are properly careful; and so he—
She ceases. According to the terms of the treaty, the venerable lady’s time
has passed. An extinguisher descends on her, giving her the likeness of one
under condemnation of ‘the Most Holy Inqusition, in the ranks of an ‘auto
da fe’; and singularly resembling that victim at the first sharp bite of the
flames she will, be when she hears the version of her story.

CHAPTER IV. MORNING AND FAREWELL TO
AN OLD HOME
Brother and sister were about to leave the mountainland for England.
They had not gone to bed overnight, and from the windows of their deserted
home, a little before dawn, they saw the dwindled moon, a late riser, break
through droves of hunted cloud, directly topping their ancient guardian
height, the triple peak and giant of the range, friendlier in his name than in
aspect for the two young people clinging to the scene they were to quit. His
name recalled old-days: the apparition of his head among the heavens
drummed on their sense of banishment.
To the girl, this was a division of her life, and the dawn held the sword.
She felt herself midswing across a gulf that was the grave of one half,
without a light of promise for the other. Her passionate excess of attachment
to her buried home robbed the future of any colours it might have worn to
bid a young heart quicken. And England, though she was of British blood,
was a foreign place to her, not alluring: her brother had twice come out of
England reserved in speech; her mother’s talk of England had been
unhappy; her father had suffered ill-treatment there from a brutal institution
termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted the not seeing England again.
The thought that she was bound thitherward enfolded her like a frosty mist.
But these bare walls, these loud floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the
vault-sounding of the ghostly house, everywhere the absence of the faces in
the house told her she had no choice, she must go. The appearance of her
old friend the towering mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her
swift mind to see herself far away, yearning to him out of exile, an exile that
had no local features; she would not imagine them to give a centre of
warmth, her wilful grief preferred the blank. It resembled death in seeming
some hollowness behind a shroud, which we shudder at.
The room was lighted by a stable-lantern on a kitchen-table. Their seat
near the window was a rickety garden-bench rejected in the headlong sale
of the furniture; and when she rose, unable to continue motionless while the

hosts of illuminated cloud flew fast, she had to warn her brother to preserve
his balance. He tacitly did so, aware of the necessity.
She walked up and down the long seven-windowed saloon, haunted by
her footfall, trying to think, chafing at his quietness and acknowledging that
he did well to be quiet. They had finished their packing of boxes and of
wearing-apparel for the journey. There was nothing to think of, nothing
further to talk of, nothing for her to do save to sit and look, and deaden her
throbs by counting them. She soon returned to her seat beside her brother,
with the marvel in her breast that the house she desired so much to love
should be cold and repel her now it was a vacant shell. Her memories could
not hang within it anywhere. She shut her eyes to be with the images of the
dead, conceiving the method as her brother’s happy secret, and imitated his
posture, elbows propped on knees to support the chin. His quietness
breathed of a deeper love than her own.
Meanwhile the high wind had sunk; the moon, after pushing her withered
half to the zenith, was climbing the dusky edge, revealed fitfully; threads
and wisps of thin vapour travelled along a falling gale, and branched from
the dome of the sky in migratory broken lines, like wild birds shifting the
order of flight, north and east, where the dawn sat in a web, but as yet had
done no more than shoot up a glow along the central heavens, in amid the
waves of deepened aloud: a mirror for night to see her dark self in her own
hue. A shiver between the silent couple pricked their wits, and she said:
‘Chillon, shall we run out and call the morning?’
It was an old game of theirs, encouraged by their hearty father, to be out
in the early hour on a rise of ground near the house and ‘call the morning.’
Her brother was glad of the challenge, and upon one of the yawns following
a sleepless night, replied with a return to boyishness: ‘Yes, if you like. It’s
the last time we shall do her the service here. Let’s go.’
They sprang up together and the bench fell behind them. Swinging the
lantern he carried inconsiderately, the ring of it was left on his finger, and
the end of candle rolled out of the crazy frame to the floor and was
extinguished. Chillon had no match-box. He said to her:
‘What do you think of the window?—we’ve done it before, Carin. Better
than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.’
‘I’m ready,’ she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her
readiness on the spot.

A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower—bed
was not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides the
how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her brother,
never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper contraction
of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father: ‘Mean it when
you’re doing it.’
‘For no enemy’s shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,’
Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a sign
of approval. She looked up at him.
They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen
by heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony
pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level
with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the change
to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of the
clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was uncertain.
Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been thought.
‘You remember everything of father,’ Carinthia said. ‘We both do,’ said
Chillon.
She pressed her brother’s arm. ‘We will. We will never forget anything.’
Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn’s. Half-way down the
ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the grass like
a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile above. Their
childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light, which was neither
dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and dwarf growth and
grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them. They wound their way by
borders of crag, seeing in a dell below the mouth of the idle mine begirt
with weedy and shrub-hung rock, a dripping semi-circle. Farther up they
came on the flat juniper and crossed a wet ground-thicket of whortleberry:
their feet were in the moist moss among sprigs of heath; and a great fir-tree
stretched his length, a peeled multitude of his dead fellows leaned and stood
upright in the midst of scattered fire-stained members, and through their
skeleton limbs the sheer precipice of slate-rock of the bulk across the
chasm, nursery of hawk and eagle; wore a thin blue tinge, the sign of
warmer light abroad.
‘This way, my brother!’ cried Carinthia, shuddering at a path he was
about to follow.

Dawn in the mountain-land is a meeting of many friends. The pinnacle,
the forest-head, the latschen-tufted mound, rock-bastion and defiant cliff
and giant of the triple peak, were in view, clearly lined for a common
recognition, but all were figures of solid gloom, unfeatured and bloomless.
Another minute and they had flung off their mail, and changed to various,
indented, intricate, succinct in ridge, scar and channel; and they had all a
look of watchfulness that made them one company. The smell of rock-
waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised
the breast high to breathe it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.
What wonder that the mountain-bred girl should let fly her voice. The
natural carol woke an echo. She did not repeat it.
‘And we will not forget our home, Chillon,’ she said, touching him gently
to comfort some saddened feeling.
The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and
melted from brown to purpleblack. The upper sky swam with violet; and in
a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and then suffused.
It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the interflooding of colours,
and it was imaginable that all turned to the giant whose forehead first
kindled to the sun: a greeting of god and king.
On the morning of a farewell we fluctuate sharply between the very
distant and the close and homely: and even in memory the fluctuation
occurs, the grander scene casting us back on the modestly nestling, and that,
when it has refreshed us, conjuring imagination to embrace the splendour
and wonder. But the wrench of an immediate division from what we love
makes the things within us reach the dearest, we put out our hands for them,
as violently-parted lovers do, though the soul in days to come would know
a craving, and imagination flap a leaden wing, if we had not looked beyond
them.
‘Shall we go down?’ said Carinthia, for she knew a little cascade near the
house, showering on rock and fern, and longed to have it round her.
They descended, Chillon saying that they would soon have the mists
rising, and must not delay to start on their journey.
The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the
plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against
the edge of golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding
waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-

banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the sweep
of their rivers. Immense was the range of vision scudding the peaks and
over the illimitable Eastward plains flat to the very East and sources of the
sun.
Carinthia said: ‘When I marry I shall come here to live and die.’
Her brother glanced at her. He was fond of her, and personally he liked
her face; but such a confident anticipation of marriage on the part of a
portionless girl set him thinking of the character of her charms and the
attraction they would present to the world of men. They were expressive
enough; at times he had thought them marvellous in their clear cut of the
animating mind.—No one could fancy her handsome; and just now her hair
was in some disorder, a night without sleep had an effect on her
complexion.
‘It’s not usually the wife who decides where to live,’ said he.
Her ideas were anywhere but with the dream of a husband. ‘Could we
stay on another day?—’
‘My dear girl! Another night on that crazy stool! ‘Besides, Mariandl is
bound to go to-day to her new place, and who’s to cook for us? Do you
propose fasting as well as watching?’
‘Could I cook?’ she asked him humbly.
‘No, you couldn’t; not for a starving regiment! Your accomplishments are
of a different sort. No, it’s better to get over the pain at once, if we can’t
escape it.
‘That I think too,’ said she, ‘and we should have to buy provisions. Then,
brother, instantly after breakfast. Only, let us walk it. I know the whole way,
and it is not more than a two days’ walk for you and me. Consent. Driving
would be like going gladly. I could never bear to remember that I was
driven away.
And walking will save money; we are not rich, you tell me, brother.’
‘A few florins more or less!’ he rejoined, rather frowning. ‘You have
good Styrian boots, I see. But I want to be over at the Baths there soon; not
later than to-morrow.’
‘But, brother, if they know we are coming they will wait for us. And we
can be there to-morrow night or the next morning!’

He considered it. He wanted exercise and loved this mountain-land; his
inclinations melted into hers; though he had reasons for hesitating. ‘Well,
we’ll send on my portmanteau and your boxes in the cart; we’ll walk it.
You’re a capital walker, you’re a gallant comrade; I wouldn’t wish for a
better.’ He wondered, as he spoke, whether any true-hearted gentleman
besides himself would ever think the same of this lonely girl.
Her eyes looked a delighted ‘No-really?’ for the sweetest on earth to her
was to be prized by her brother.
She hastened forward. ‘We will go down and have our last meal at
home,’ she said in the dialect of the country. ‘We have five eggs. No meat
for you, dear, but enough bread and butter, some honey left, and plenty of
coffee. I should like to have left old Mariandl more, but we are unable to do
very much for poor people now. Milk, I cannot say. She is just the kind soul
to be up and out to fetch us milk for an early first breakfast; but she may
have overslept herself.’
Chillon smiled. ‘You were right, Janet’, about not going to bed last night;
we might have missed the morning.’
‘I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will,’ she replied.
‘You’d be glad of your doses of sleep if you had to work and study.’
‘To fall down by the wayside tired out—yes, brother, a dead sleep is
good. Then you are in the hands of God. Father used to say, four hours for a
man, six for a woman.’
‘And four and twenty for a lord,’ added Chillon. ‘I remember.’
‘A lord of that Admiralty,’ she appealed to his closer recollection. ‘But I
mean, brother, dreaming is what I detest so.’
‘Don’t be detesting, my dear; reserve your strength,’ said he. ‘I suppose
dreams are of some use, now and then.’
‘I shall never think them useful.’
‘When we can’t get what we want, my good Carin.’
‘Then we should not waste ourselves in dreams.’
‘They promise falsely sometimes. That’s no reason why we should reject
the consolation when we can’t get what we want, my little sister.’
‘I would not be denied.’
‘There’s the impossible.’

‘Not for you, brother.’
Perhaps a half-minute after she had spoken, he said, ‘pursuing a dialogue
within himself aloud rather than revealing a secret: ‘You don’t know her
position.’
Carinthia’s heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly
conjured up?
She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and yet
she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain of an
unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she asked she
would suffer greater pain.
The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some
of the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the
three aspects and signs of a house’s emptiness when they are seen together.
Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning
for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population of
the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of sunrise.
They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one stroke, and
wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and all had
vanished.
The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows, from
a fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The firwood
was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon fell rayless
and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high overhead,
themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like the mottled grey
of an eagle’s breast: the smaller of them bluish like traces of the beaked
wood-pigeon.
She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of
naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that
rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.

CHAPTER V. A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST
AND SUNSHINE
Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth
steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast, which
was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with the
exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl had stuffed
into Chillon’s leather sack—the fruit of secret begging on their behalf about
the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky as he slung it over
his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such a trifle till he had it
inside him. ‘And you that love tea so, my pretty one, so that you always
laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your mother,’ she said to
Carinthia, ‘you will find one pinch of it in your bag at the end of the left-
foot slipper, to remember your home by when you are out in the world.’
She crossed the strap of the bag on her mistress’s bosom, and was
embraced by Carinthia and Chillon in turns, Carinthia telling her to dry her
eyes, for that she would certainly come back and perhaps occupy the house
one day or other. The old soul moaned of eyes that would not be awake to
behold her; she begged a visit at her grave, though it was to be in a Catholic
burial-place and the priests had used her dear master and mistress ill, not
allowing them to lie in consecrated ground; affection made her a champion
of religious tolerance and a little afraid of retribution. Carinthia soothed her,
kissed her, gave the promise, and the parting was over.
She and Chillon had on the previous day accomplished a pilgrimage to
the resting-place of their father and mother among humble Protestants, iron-
smelters, in a valley out of the way of their present line of march to the
glacier of the great snow-mountain marking the junction of three Alpine
provinces of Austria. Josef, the cart-driver with the boxes, who was to pass
the valley, vowed of his own accord to hang a fresh day’s wreath on the
rails. He would not hear of money for the purchase, and they humoured
him. The family had been beloved. There was an offer of a home for
Carinthia in the castle of Count Lebern, a friend of her parents, much taken
with her, and she would have accepted it had not Chillon overruled her

choice, determined that, as she was English, she must come to England and
live under the guardianship of her uncle, Lord Levellier, of whose character
he did not speak.
The girl’s cheeks were drawn thin and her lips shut as they departed; she
was tearless. A phantom ring of mist accompanied her from her first footing
outside the house. She did not look back. The house came swimming and
plunging after her, like a spectral ship on big seas, and her father and
mother lived and died in her breast; and now they were strong, consulting,
chatting, laughing, caressing; now still and white, caught by a vapour that
dived away with them either to right or left, but always with the same
suddenness, leaving her to question herself whether she existed, for more of
life seemed to be with their mystery than with her speculations. The
phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the invariable low-sweeping dark
spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as close as the shroud. She walked
fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near midday the haunted circle
widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and heads of trees, whose round
intervolving roots grasped the yellow roadside soil; the mists shook like a
curtain, and partly opened and displayed a tapestry-landscape, roughly
worked, of woollen crag and castle and suggested glen, threaded waters,
very prominent foreground, Autumn flowers on banks; a predominant
atmospheric greyness. The sun threw a shaft, liquid instead of burning, as
we see his beams beneath a wave; and then the mists narrowed again,
boiled up the valleys and streams above the mountain, curled and flew, and
were Python coils pierced by brighter arrows of the sun. A spot of blue
signalled his victory above.
To look at it was to fancy they had been walking under water and had
now risen to the surface. Carinthia’s mind stepped out of the chamber of
death. The different air and scene breathed into her a timid warmth toward
the future, and between her naming of the lesser mountains on their side of
the pass, she asked questions relating to England, and especially the ladies
she was to see at the Baths beyond the glacier-pass. She had heard of a
party of his friends awaiting him there, without much encouragement from
him to ask particulars of them, and she had hitherto abstained, as she was
rather shy of meeting her countrywomen. The ladies, Chillon said, were
cousins; one was a young widow, the Countess of Fleetwood, and the other
was Miss Fakenham, a younger lady.

Carinthia murmured in German: ‘Poor soul!’ Which one was she pitying?
The widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.
Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her second
widowhood.
‘She marries again!’ exclaimed the girl.
‘You don’t like that idea?’ said he.
Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.
Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense. ‘And
marries again!’ he said. ‘There will certainly be a third.’
‘Husband?’ said she, as at the incredible.
‘Husband, let’s hope,’ he answered.
She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her
brother signified: It will not be you!
Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out the
contents of his bag. Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of eating.
A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat, and here he
relieved the bag of a bottle of wine, slices of, meat, bread, hard eggs, and
lettuce, a chipped cup to fling away after drinking the wine, and a supply of
small butler-cakes known to be favourites with Carinthia. She reversed the
order of the feast by commencing upon one of the cakes, to do honour to
Mariandl’s thoughtfulness. As at their breakfast, they shared the last morsel.
‘But we would have made it enough for our dear old dog Pluto as well, if
he had lived,’ said Carinthia, sighing with her thankfulness and
compassionate regrets, a mixture often inspiring a tender babbling
melancholy. ‘Dogs’ eyes have such a sick look of love. He might have lived
longer, though he was very old, only he could not survive the loss of father.
I know the finding of the body broke his heart. He sprang forward, he
stopped and threw up his head. It was human language to hear him, Chillon.
He lay in the yard, trying to lift his eyes when I came to him, they were so
heavy; and he had not strength to move his poor old tail more than once. He
died with his head on my lap. He seemed to beg me, and I took him, and he
breathed twice, and that was his end. Pluto! old dog! Well, for you or for
me, brother, we could not have a better wish. As for me, death!... When we
know we are to die! Only let my darling live! that is my prayer, and that we
two may not be separated till I am taken to their grave. Father bought

ground for four—his wife and himself and his two children. It does not
oblige us to be buried there, but could we have any other desire?’
She stretched her hand to her brother. He kissed it spiritedly.
‘Look ahead, my dear girl. Help me to finish this wine. There ‘s nothing
like good hard walking to give common wine of the country a flavour—and
out of broken crockery.’
‘I think it so good,’ Carinthia replied, after drinking from the cup. ‘In
England they, do not grow wine. Are the people there kind?’
‘They’re civilized people, of course.’
‘Kind—warm to you, Chillon?’
‘Some of them, when you know them. “Warm,” is hardly the word.
Winter’s warm on skates. You must do a great deal for yourself. They don’t
boil over. By the way, don’t expect much of your uncle.’
‘Will he not love me?’
‘He gives you a lodging in his house, and food enough, we’ll hope. You
won’t see company or much of him.’
‘I cannot exist without being loved. I do not care for company. He must
love me a little.’
‘He is one of the warm-hearted race—he’s mother’s brother; but where
his heart is, I ‘ve not discovered.
Bear with him just for the present, my dear, till I am able to support you.’
‘I will,’ she said.
The dreary vision of a home with an unloving uncle was not brightened
by the alternative of her brother’s having to support her. She spoke of
money. ‘Have we none, Chillon?’
‘We have no debts,’ he answered. ‘We have a claim on the Government
here for indemnification for property taken to build a fortress upon one of
the passes into Italy. Father bought the land, thinking there would be a yield
of ore thereabout; and they have seized it, rightly enough, but they dispute
our claim for the valuation we put on it. A small sum they would consent to
pay. It would be a very small sum, and I ‘m father’s son, I will have justice.’
‘Yes!’ Carthinia joined with him to show the same stout nature.
‘We have nothing else except a bit to toss up for luck.’

‘And how can I help being a burden on my brother?’ she inquired, in
distress.
‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband,’ he said lightly.
They performed a sacrifice of the empty bottle and cracked cup on the
site of their meal, as if it had been a ceremony demanded from travellers,
and leaving them in fragments, proceeded on their journey refreshed.
Walking was now high enjoyment, notwithstanding the force of the sun,
for they were a hardy couple, requiring no more than sufficient nourishment
to combat the elements with an exulting blood. Besides they loved
mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass they
climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale dry red
and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked, striking their
minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so strange they were in
shape and colouring. These sharp points were the first to greet them
between the blue and green. A depression of the pass to the left gave sight
of the points of black fir forest below, round the girths of the barren shafts.
Mountain blocks appeared pushing up in front, and a mountain wall and
woods on it, and mountains in the distance, and cliffs riven with falls of
water that were silver skeins, down lower to meadows, villages and spires,
and lower finally to the whole valley of the foaming river, field and river
seeming in imagination rolled out from the hand of the heading mountain.
‘But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!’ said Carinthia.
She said it upon love’s instinct to halo the scene with something beyond
present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of theirs
together should never be forgotten.
A smooth fold of cloud, moveless along one of the upper pastures, and
still dense enough to be luminous in sunlight, was the last of the mist.
They watched it lying in the form of a fish, leviathan diminished, as they
descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread peacockwise,
and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a breath of air as
gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little lizard, nothingness.
The bluest bright day of the year was shining. Chillon led the descent.
With his trim and handsome figure before her, Carinthia remembered the
current saying, that he should have been the girl and she the boy. That was

because he resembled their mother in face. But the build of his limbs and
shoulders was not feminine.
To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and
grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like energy of
stature, delightful to her contemplation. And he had the mouth women put
faith in for decision and fixedness. She did, most fully; and reflecting how
entirely she did so, the thought assailed her: some one must be loving him!
She allowed it to surprise her, not choosing to revert to an uneasy
sensation of the morning.
That some one, her process of reasoning informed her, was necessarily an
English young lady. She reserved her questions till they should cease this
hopping and heeling down the zigzag of the slippery path-track. When
children they had been collectors of beetles and butterflies, and the flying
by of a ‘royal-mantle,’ the purple butterfly grandly fringed, could still
remind Carinthia of the event it was of old to spy and chase one. Chillon
himself was not above the sentiment of their “very early days”; he stopped
to ask if she had been that lustrous blue-wing, a rarer species, prized by
youngsters, shoot through the chestnut trees: and they both paused for a
moment, gazing into the fairyland of infancy, she seeing with her brother’s
eyes, this prince of the realm having escaped her. He owned he might have
been mistaken, as the brilliant fellow flew swift and high between leaves,
like an ordinary fritillary. Not the less did they get their glimpse of the
wonders in the sunny eternity of a child’s afternoon.
‘An Auerhahn, Chillon!’ she said, picturing the maturer day when she
had scaled perilous heights with him at night to stalk the blackcock in the
prime of the morning. She wished they could have had another such
adventure to stamp the old home on his heart freshly, to the exclusion of
beautiful English faces.
On the level of the valley, where they met the torrent-river, walking side
by side with him, she ventured an inquiry: ‘English girls are fair girls, are
they not?’
‘There are some dark also,’ he replied.
‘But the best-looking are fair?’
‘Perhaps they are, with us.’
‘Mother was fair.’

‘She was.’
‘I have only seen a few of them, once at Vies and at Venice, and those
Baths we are going to; and at Meran, I think.’
‘You considered them charming?’
‘Not all.’
It was touching that she should be such a stranger to her countrywomen!
He drew a portrait-case from his breast-pocket, pressing the spring, and
handed it to her, saying: ‘There is one.’ He spoke indifferently, but as soon
as she had seen the face inside it, with a look at him and a deep breath; she
understood that he was an altered brother, and that they were three instead
of two.
She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only ‘Yes.’
He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace
increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to learn
when some minutes later she said; ‘Shall I see her, Chillon?’
‘She is one of the ladies we are to meet.’
‘What a pity!’ Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to get
to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how readily
he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.
Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They
reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the
remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain. She
assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her own, save to
make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her brother: she
could not be robbed of their relationship.
Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed
of, she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed it to
the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her on, after the
valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of waterfalls and busy
mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew short and wild, and the
glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam than water, and the savagery,
naturally exciting to her, breathed of its lair among the rocks and ice-fields.
Her brother said: ‘There he is.’ She saw the whitecrowned king of the
region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed to
think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him, and

continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle, merely
admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been extinguished.
—‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.’ Chillon’s words whispered of the
means of escape from the den of her uncle.
But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of
melting pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it
up in her ‘heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would
really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: ‘Be mine!’
His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the
lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her
mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl’s chances of winning
attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but, as she
argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a beautiful woman, and
this was a circumstance that reflected the greater hopelessness on her
prospects. She bore a likeness to her father, little to her mother, though he
fancied the reverse and gave her the mother’s lips and hair. Thinking of
herself, however, was destructive to the form of her mirror of knightliness:
he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy vapour born of our sensibility
must do when we relapse to coldness, and the more completely when we try
to command it. No, she thought, a plain girl should think of work, to earn
her independence.
‘Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?’ she said.
He laughed out. ‘What ‘s in your head?’
The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for
wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and,
as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable: ‘You
have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.’
He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the
succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: ‘Livia is one,
and Henrietta!
Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. ‘Henrietta!’ She chose that name
for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she thought, with
the new element she had been compelled to take into her system, to absorb
it if she could.
‘You’re not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my
dear?’

‘No, Chillon.’
‘You can’t explain it, I suppose?’
‘A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.’
A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near her
brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable to claim the
privilege. That was her meaning, involved with the hazy project of earning
an independence; but she could not explain it, and Chillon set her down for
one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple adventurous girl had not
previously seemed to be.
She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her
tongue. Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title, passed
with a sigh or two. It was her first taste of life in the world.
A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her recent
mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and those
ladies. Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and sang the
music of the splendid spheres. Henrietta was closer to earth, for her features
had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer, and the richer for him who
loved her, being one of us, though an over-earthly one; and Carinthia gave
her to Chillon, reserving for herself a handmaiden’s place within the circle
of their happiness.
This done, she sat straight in the car. It was toiling up the steep ascent of
a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native province. Her proposal
to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her blood, now that she had
mastered a new element in it, soon restored her to her sisterly affinity with
natural glories. The sunset was on yonder side of the snows. Here there was
a feast of variously-tinted sunset shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river,
serrated cliff. The peaked cap of the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward
snow caught a scarlet illumination: one flank of the white in heaven was
violetted wonderfully.
At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round head
and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out of the village,
and he told her some of his hopes. They referred to inventions of destructive
weapons, which were primarily to place his country out of all danger from a
world in arms; and also, it might be mentioned, to bring him fortune. ‘For I
must have money!’ he said, sighing it out like a deliberate oath. He and his
uncle were associated in the inventions. They had an improved rocket that

would force military chiefs to change their tactics: they had a new powder,
a rifle, a model musket—the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme
for fortress artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the
defensive once again. ‘And that will be really doing good,’ said Chillon,
‘for where it’s with the offensive, there’s everlasting bullying and
plundering.’
Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle
divided the profits equally. She discerned what his need of money signified.
Tenderness urged her to say: ‘Henrietta! Chillon.’
‘Well?’ he answered quickly.
‘Will she wait?’
‘Can she, you should ask.’
‘Is she brave?’
‘Who can tell, till she has been tried?’
‘Is she quite free?’
‘She has not yet been captured.’
‘Brother, is there no one else...?’
‘There’s a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.’
‘He is rich?’
‘The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.’
‘Is he young?’
‘About the same age as mine.’
‘Is he a handsome young man?’
‘Handsomer than your brother, my girl.’
‘No, no, no!’ said she. ‘And what if he is, and your Henrietta does not
choose him? Now let me think what I long to think. I have her close to me.’
She rocked a roseate image on her heart and went to bed with it by
starlight.
By starlight they sprang to their feet and departed the next morning, in
the steps of a guide carrying, Chillon said, ‘a better lantern than we left
behind us at the smithy.’
‘Father!’ exclaimed Carinthia on her swift inward breath, for this one of
the names he had used to give to her old home revived him to her thoughts

and senses fervently.

CHAPTER VI. THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER
Three parts down a swift decline of shattered slate, where travelling
stones loosened from rows of scree hurl away at a bound after one roll over,
there sat a youth dusty and torn, nursing a bruised leg, not in the easiest of
postures, on a sharp tooth of rock, that might at any moment have broken
from the slanting slab at the end of which it formed a stump, and added him
a second time to the general crumble of the mountain. He had done a
portion of the descent in excellent imitation of the detached fragments, and
had parted company with his alpenstock and plaid; preserving his hat and
his knapsack. He was alone, disabled, and cheerful; in doubt of the arrival
of succour before he could trust his left leg to do him further service
unaided; but it was morning still, the sun was hot, the air was cool; just the
tempering opposition to render existence pleasant as a piece of vegetation,
especially when there has been a question of your ceasing to exist; and the
view was of a sustaining sublimity of desolateness: crag and snow
overhead; a gloomy vale below; no life either of bird or herd; a voiceless
region where there had once been roars at the bowling of a hill from a
mountain to the deep, and the third flank of the mountain spoke of it in the
silence.
He would have enjoyed the scene unremittingly, like the philosopher he
pretended to be, in a disdain of civilization and the ambitions of men, had
not a contest with earth been forced on him from time to time to keep the
heel of his right foot, dug in shallow shale, fixed and supporting. As long as
it held he was happy and maintained the attitude of a guitar-player,
thrumming the calf of the useless leg to accompany tuneful thoughts, but
the inevitable lapse and slide of the foot recurred, and the philosopher was
exhibited as an infant learning to crawl. The seat, moreover, not having
been fashioned for him or for any soft purpose, resisted his pressure and
became a thing of violence, that required to be humiliatingly coaxed. His
last resource to propitiate it was counselled by nature turned mathematician:
tenacious extension solved the problem; he lay back at his length, and with
his hat over his eyes consented to see nothing for the sake of comfort. Thus

he was perfectly rational, though when others beheld him he appeared the
insanest of mortals.
A girl’s voice gave out the mountain carol ringingly above. His heart and
all his fancies were in motion at the sound. He leaned on an elbow to listen;
the slide threatened him, and he resumed his full stretch, determined to take
her for a dream. He was of the class of youths who, in apprehension that
their bright season may not be permanent, choose to fortify it by a
systematic contempt of material realities unless they come in the fairest of
shapes, and as he was quite sincere in this feeling and election of the right
way to live, disappointment and sullenness overcame him on hearing men’s
shouts and steps; despite his helpless condition he refused to stir, for they
had jarred on his dream. Perhaps his temper, unknown to himself, had been
a little injured by his mishap, and he would not have been sorry to charge
them with want of common humanity in passing him; or he did not think his
plight so bad, else he would have bawled after them had they gone by: far
the youths of his description are fools only upon system,—however
earnestly they indulge the present self-punishing sentiment. The party did
not pass; they stopped short, they consulted, and a feminine tongue more
urgent than the others, and very musical, sweet to hear anywhere, put him in
tune. She said, ‘Brother! brother!’ in German. Our philosopher flung off his
hat.
‘You see!’ said the lady’s brother.
‘Ask him, Anton,’ she said to their guide.
‘And quick!’ her brother added.
The guide scrambled along to him, and at a closer glance shouted: ‘The
Englishman!’ wheeling his finger to indicate what had happened to the
Tomnoddy islander.
His master called to know if there were broken bones, as if he could stop
for nothing else.
The cripple was raised. The gentleman and lady made their way to him,
and he tried his hardest to keep from tottering on the slope in her presence.
No injury had been done to the leg; there was only a stiffness, and an idiotic
doubling of the knee, as though at each step his leg pronounced a dogged
negative to the act of walking. He said something equivalent to ‘this donkey
leg,’ to divert her charitable eyes from a countenance dancing with ugly
twitches. She was the Samaritan. A sufferer discerns his friend, though it be

not the one who physically assists him: he is inclined by nature to put
material aid at a lower mark than gentleness, and her brief words of
encouragement, the tone of their delivery yet more, were medical to his
blood, better help than her brother’s iron arm, he really believed. Her
brother and the guide held him on each side, and she led to pick out the
safer footing for him; she looked round and pointed to some projection that
would form a step; she drew attention to views here and there, to win
excuses for his resting; she did not omit to soften her brother’s visible
impatience as well, and this was the art which affected her keenly sensible
debtor most.
‘I suppose I ought to have taken a guide,’ he said.
‘There’s not a doubt of that,’ said Chillon Kirby.
Carinthia halted, leaning on her staff: ‘But I had the same wish. They told
us at the inn of an Englishman who left last night to sleep on the mountain,
and would go alone; and did I not say, brother, that must be true love of the
mountains?’
‘These freaks get us a bad name on the Continent,’ her brother replied.
He had no sympathy with nonsense, and naturally not with a youth who
smelt of being a dreamy romancer and had caused the name of Englishman
to be shouted in his ear in derision. And the fellow might delay his arrival at
the Baths and sight of the lady of his love for hours!
They managed to get him hobbling and slipping to the first green tuft of
the base, where long black tongues of slate-rubble pouring into the grass,
like shore-waves that have spent their burden, seem about to draw back to
bring the mountain down. Thence to the level pasture was but a few skips
performed sliding.
‘Well, now,’ said Chillon, ‘you can stand?’
‘Pretty well, I think.’ He tried his foot on the ground, and then stretched
his length, saying that it only wanted rest. Anton pressed a hand at his ankle
and made him wince, but the bones were sound, leg and hip not worse than
badly bruised. He was advised by Anton to plant his foot in the first running
water he came to, and he was considerate enough to say to Chillon:
‘Now you can leave me; and let me thank you. Half an hour will set me
right. My name is Woodseer, if ever we meet again.’

Chillon nodded a hurried good-bye, without a thought of giving his name
in return. But Carinthia had thrown herself on the grass. Her brother asked
her in dismay if she was tired. She murmured to him: ‘I should like to hear
more English.’
‘My dear girl, you’ll have enough of it in two or three weeks.’
‘Should we leave a good deed half done, Chillon?’
‘He shall have our guide.’
‘He may not be rich.’
‘I’ll pay Anton to stick to him.’
‘Brother, he has an objection to guides.’
Chillon cast hungry eyes on his watch: ‘Five minutes, then.’ He
addressed Mr. Woodseer, who was reposing, indifferent to time, hard-by:
‘Your objection to guides might have taught you a sharp lesson. It ‘s like
declining to have a master in studying a science—trusting to instinct for
your knowledge of a bargain. One might as well refuse an oar to row in a
boat.’
‘I ‘d rather risk it,’ the young man replied. ‘These guides kick the soul
out of scenery. I came for that and not for them.’
‘You might easily have been a disagreeable part of the scene.’
‘Why not here as well as elsewhere?’
‘You don’t care for your life?’
‘I try not to care for it a fraction more than Destiny does.’
‘Fatalism. I suppose you care for something?’
‘Besides I’ve a slack purse, and shun guides and inns when I can. I care
for open air, colour, flowers, weeds, birds, insects, mountains. There’s a
world behind the mask. I call this life; and the town’s a boiling pot,
intolerably stuffy. My one ambition is to be out of it. I thank heaven I have
not another on earth. Yes, I care for my note-book, because it’s of no use to
a human being except me. I slept beside a spring last night, and I never shall
like a bedroom so well. I think I have discovered the great secret: I may be
wrong, of course.’ And if so, he had his philosophy, the admission was
meant to say.
Carinthia expected the revelation of a notable secret, but none came; or if
it did it eluded her grasp:—he was praising contemplation, he was praising

tobacco. He talked of the charm of poverty upon a settled income of a very
small sum of money, the fruit of a compact he would execute with the town
to agree to his perpetual exclusion from it, and to retain his identity, and not
be the composite which every townsman was. He talked of Buddha. He
said: ‘Here the brook’s the brook, the mountain’s the mountain: they are as
they always were.’
‘You’d have men be the same,’ Chillon remarked as to a nursling prattler,
and he rejoined: ‘They’ve lost more than they’ve gained; though, he
admitted, ‘there has been some gain, in a certain way.’
Fortunately for them, young men have not the habit of reflecting upon the
indigestion of ideas they receive from members of their community,
sometimes upon exchange. They compare a view of life with their own
view, to condemn it summarily; and he was a curious object to Chillon as
the perfect opposite of himself.
‘I would advise you,’ Chillon said, ‘to get a pair of Styrian boots, if you
intend to stay in the Alps. Those boots of yours are London make.’
‘They ‘re my father’s make,’ said Mr. Woodseer.
Chillon drew out his watch. ‘Come, Carinthia, we must be off.’ He
proposed his guide, and, as Anton was rejected, he pointed the route over
the head of the valley, stated the distance to an inn that way, saluted and
strode.
Mr. Woodseer, partly rising, presumed, in raising his hat and thanking
Carinthia, to touch her fingers. She smiled on him, frankly extending her
open hand, and pointing the route again, counselling him to rest at the inn,
even saying: ‘You have not yet your strength to come on with us?’
He thought he would stay some time longer: he had a disposition to
smoke.
She tripped away to her brother and was watched through the whiffs of a
pipe far up the valley, guiltless of any consciousness of producing an
impression. But her mind was with the stranger sufficiently to cause her to
say to Chillon, at the close of a dispute between him and Anton on the
interesting subject of the growth of the horns of chamois: ‘Have we been
quite kind to that gentleman?’
Chillon looked over his shoulder. ‘He’s there still; he’s fond of solitude.
And, Carin, my dear, don’t give your hand when you are meeting or parting

with people it’s not done.’
His uninstructed sister said: ‘Did you not like him?’
She was answered with an ‘Oh,’ the tone of which balanced lightly on the
neutral line. ‘Some of the ideas he has are Lord Fleetwood’s, I hear, and one
can understand them in a man of enormous wealth, who doesn’t know what
to do with himself and is dead-sick of flattery; though it seems odd for an
English nobleman to be raving about Nature. Perhaps it’s because none else
of them does.’
‘Lord Fleetwood loves our mountains, Chillon?’
‘But a fellow who probably has to make his way in the world!—and he
despises ambition!’... Chillon dropped him. He was antipathetic to
eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession of
heterodox ideas: to have listened seriously to them coming from the mouth
of an unambitious bootmaker’s son involved him in the absurdity. He
considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort of
courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the
convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady’s, with the plea of
thanking her. He hoped she would be more on her guard.
Carinthia was sure she had the name of the nobleman wishing to bestow
his title upon the beautiful Henrietta. Lord Fleetwood! That slender thread
given her of the character of her brother’s rival who loved the mountains
was woven in her mind with her passing experience of the youth they had
left behind them, until the two became one, a highly transfigured one, and
the mountain scenery made him very threatening to her brother. A silky
haired youth, brown-eyed, unconquerable in adversity, immensely rich,
fond of solitude, curled, decorated, bejewelled by all the elves and gnomes
of inmost solitude, must have marvellous attractions, she feared. She
thought of him so much, that her humble spirit conceived the stricken soul
of the woman as of necessity the pursuer; as shamelessly, though timidly, as
she herself pursued in imagination the enchanted secret of the mountain-
land. She hoped her brother would not supplicate, for it struck her that the
lover who besieged the lady would forfeit her roaming and hunting fancy.
‘I wonder what that gentleman is doing now,’ she said to Chillon.
He grimaced slightly, for her sake; he would have liked to inform her, for
the sake of educating her in the customs of the world she was going to
enter, that the word ‘gentleman’ conveys in English a special signification.

Her expression of wonder whether they were to meet him again gave
Chillon the opportunity of saying:
‘It ‘s the unlikeliest thing possible—at all events in England.’
‘But I think we shall,’ said she.
‘My dear, you meet people of your own class; you don’t meet others.’
‘But we may meet anybody, Chillon!’
‘In the street. I suppose you would not stop to speak to him in the street.’
‘It would be strange to see him in the street!’ Carinthia said.
‘Strange or not!’
.... Chillon thought he had said sufficient. She was under his
protectorship, otherwise he would not have alluded to the observance of
class distinctions. He felt them personally in this case because of their
seeming to stretch grotesquely by the pretentious heterodoxy of the young
fellow, whom, nevertheless, thinking him over now that he was mentioned,
he approved for his manliness in bluntly telling his origin and status.
A chalet supplied them with fresh milk, and the inn of a village on a
perch with the midday meal. Their appetites were princely and swept over
the little inn like a conflagration. Only after clearing it did they remember
the rearward pedestrian, whose probable wants Chillon was urged by
Carthinia to speak of to their host. They pushed on, clambering up,
scurrying down, tramping gaily, till by degrees the chambers of Carinthia’s
imagination closed their doors and would no longer intercommunicate. Her
head refused to interest her, and left all activity to her legs and her eyes, and
the latter became unobservant, except of foot-tracks, animal-like. She felt
that she was a fine machine, and nothing else: and she was rapidly
approaching those ladies!
‘You will tell them how I walked with you,’ she said.
‘Your friends over yonder?’ said he.
‘So that they may not think me so ignorant, brother.’ She stumbled on the
helpless word in a hasty effort to cloak her vanity.
He laughed. Her desire to meet the critical English ladies with a towering
reputation in one department of human enterprise was comprehensible,
considering the natural apprehensiveness of the half-wild girl before such a
meeting. As it often happens with the silly phrases of simple people, the

wrong word, foolish although it was, went to the heart of the hearer and
threw a more charitable light than ridicule on her. So that they may know I
can do something they cannot do, was the interpretation. It showed her deep
knowledge of her poorness in laying bare the fact.
Anxious to cheer her, he said: ‘Come, come, you can dance. You dance
well, mother has told me, and she was a judge. You ride, you swim, you
have a voice for country songs, at all events. And you’re a bit of a botanist
too. You’re good at English and German; you had a French governess for a
couple of years. By the way, you understand the use of a walking-stick in
self-defence: you could handle a sword on occasion.’
‘Father trained me,’ said Carthinia. ‘I can fire a pistol, aiming.’
‘With a good aim, too. Father told me you could. How fond he was of his
girl! Well, bear in mind that father was proud of you, and hold up your head
wherever you are.’
‘I will,’ she said.
He assured her he had a mind to have a bugle blown at the entrance of
the Baths for a challenge to the bathers to match her in warlike
accomplishments.
She bit her lips: she could not bear much rallying on the subject just then:
‘Which is the hard one to please?’ she asked.
‘The one you will find the kinder of the two.’
‘Henrietta?’
He nodded.
‘Has she a father?’
‘A gallant old admiral: Admiral Baldwin Fakenham.’
‘I am glad of that!’ Carinthia sighed out heartily. ‘And he is with her?
And likes you, Chillon?’
‘On the whole, I think he does.’
‘A brave officer!’ Such a father would be sure to like him.
So the domestic prospect was hopeful.
At sunset they stood on the hills overlooking the basin of the Baths, all
enfolded in swathes of pink and crimson up to the shining grey of a high
heaven that had the fresh brightness of the morning.

‘We are not tired in the slightest,’ said Carinthia, trifling with the vision
of a cushioned rest below. ‘I could go on through the night quite
comfortably.’
‘Wait till you wake up in your little bed to-morrow,’ Chillon replied
stoutly, to drive a chill from his lover’s heart, that had seized it at the bare
suggestion of their going on.

CHAPTER VII. THE LADY’S LETTER
Is not the lover a prophet? He that fervently desires may well be one; his
hurried nature is alive with warmth to break the possible blow: and if his
fears were not needed they were shadows; and if fulfilled, was he not
convinced of his misfortune by a dark anticipation that rarely erred?
Descending the hills, he remembered several omens: the sun had sunk when
he looked down on the villas and clustered houses, not an edge of the orb
had been seen; the admiral’s quarters in the broad-faced hotel had worn an
appearance resembling the empty house of yesterday; the encounter with
the fellow on the rocks had a bad whisper of impish tripping. And what
moved Carinthia to speak of going on?
A letter was handed to Chillon in the hall of the admiral’s hotel, where
his baggage had already been delivered. The manager was deploring the
circumstance that his rooms were full to the roof, when Chillon said:
‘Well, we must wash and eat’; and Carinthia, from watching her brother’s
forehead during his perusal of the letter, declared her readiness for anything.
He gave her the letter to read by herself while preparing to sit at table,
unwilling to ask her for a further tax on her energies—but it was she who
had spoken of going on! He thought of it as of a debt she had contracted
and might be supposed to think payable to their misfortune.
She read off the first two sentences.
‘We can have a carriage here, Chillon; order a carriage; I shall get as
much sleep in a carriage as in a bed: I shall enjoy driving at night,’ she said
immediately, and strongly urged it and forced him to yield, the manager
observing that a carriage could be had.
In the privacy of her room, admiring the clear flowing hand, she read the
words, delicious in their strangeness to her, notwithstanding the heavy
news, as though they were sung out of a night-sky:

‘Most picturesque of Castles!

May none these marks efface,
For they appeal from Tyranny...’

‘We start at noon to-day. Sailing orders have been issued, and I could
only have resisted them in my own person by casting myself overboard. I
go like the boat behind the vessel. You were expected yesterday, at latest
this morning. I have seen boxes in the hall, with a name on them not foreign
to me. Why does the master tarry? Sir, of your valliance you should have
held to your good vow,—quoth the damozel, for now you see me sore
perplexed and that you did not your devoir is my affliction. Where lingers
chivalry, she should have proceeded, if not with my knight? I feast on your
regrets. I would not have you less than miserable: and I fear the reason is,
that I am not so very, very sure you will be so at all or very hugely, as I
would command it of you for just time enough to see that change over your
eyebrows I know so well.
‘If you had seen a certain Henrietta yesterday you would have the picture
of how you ought to look. The admiral was heard welcoming a new arrival
—you can hear him. She ran down the stairs quicker than any cascade of
this district, she would have made a bet with Livia that it could be no one
else—her hand was out, before she was aware of the difference it was
locked in Lord F.‘s!
‘Let the guilty absent suffer for causing such a betrayal of
disappointment. I must be avenged! But if indeed you are unhappy and
would like to chide the innocent, I am full of compassion for the poor
gentleman inheriting my legitimate feelings of wrath, and beg merely that
he will not pour them out on me with pen and paper, but from his lips and
eyes.
‘Time pressing, I chatter no more. The destination is Livia’s beloved
Baden. We rest a night in the city of Mozart, a night at Munich, a night at
Stuttgart. Baden will detain my cousin full a week. She has Captain Abrane
and Sir Meeson Corby in attendance—her long shadow and her short: both
devoted to Lord F., to win her smile, and how he drives them! The captain
has been paraded on the promenade, to the stupefaction of the foreigner.
Princes, counts, generals, diplomats passed under him in awe. I am told that
he is called St. Christopher.
‘Why do we go thus hastily?—my friend, this letter has to be concealed. I
know some one who sees in the dark.
‘Think no harm of Livia. She is bent upon my worldly advantage, and
that is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to

papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a
fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls madcap
and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a Will-o’-the-wisp, my
friend. Who could ever know where the man was when he himself never
knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth—because it is
without an aim or always with a new one. And am I the one to direct him? I
need direction. My lord and sovereign must fix my mind. I am volatile,
earthly, not to be trusted if I do not worship. He himself said to me that—he
reads our characters. “Nothing but a proved hero will satisfy Henrietta,” his
words! And the hero must be shining like a beacon-fire kept in a blaze.
Quite true; I own it. Is Chillon Kirby satisfied? He ought to be.
‘But oh!—to be yoked is an insufferable thought, unless we name all the
conditions. But to be yoked to a creature of impulses! Really I could only
describe his erratic nature by commending you to the study of a dragon-fly.
It would map you an idea of what he has been in the twenty-four hours
since we had him here. They tell me a vain sort of person is the cause. Can
she be the cause of his resolving to have a residence here, to buy up half the
valley—erecting a royal palace—and marking out the site—raving about it
in the wildest language, poetical if it had been a little reasonable—and then,
after a night, suddenly, unaccountably, hating the place, and being under the
necessity of flying from it in hot haste, tearing us all away, as if we were
attached to a kite that will neither mount nor fall, but rushes about
headlong. Has he heard, or suspected? or seen certain boxes bearing a
name? Livia has no suspicion, though she thinks me wonderfully contented
in so dull a place, where it has rained nine days in a fortnight. I ask myself
whether my manner of greeting him betrayed my expectation of another. He
has brains. It is the greatest of errors to suppose him at all like the common
run of rich young noblemen. He seems to thirst for brilliant wits and
original sayings. His ambition is to lead all England in everything! I readily
acknowledge that he has generous ideas too; but try to hold him, deny him
his liberty, and it would be seen how desperate and relentless he would be
to get loose. Of this I am convinced: he would be either the most abject of
lovers, or a woman (if it turned out not to be love) would find him the most
unscrupulous of yoke-fellows. Yoke-fellow! She would not have her reason
in consenting. A lamb and a furious bull! Papa and I have had a serious talk.
He shuts his ears to my comparisons, but admits, that as I am the principal
person concerned, etc. Rich and a nobleman is too tempting for an anxious

father; and Livia’s influence is paramount. She has not said a syllable in
depreciation of you. That is to her credit. She also admits that I must yield
freely if at all, and she grants me the use of similes; but her tactics are to
contest them one by one, and the admirable pretender is not as shifty as the
mariner’s breeze, he is not like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which
you cannot say whether it is chasing or chased: it is I who am the shifty
Pole to the steadiest of magnets. She is a princess in other things besides her
superiority to Physics. There will be wild scenes at Baden.
‘My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you. What have I to write in it
except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday—“He has not
come!” Oh! to be caring for a he.
‘O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct her
extravagant idolatry! I long for her. I had a number of nice little phrases to
pet her with.
‘You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the
best friends for women. In which case, the earl should be worthy of our
friendship; he is liked. Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the hard
service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to speak
well of him, and Methuen Rivers—here for two days on his way to his
embassy at Vienna—assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the point of
honour of his word. They have stories of him, to confirm Livia’s eulogies,
showing him punctilious to chivalry: No man alive is like him in that, they
say. He grieves me. All that you have to fear is my pity for one so sensitive.
So speed, sir! It is not good for us to be much alone, and I am alone when
you are absent.
‘I hear military music!
‘How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute. There
is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of distances.—
Chillon! it would kill me!—Writing here and you perhaps behind the hill, I
can hardly bear it;—I am torn away, my hand will not any more. This music
burst out to mock me! Adieu.

‘I am yours.

‘Your HENRIETTA.

‘A kiss to the sister. It is owing to her.’

Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line. It seemed to her to end in a
celestial shower.
She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of
the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents
perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing, for
there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.
She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it. A night
in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in the thought
that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him asleep, and in the
sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the fairest angel of her sex.
They pursued their journey soon after Anton was dismissed with warm
shakes of the hand and appointments for a possible year in the future.
The blast of the postillion’s horn on the dark highway moved Chillon to
say: ‘This is what they call posting, my dear.’
She replied: ‘Tell me, brother: I do not understand, “Let none these marks
efface,” at the commencement, after most “picturesque of Castles”:—that is
you.’
‘They are quoted from the verses of a lord who was a poet, addressed to
the castle on Lake Leman. She will read them to you.’
‘Will she?’
The mention of the lord set Carinthia thinking of the lord whom that
beautiful SHE pitied because she was forced to wound him and he was very
sensitive. Wrapped in Henrietta, she slept through the joltings of the
carriage, the grinding of the wheels, the blowing of the horn, the flashes of
the late moonlight and the kindling of dawn.

CHAPTER VIII. OF THE ENCOUNTER OF
TWO STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR
CONSORTING: IN WHICH THE MALE
READER IS REQUESTED TO BEAR IN MIND
WHAT WILD CREATURE HE WAS IN HIS
YOUTH, WHILE THE FEMALE SHOULD
MARVEL CREDULOUSLY
The young man who fancied he had robed himself in the plain homespun
of a natural philosopher at the age of twenty-three journeyed limping
leisurely in the mountain maid Carinthia’s footsteps, thankful to the Fates
for having seen her; and reproving the remainder of superstition within him,
which would lay him open to smarts of evil fortune if he, encouraged a
senseless gratitude for good; seeing that we are simply to take what happens
to us. The little inn of the village on the perch furnished him a night’s
lodging and a laugh of satisfaction to hear of a young lady and gentleman,
and their guide, who had devoured everything eatable half a day in advance
of him, all save the bread and butter, and a few scraps of meat,
apologetically spread for his repast by the maid of the inn: not enough for, a
bantam cock, she said, promising eggs for breakfast. He vowed with an
honest heart, that it was more than enough, and he was nourished by
sympathy with the appetites of his precursors and the maid’s description of
their deeds. That name, Carinthia, went a good way to fill him.
Farther on he had plenty, but less contentment. He was compelled to
acknowledge that he had expected to meet Carinthia again at the Baths. Her
absence dealt a violent shock to the aerial structure he dwelt in; for though
his ardour for the life of the solitudes was unfeigned, as was his calm
overlooking of social distinctions, the self-indulgent dreamer became
troubled with an alarming sentience, that for him to share the passions of
the world of men was to risk the falling lower than most. Women are a
cause of dreams, but they are dreaded enemies of his kind of dream, deadly

enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should one of them be taken on
board a vessel of the vapourish texture young Woodseer sailed in above the
clouds lightly while he was in it alone, questions of past, future, and
present, the three weights upon humanity, bear it down, and she must go, or
the vessel sinks. And cast out of it, what was he? The asking exposed him to
the steadiest wind the civilized world is known to blow. From merely
thinking upon one of the daughters of earth, he was made to feel his
position in that world, though he refused to understand it, and assisted by
two days of hard walking he reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm,
no very serious burden. His note-book sustained it easily. He wrote her
name in simple fondness of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some
sentences, which he thought profound. They were composed as he sat by
the roadway, on the top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake
deep under wooded mountain walls: things of priceless value.
It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to
prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the man in
his best German to desist. During the altercation, there passed a countryman
of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: ‘I thank you for that.’ It
was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves, each deeming the
other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes when we are haunted
by a second person in pursuit of it; he is discolouring matter in our pure
crystal cup. Such is the worship of the picturesque; and it would appear to
say, that the spirit of man finds itself yet in the society of barbarians. The
case admits of good pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the
exclusive or the vulgar be the more barbarous. But in those days the
solicitation of the picturesque had been revived by a poet of some
impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees could hardly meet, as the two met
here, and not be mutually obscurants.
They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a
farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service for
an inn. Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely dwelling-
place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there than in love, and
each awaited the other’s departure, with an air that said: ‘You are in my
sunlight’; and going deeper, more sternly: ‘Sir, you are an offence to
Nature’s pudency!’

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of
the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up
with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid
him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their
boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.
After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not
have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry
with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be
walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:
solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers. In the
first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged scene.
He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and started, full of
the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.
At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was overtaken
by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the informal English
style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously blunt manner: ‘This
book is yours,—I have no doubt it is yours; I am glad to be able to restore
it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of the contents, I mean. I have to
beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I looked at the page, I looked
through the whole; I am quite at your mercy.’
Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of
his pocket, and replied: ‘Thank you, thank you. It’s of use to me, though to
no one else.’
‘You pardon me?’
‘Certainly. I should have done it myself.’
‘I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.’ Lord Fleetwood was the
name given.
Woodseer’s plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.
The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless eyes
that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present colloquial
mood.
‘You could have done the same? I should find it hard to forgive the man
who pried into my secret thoughts,’ he remarked.
‘There they are. If one puts them to paper!...’ Woodseer shrugged.

‘Yes, yes. They never last long enough with me. So far I’m safe. One
page led to another. You can meditate. I noticed some remarks on Religions.
You think deeply.’
Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a
small flourish. ‘Just a few heads of ideas. When the wind puffs down a
sooty chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like
the notes in this book of mine. There they wait for another puff, or my
fingers to stamp them.’
‘I could tell you were the owner of that book,’ said Lord Fleetwood. He
swept his forehead feverishly. ‘What a power it is to relieve one’s brain by
writing! May I ask you, which one of the Universities...?’
The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught to
feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp. ‘My
University,’ Woodseer replied, ‘was a merchant’s office in Bremen for some
months. I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business. I was
invalided home, and then tried a merchant’s office in London. I put on my
hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows were
hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume of
our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library. I had scarce
any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively—a good first lesson.
We’re at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we see men as
they were in the beginning—not so eager for harness till they get
acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old animal
having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn.’
Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those
days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and he
had plucked a flower from them.
His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he
had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let his
companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together with
the great stuff he contained. He grew conscious of an over-anxiety, and was
uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his naturalness, dimly if
at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance within. What is a lord to a
philosopher! But the world is around us as a cloak, if not a coat; in his
ignorance he supposed it specially due to a lord seeking acquaintance with
him, that he should expose his condition: doing the which appeared to

subject him to parade his intellectual treasures and capacity for shaping
sentences; and the effect upon Lord Fleetwood was an incentive to the
display. Nevertheless he had a fretful desire to escape from the
discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his knapsack and began to saunter.
The young lord was at his elbow. ‘I can’t part with you. Will you allow
me?’
Woodseer was puzzled and had to say: ‘If you wish it.’
‘I do wish it: an hour’s walk with you. One does not meet a man like you
every day. I have to join a circle of mine in Baden, but there’s no hurry; I
could be disengaged for a week. And I have things to ask you, owing to my
indiscretion—but you have excused it.’
Woodseer turned for a farewell gaze at the great Watzmann, and saluted
him.
‘Splendid,’ said Lord Fleetwood; ‘but don’t clap names on the mountains.
—I saw written in your book: “A text for Dada.” You write: “A despotism
would procure a perfect solitude, but kill the ghost.” That was my thought
at the place where we were at the lake. I had it. Tell me—though I could not
have written it, and “ghost” is just the word, the exact word—tell me, are
you of Welsh blood? “Dad” is good Welsh—pronounce it hard.’
Woodseer answered: ‘My mother was a Glamorganshire woman. My
father, I know, walked up from Wales, mending boots on his road for a
livelihood. He is not a bad scholar, he knows Greek enough to like it. He is
a Dissenting preacher. When I strike a truism, I ‘ve a habit of scoring it to
give him a peg or tuning-fork for one of his discourses. He’s a man of
talent; he taught himself, and he taught me more than I learnt at school. He
is a thinker in his way. He loves Nature too. I rather envy him in some
respects. He and I are hunters of Wisdom on different tracks; and he, as he
says, “waits for me.” He’s patient!’
Ah, and I wanted to ask you,’ Lord Fleetwood observed, bursting with it,
‘I was puzzled by a name you write here and there near the end, and permit
me to ask, it: Carinthia! It cannot be the country? You write after, the name:
“A beautiful Gorgon—a haggard Venus.” It seized me. I have had the face
before my eyes ever since. You must mean a woman. I can’t be deceived in
allusions to a woman: they have heart in them. You met her somewhere
about Carinthia, and gave her the name? You write—may I refer to the
book?’

He received the book and flew through the leaves:
‘Here—“A panting look”: you write again: “A look of beaten flame: a
look of one who has run and at last beholds!” But that is a living face: I see
her! Here again: “From minute to minute she is the rock that loses the sun at
night and reddens in the morning.” You could not create an idea of a woman
to move you like that. No one could, I am certain of it, certain; if so, you ‘re
a wizard—I swear you are. But that’s a face high over beauty. Just to know
there is a woman like her, is an antidote. You compare her to a rock. Who
would imagine a comparison of a woman to a rock! But rock is the very
picture of beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus. Tell me you met her, you saw
her. I want only to hear she lives, she is in the world. Beautiful women
compared to roses may whirl away with their handsome dragoons! A pang
from them is a thing to be ashamed of. And there are men who trot about
whining with it! But a Carinthia makes pain honourable. You have done
what I thought impossible—fused a woman’s face and grand scenery, to
make them inseparable. She might be wicked for me. I should see a bright
rim round hatred of her!—the rock you describe. I could endure horrors and
not annihilate her! I should think her sacred.’
Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker
than he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost insanely
extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a stranger. For himself,
he was open with everybody, his philosophy not allowing that strangers
existed on earth. But the presence of a lord brought the conventional world
to his feelings, though at the same time the title seemed to sanction the
exceptional abruptness and wildness of this lord. As for suspecting him to
be mad, it would have been a common idea: no stretching of speech or
overstepping of social rules could waken a suspicion so spiritless in
Woodseer.
He said: ‘I can tell you I met her and she lives. I could as soon swim in
that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a
feature of her. She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women. She has
the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could think of it as a
history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr! As for comparisons,
they are flowers thrown into the fire.’
‘I have had that—I have thought that,’ said Lord Fleetwood. ‘Go on; talk
of her, pray; without comparisons. I detest them. How did you meet her?

What made you part? Where is she now? I have no wish to find her, but I
want thoroughly to believe in her.’
Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord’s malady.
Here was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the
sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be. Woodseer put it down to
a curious imaginative fellowship with himself. He forgot the lord, and
supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech. After talking
of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon his discovery of the
Great Secret of life, against which his hearer struggled for a time, though
that was cooling to him too; but ultimately there was no resistance, and so
deep did they sink into the idea of pure contemplation, that the idea of
woman seemed to have become a part of it. No stronger proof of their
aethereal conversational earnestness could be offered. A locality was given
to the Great Secret, and of course it was the place where the most powerful
recent impression had been stamped on the mind of the discoverer: the
shadowy valley rolling from the slate-rock. Woodseer was too artistic a
dreamer to present the passing vision of Carinthia with any associates there.
She passed: the solitude accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for
the one swift gleam: she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the
ghost of the rocky obscurity. But now remembering her mountain carol, he
chanced to speak of her as a girl.
‘She is a girl?’ cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for, rapid as
he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his conception of
Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman—logically. Who but the
woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be impossible for a
girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was, that it had come upon a
beautiful face in some staring horror of a world that had bitten the tender
woman. She touched him sympathetically through the pathos.
Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face. It would
shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all. quietude.
But a girl’s face has no story of poisonous intrusion. She indeed may be cast
in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with Nature, beautiful because she

is purely of Nature. Woodseer did his best to present his view irresistibly.
Perhaps he was not clear; it was a piece of skiamachy, difficult to render
clear to the defeated.
Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but ‘Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!’ and it
struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen the
girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a beautiful Gorgon.
He recounted the scene of the meeting with her, pictured it in effective
colours, but his companion gave no response, nor a nod. They ceased to
converse, and when the young lord’s hired carriage drew up on the road,
Woodseer required persuasion to accompany him. They were both in their
different stations young tyrants of the world, ready to fight the world and
one another for not having their immediate view of it such as they wanted
it. They agreed, however, not to sleep in the city. Beds were to be had near
the top of a mountain on the other side of the Salza, their driver informed
them, and vowing themselves to that particular height, in a mutual disgust
of the city, they waxed friendlier, with a reserve.
Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional
treatment from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the
hotel in Salzburg on the lookout for his master.
‘Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,’ said the man.
Sir Meeson Corby appeared; Lord Fleetwood cut him short: ‘You ‘re in a
hurry; go at once, don’t wait for me; I join you in Baden.—Do me the
favour to eat with me,’ he turned to Woodseer. ‘And here, Corby! tell the
countess I have a friend to bear me company, and there is to be an extra
bedroom secured at her hotel. That swinery of a place she insists on visiting
is usually crammed. With you there,’ he turned to Woodseer, ‘I might find it
agreeable.—You can take my man, Corby; I shall not want the fellow.’
‘Positively, my dear Fleetwood, you know,’ Sir Meeson expostulated, ‘I
am under orders; I don’t see how—I really can’t go on without you.’
‘Please yourself. This gentleman is my friend, Mr. Woodseer.’
Sir Meeson Corby was a plump little beau of forty, at war with his fat and
accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory. His tightness
made his fatness elastic; he looked wound up for a dance, and could hardly
hold on a leg; but the presentation of a creature in a battered hat and soiled
garments, carrying a tattered knapsack half slung, lank and with disorderly
locks, as the Earl of Fleetwood’s friend—the friend of the wealthiest

nobleman of Great Britain!—fixed him in a perked attitude of inquiry that
exhausted interrogatives. Woodseer passed him, slouching a bow. The
circular stare of Sir Meeson seemed unable to contract. He directed it on
Lord Fleetwood, and was then reminded that he dealt with prickles.
‘Where have you been?’ he said, blinking to refresh his eyeballs. ‘I
missed you, I ran round and round the town after you.’
‘I have been to the lake.’
‘Queer fish there!’ Sir Meeson dropped a glance on the capture.
Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer’s arm. ‘Do you eat with us?’ he asked the
baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they
strode to the dining-room.
‘Do you wash, sir, before eating?’ Sir Meeson said to Woodseer,
caressing his hands when they had seated themselves at table. ‘Appliances
are to be found in this hotel.’
‘Soap?’ said Lord Fleetwood.
‘Soap—at least, in my chamber.’
‘Fetch it, please.’
Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that. He requested the waiter to
show the gentleman to a room.
Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel.
‘We’re off directly and must eat at once,’ he said.
‘Soap—soap! my dear Fleetwood,’ Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to
impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing of
those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.
‘Let the waiter fetch it.’
‘The soap is in my portmanteau.’
‘You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me. Bring it.’
Woodseer had risen. Lord Fleetwood motioned him down. He kept an
eye dead—as marble on Corby, who muttered: ‘You can’t mean that you
ask me...?’ But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a
power of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of gaze
forcefuller than repetitions of the word. He knew Lord Fleetwood. Men
privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot: they were
sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him. He had hastily

to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the whole torture of
banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else the mad behest must
be obeyed. He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and sprang up, remarking, that
he went with all the willingness imaginable. It could not have been the first
occasion.
He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing
his metal soap-case. The performance was checked by another look solid as
shot, and as quick. Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson Corby
or Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the service, but so
intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him uncomfortable in
his own sense of independence. The humblest citizen of a free nation has
that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in a neighbouring State:
it acts like a concussion of the air.
Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their
different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an observer.
He listened to Sir Meeson’s entreaties that he should start at once for
Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by his office to
hang about him in terror of his liege lady’s displeasure. Presently, near the
close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger, he handed it to the
baronet, and said, ‘Give her that. She knows I shall follow that.’ He added
to himself:—I shall have ill-luck till I have it back! and he asked Woodseer
whether he put faith in the virtue of talismans.
‘I have never possessed one,’ said Woodseer, with his natural frankness.
‘It would have gone long before this for a night’s lodging.’
Sir Meeson heard him, and instantly urged Lord Fleetwood not to think
of dismissing his man Francis. ‘I beg it, Fleetwood! I beg you to take the
man. Her ladyship will receive me badly, ring or no ring, if she hears of
your being left alone. I really can’t present myself. I shall not go, not go. I
say no.’
‘Stay, then,’ said Fleetwood.
He turned to Woodseer with an air of deference, and requested the
privilege of glancing at his notebook again, and scanned it closely at one of
the pages. ‘I believe it true,’ he cried; ‘I had a half recollection of it—I have
had some such thought, but never could put it in words. You have thought
deeply.’
‘That is only a surface thought, or common reflection,’ said Woodseer.

Sir Meeson stared at them in turn. Judging by their talk and the effect
produced on the earl, he took Woodseer for a sort of conjuror.
It was his duty to utter a warning.
He drew Fleetwood aside. A word was whispered, and they broke
asunder with a snap. Francis was called. His master gave him his keys, and
despatched him into the town to purchase a knapsack or bag for the outfit of
a jolly beggar. The prospect delighted Lord Fleetwood. He sang notes from
the deep chest, flaunting like an opera brigand, and contemplating his
wretched satellite’s indecision with brimming amusement.
‘Remember, we fight for our money. I carry mine,’ he said to Woodseer.
‘Wouldn’t it be expedient, Fleetwood...’ Sir Meeson suggested a treasurer
in the person of himself.
‘Not a florin, Corby! I should find it all gambled away at Baden.’
‘But I am not Abrane, I’m not Abrane! I never play, I have no mania,
none. It would be prudent, Fleetwood.’
‘The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they
would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another
fling. I ‘d rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed that
dragon’s jaw. A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your
honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him with some
satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I ‘ve tried these tables, and
couldn’t stir a pulse. Have you?’
It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables.
‘Not I,’ said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.
Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and
discarding a suspicion of the young philosopher’s possible weakness under
temptation.
Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the
town and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of
quieting his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together. He
could not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands. He said
it:—he could not have done the thing. So the best he could do was to let
them go. Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of striking
contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great Britain
tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his comrade, a

total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly next to a
mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter, that he
caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway. Hundreds of
thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a beggar for his friend!
He would have given something to have an English ear near him as he
watched them rounding under the mountain they were about to climb.

CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING THE BLACK
GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF
HER, TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTION
OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES
In those early days of Fortune’s pregnant alternations of colour between
the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring of
the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest’ of the
ante-chambers of Hades. Thither in the ripeness of the year trooped the
devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and annually among
them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for nowhere else had
she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to a slumber by gales.
She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of
excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and
swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master
passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed, fearless
of a sting; the lady petted them as her swans. It surprised her to a gentle
contempt of men and women, that they should be ruffled either by love or
play. A withholding from the scene will naturally arouse disturbing wishes;
but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in our element. And who
could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual good luck? Fortune,
the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their mutability: and
Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a droning husband, if
constancy were practised by them. Observe the staggering and plunging of
the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded of their faithfulness.
She could make for herself a quiet centre in the heart of the whirlwind,
but the whirlwind was required. The clustered lights at the corner of the
vale under forest hills, the burst of music, the blazing windows of the
saloons of the Furies, and the gamblers advancing and retreating, with their
totally opposite views of consequences, and fashions of wearing or tearing
the mask; and closer, the figures shifting up and down the promenade,
known and unknown faces, and the histories half known, half woven,

weaving fast, which flew their threads to provoke speculation; pleasantly
embraced and diverted the cool-blooded lady surrounded by her courtiers,
who could upon occasion supply the luminous clue or anecdote. She had an
intuitive liveliness to detect interchanges of eyes, the shuttle of intrigue; the
mild hypocrisy, the clever audacity, the suspicion confirmed, the
complication threatening to become resonant and terrible; and the old
crossing the young and the young outwitting the old, wiles of fair traitors
and dark, knaves of all suits of the pack. A more intimate acquaintance with
their lineaments inspired a regard for them, such as poets may feign the
throned high moon to entertain for objects causing her rays to flash.
The simple fools, performing in character, were a neutral people,
grotesques and arabesques wreathed about the margins of the scene. Venus
or Fortune smote them to a relievo distinguishing one from another. Here,
however, as elsewhere, the core of interest was with the serious population,
the lovers and the players in earnest, who stood round the furnace and
pitched themselves into it, not always under a miscalculation of their
chances of emerging transfigured instead of serving for fuel. These, the
tragical children of folly, were astute: they played with lightning, and they
knew the conditions of the game; victories were to be had.
The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they
thought little of: for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal deity
called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only in the
Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo idea of the
union of these two periods. Still he is occasionally a benevolent god to the
appetites; which have but to be continuous to establish him in permanence;
and as nothing in us more readily supposes perpetuity than the appetite
rushing to destroy itself, the rational nature of the most universal worship
on earth is perceived at once.
Now, the price paid for a victory is this: that having been favoured in a
single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity—the Black
Goddess of the golden fringes—men believe in her for ever after, behold
her everywhere, they belong to her. Their faith as to sowing and reaping has
gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is: she has the power to
attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding their impassioned devotion
with cuffs and scorns. They have ceased to have a first notion upon

anything without a second haunting it, which directs them to propitiate
Fortune.
But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom
of our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of commonplace to insist on
such reflections. Many of them, indeed, took the union of the Black
Goddess and the Rosy Present for the composition of the very Arch-Fiend.
Some had a shot at the strange conjecture, figuring her as tired of men in
the end and challengeing him below—equally tired of his easy conquests of
men since the glorious old times of the duelling saints. By virtue of his one
incorrigible weakness, which we know him to have as long as we have it
ourselves: viz., the belief in her existence, she is to get the better of him.
Upon this point the experience of Captain Abrane has a value. Livia was
a follower of the Red and Black and the rounding ball in the person of the
giant captain, through whom she received her succession of sweetly teasing
thrills and shocks, as one of the adventurous company they formed together.
The place was known to him as the fair Philistine to another muscular hero;
he had been shorn there before, and sent forth tottering, treating the friends
he met as pillars to fall with him; and when the operation was done
thoroughly, he pronounced himself refreshed by it, like a more sensible
Samson, the cooler for his clipping. Then it was that he relapsed
undistractedly upon processes of his mind and he often said he thought
Fortune would beat the devil.
Her power is shown in the moving of her solicitors to think, instantly
after they have made their cast, that the reverse of it was what they
intended. It comes as though she had withdrawn the bandage from her
forehead and dropped a leaden glance on them, like a great dame angry to
have her signal misinterpreted. Well, then, distinguished by the goddess in
such a manner, we have it proved to us how she wished to favour: for the
reverse wins, and we who are pinched blame not her cruelty but our blind
folly. This is true worship. Henceforth the pain of her nip is mingled with
the dream of her kiss; between the positive and the imagined of her we
remain confused until the purse is an empty body on a gallows, honour too,
perhaps.
Captain Abrane was one of the Countess Livia’s numerous courtiers on
the border of the promenade under the lighted saloons. A colossus inactive,
he had little to say among the chattering circle; for when seated, cards were

wanted to animate him: and he looked entirely out of place and unfitted,
like a great vessel’s figure-head in a shipwright’s yard.
She murmured: ‘Not this evening?’
Abrane quoted promptly a line of nursery song ‘How shall he cut it
without e’er a knife?’
‘Have we run it down so low?’ said she, with no reproach in her tone.
The captain shrugged over his clean abyss, where nothing was.
Yesterday their bank presented matronly proportions. But an importuned
goddess reduces the most voluminous to bare stitches within a few winks of
an eye.
Livia turned to a French gentleman of her court, M. de St. Ombre, and
pursued a conversation. He was a stately cavalier of the Gallicized Frankish
outlines, ready, but grave in his bearing, grave in his delivery, trimly
moustached, with a Guise beard.
His profound internal question relating to this un-English beauty of the
British Isles:—had she no passion in her nature? was not convinced by her
apparent insensibility to Fortune’s whips.
Sir Meeson Corby inserted a word of Bull French out of place from time
to time.
As it might be necessary to lean on the little man for weapons of war,
supposing Lord Fleetwood delayed his arrival yet another day, Livia was
indulgent. She assisted him to think that he spoke the foreign tongue.
Mention of Lord Fleetwood set Sir Meeson harping again on his alarms,
in consideration of the vagabond object of the young lord had roamed away
with.
‘You forget that Russett has gypsy in him: Welsh! it’s about the same,’
said Livia. ‘He can take excellent care of himself and his purse.’
‘Countess, he is a good six days overdue.’
‘He will be in time for the ball at the Schloss.’
Sir Meeson Corby produced an aspect of the word ‘if,’ so perkily, that the
dejected Captain Abrane laughed outright and gave him double reason to
fret for Lord Fleetwood’s arrival, by saying: ‘If he hangs off much longer, I
shall have to come on you for another fifty.’

Our two pedestrians out of Salzburg were standing up in the night of
cloud and pines above the glittering pool, having made their way along the
path from the hill anciently dedicated to the god Mercury; and at the
moment when Sir Meeson put forth his frilled wrists to say: ‘If you had
seen his hands—the creature Fleetwood trotted off alone with!—you’d be a
bit anxious too’; the young lord called his comrade to gaze underneath
them: ‘There they are, hard at it, at their play!—it’s the word used for the
filthiest gutter scramble.’
They had come to know something of one another’s humours; which are
taken by young men for their characters; and should the humours please,
they are friends, until further humours develop, trying these nascent
conservatives hard to suit them to their moods as well as the accustomed.
Lord Fleetwood had discovered in his companion, besides the spirit of
independence and the powers of thought impressed on him by Woodseer’s
precocious flashes, a broad playfulness, that trenched on buffoonery; it
astonished, amused, and relieved him, loosening the spell of reverence cast
over him by one who could so wonderfully illumine his brain. Prone to
admire and bend the knee where he admired, he chafed at subjection, unless
he had the particular spell constantly renewed. A tone in him once or twice
of late, different from the comrade’s, had warned Woodseer to be guarded.
Susceptible, however, of the extreme contrast between the gamblers
below and Nature’s lover beside him, Fleetwood returned to his enthusiasm
without thinking it a bondage.
‘I shall never forget the walk we ‘ve had. I have to thank you for the
noblest of pleasures. You ‘ve taught me—well, a thousand things; the things
money can’t buy. What mornings they were! And the dead-tired nights!
Under the rock and up to see the snowy peak pink in a gap of thick mist.
You were right: it made a crimsoning colour shine like a new idea. Up in
those mountains one walks with the divinities, you said. It’s perfectly true. I
shall remember I did. I have a treasure for life! Now I understand where
you get your ideas. The life we lead down there is hoggish. You have
chosen the right. You’re right, over and over again, when you say, the dirty
sweaters are nearer the angels for cleanliness than my Lord and Lady
Sybarite out of a bath, in chemical scents. A man who thinks, loathes their
High Society. I went through Juvenal at college. But you—to be sure, you
add example—make me feel the contempt of it more. I am everlastingly

indebted to you. Yes, I won’t forget: you preach against the despising of
anything.
This was pleasant in Woodseer’s ears, inasmuch as it established the
young nobleman as the pupil of his philosophy for the conduct of life; and
to fortify him, he replied:
‘Set your mind on the beauty, and there’ll be no room for comparisons.
Most of them are unjust, precious few instructive. In this case, they spoil
both pictures: and that scene down there rather hooks me; though I prefer
the Dachstein in the wane of the afterglow. You called it Carinthia.’
‘I did: the beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus—if she is to be a girl!’
Fleetwood rejoined. ‘She looked burnt out—a spectre.’
‘One of the admirably damned,’ said Woodseer, and he murmured with
enjoyment: ‘Between the lights—that ‘s the beauty and the tragedy of
Purgatory!’
His comrade fell in with the pictured idea: ‘You hit it:—not what you
called the “sublimely milky,” and not squalid as you’ll see the faces of the
gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me—may I beg?—don’t clap
names on the mountains we’ve seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English
tourist, horrors. We’ll moralize over the crowds at the tables down there. On
the whole, it’s a fairish game: you know the odds against you, as you don’t
on the Turf or the Bourse. Have your fling; but don’t get bitten. There’s a
virus. I’m not open to it. Others are.’
Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the
universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not afford
to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.
These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were grand
morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed
in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking
inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally. He had a
sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental nature
exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the superhuman.
For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above temptation. To see a
forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on those tides, pulled along
the current, and caught by the undertug of the lasher, would be fun.

‘We’ll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what
they’re doing,’ he said, and stepped.
Woodseer would gladly have remained. The starlit black ridges about him
and the dragon’s mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual
and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher. He
had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell on an
arm; a small matter.
Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party: and
Fleetwood’s man-servant was absent.
‘Gambling, the rascal!’ he said. Woodseer heard the first note of the place
in that.
His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very
soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of ‘supper presently’ to
one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly hostelry,
counting that a supper and a night there would do for it. They hurried on to
the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the side of seated
groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine perfumery, cigar-
smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.
Fleetwood scanned the groups. He had seen enough in a moment and his
face blackened. A darting waiter was called to him.
He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded: ‘You shall have something
to joint your bones!’ What cause of wrath he had was past a guess: a wolf at
his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.
The waiter darted back, bearing a tray and tall glasses filled each with
piled parti-coloured liqueurs, on the top of which an egg-yolk swam.
Fleetwood gave example. Swallowing your egg, the fiery-velvet triune
behind slips after it, in an easy milky way, like a princess’s train on a state-
march, and you are completely, transformed, very agreeably; you have
become a merry demon. ‘Well, yes, it’s next to magic,’ he replied to
Woodseer’s astonished snigger after the draught, and explained, that it was
a famous Viennese four-of-the-morning panacea, the revellers’ electrical
restorer. ‘Now you can hold on for an hour or two, and then we’ll sup. At
Rome?’
‘Ay! Druids to-morrow!’ cried the philosopher bewitched.

He found himself bowing to a most heavenly lady, composed of day and
night in her colouring, but more of night, where the western edge has
become a pale steel blade. Men were around her, forming a semi-circle. The
world of men and women was mere timber and leafage to this flower of her
sex, glory of her kind. How he behaved in her presence, he knew not; he
was beyond self-criticism or conscious reflection; simply the engine of the
commixed three liqueurs, with parlous fine thoughts, and a sense of
steaming into the infinite.
To leave her was to have her as a moon in the heavens and to think of her
creatively. A swarm of images rushed about her and away, took lustre and
shade. She was a miracle of greyness, her eyes translucently grey, a dark-
haired queen of the twilights; and his heart sprang into his brain to picture
the novel beauty; language became a flushed Bacchanal in a ring of dancing
similes. Lying beside a bank of silvery cinquefoil against a clear evening
sky, where the planet Venus is a point of new and warmer light, one has the
vision of her. Or something of Persephone rising to greet her mother, when
our beam of day first melts through her as she kneels to gather an early bud
of the year, would be near it. Or there is a lake in mid-forest, that curls part
in shadow under the foot of morning: there we have her.
He strained to the earthly and the skyey likenesses of his marvel of
human beauty because they bestowed her on him in passing. All the while,
he was gazing on a green gaming-table.
The gold glittered, and it heaped or it vanished. Contemptuous of money,
beyond the limited sum for his needs, he gazed; imagination was blunted in
him to the hot drama of the business. Moreover his mind was engaged in
insisting that the Evening Star is not to be called Venus, because of certain
stories; and he was vowed to defend his lady from any allusion to them.
This occupied him. By degrees, the visible asserted its authority; his look
on the coin fell to speculating. Oddly, too, he was often right;—the money,
staked on the other side, would have won. He considered it rather a plain
calculation than a guess.
Philosophy withdrew him from his temporary interest in the tricks of a
circling white marble ball. The chuck farthing of street urchins has quite as
much dignity. He compared the creatures dabbling, over the board to
summer flies on butcher’s meat, periodically scared by a cloth. More in the
abstract, they were snatching at a snapdragon bowl. It struck him, that the

gamblers had thronged on an invitation to drink the round of seed-time and
harvest in a gulp. Again they were desperate gleaners, hopping, skipping,
bleeding, amid a whizz of scythe-blades, for small wisps of booty. Nor was
it long before the presidency of an ancient hoary Goat-Satan might be
perceived, with skew-eyes and pucker-mouth, nursing a hoof on a knee.
Our mediaeval Enemy sat symbolical in his deformities, as in old Italian
and Dutch thick-line engravings of him. He rolled a ball for souls, excited
like kittens, to catch it, and tumbling into the dozens of vacant pits. So it
seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by hereditary
antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher’s eye, he would have known
that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his ugliness. The
Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game. She (it is good for
us to know it) is the Power who challenges the individual, it is he who
spreads the net for the mass. She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or
ossifies the heart. From her comes craziness, from him perversity: a more
provocative and, on the whole, more contagious disease. The gambler does
not seek to lead his fellows into perdition; the snared of the Demon have
pleasure in the act. Hence our naturally interested forecasts of the contests
between them: for if he is beaten, as all must be at the close of an extended
game with her, we have only to harden the brain against her allurements and
we enter a clearer field.
Woodseer said to Fleetwood: ‘That ball has a look of a nymph running
round and round till she changes to one of the Fates.’
‘We’ll have a run with her,’ said Fleetwood, keener for business than for
metaphors—at the moment.
He received gold for a bank-note. Captain Abrane hurriedly begged a
loan. Both of them threw. Neither of them threw on the six numbers
Woodseer would have selected, and they lost. He stated that the number of
17 had won before. Abrane tried the transversal enclosing this favoured
number. ‘Of course!’ he cried, with foul resignation and a hostile glare: the
ball had seated itself and was grinning at him from the lowest of the stalls.
Fleetwood quitted the table-numbers to throw on Pair; he won, won
again, pushed his luck and lost, dragging Abrane with him. The giant varied
his tone of acquiescence in Fortune’s whims: ‘Of course! I ‘ve only to fling!
Luck hangs right enough till I put down my stake.’

‘If the luck has gone three times, the chances....’ Woodseer was rather
inquiring than pronouncing.... Lord Fleetwood cut him short. ‘The chances
are equally the contrary!’ and discomposed his argumentative mind.
As argument in such a place was impossible, he had a wild idea of
example—‘just to see’—; and though he smiled, his brain was liquefying.
Upon a calculation of the chances, merely for the humour of it, he laid a
silver piece on the first six, which had been neglected. They were now blest.
He laid his winnings on the numbed 17. Who would have expected it? why,
the player, surely! Woodseer comported himself like a veteran: he had
proved that you can calculate the chances. Instead of turning in triumph to
Lord Fleetwood, he laid gold pieces to hug the number 17, and ten in the
centre. And it is the truth, he hoped then to lose and have done with it—
after proving his case. The ball whirled, kicked, tried for seat in two, in
three points, and entered 17. The usual temporary wonderment flew round
the table; and this number was courted in dread, avoided with apprehension.
Abrane let fly a mighty breath: ‘Virgin, by Jove!’
Success was a small matter to Gower Woodseer. He displayed his
contempt of fortune by letting his heap of bank-notes lie on Impair, and he
won. Abrane bade him say ‘Maximum’ in a furious whisper. He did so, as
one at home with the word; and winning repeatedly, observed to Fleetwood:
‘Now I can understand what historians mean, in telling us of heroes rushing
into the fray and vainly seeking death. I always thought death was to be
had, if you were in earnest.’
Fleetwood scrutinized the cast of his features and the touch of his fingers
on the crispy paper.
‘Come to another of these “green fields,”’ he returned briefly. ‘The game
here is child’s play.’
Urging Virgin Luck not to quit his initiatory table, the captain reluctantly
went at their heels. Shortly before the tables were clad in mantles for the
night, he reported to Livia one of the great cases of Virgin Luck; described
it, from the silver piece to the big heap of notes, and drew on his envy of the
fellow to sketch the indomitable coolness shown in following or in quitting
a run. ‘That fellow it is, Fleetwood’s tag-rag; holds his head like a street-
fiddler; Woodler or some name. But there’s nothing to be done if we don’t
cultivate him. He must have pocketed a good three thousand and more.
They had a quarrel about calculations of chances, and Fleet ran the V up his

forehead at a piece of impudence. Fellow says some high-flying stuff; Fleet
brightens like a Sunday chimney-sweep. If I believed in Black Arts, upon
my word!’
‘Russett is not usually managed with ease,’ the lady said.
Her placid observation was directed on the pair then descending the
steps.
‘Be careful how you address, this gentleman,’ she counselled Abrane.
‘The name is not Woodier, I know. It must be the right name or none.’
Livia’s fairest smile received them. She heard the captain accosting the
child of luck as Mr. Woodier, and she made a rustle in rising to take
Fleetwood’s arm.
‘We haven’t dined, we have to sup,’ said he.
‘You are released at the end of the lamps. You redeem your ring, Russett,
and I will restore it. I have to tell you, Henrietta is here to-morrow.’
‘She might be in a better place.’
‘The place where she is to be seen is not generally undervalued by men.
It is not her fault that she is absent. The admiral was persuaded to go and
attend those cavalry manoeuvres with the Grand Duke, to whom he had
been civil when in command of the Mediterranean squadron. You know, the
admiral believes he has military—I mean soldierly-genius; and the delusion
may have given him wholesome exercise and helped him to forget his gout.
So far, Henrietta will have been satisfied. She cannot have found much
amusement among dusty troopers or at that court at Carlsruhe. Our French
milliner there has helped in retarding her quite against her will. She has had
to choose a balldress for the raw mountain-girl they have with them, and get
her fitted, and it’s a task! Why take her to the ball? But the admiral’s
infatuated with this girl, and won’t hear of her exclusion—because, he says,
she understands a field of battle; and the Ducal party have taken to her. Ah,
Russett, you should not have flown! No harm, only Henrietta does require a
trifle of management. She writes, that she is sure of you for the night at the
Schloss.’
‘Why, ma’am?’
‘You have given your word. “He never breaks his lightest word,” she
says.’
‘It sounds like the beginning of respect.’

‘The rarest thing men teach women to feel for them!’
‘A respectable love match—eh? Good Lord! You’ll be civil to my friend.
You have struck him to the dust. You have your one poetical admirer in
him.’
‘I am honoured, Russett.’
‘Cleared out, I suppose? Abrane is a funnel for pouring into that Bank.
Have your fun as you like it! I shall get supplies to-morrow. By the way,
you have that boy Cressett here. What are you doing with him?’
Livia spoke of watching over him and guarding him:
‘He was at the table beside me, bursting to have a fling; and my friend
Mr. Woodseer said, it was “Adonis come to spy the boar”:—the picture!’
Prompt as bugle to the breath, Livia proposed to bet him fifty pounds that
she would keep young Cressett from gambling a single louis. The pretty
saying did not touch her.
Fleetwood moved and bowed. Sir Meeson Corby simulated a petrifaction
of his frame at seeing the Countess of Fleetwood actually partly bent with
her gracious acknowledgement of the tramp’s gawky homage.

CHAPTER X. SMALL CAUSES
A clock sounded one of the later morning hours of the night as Gower
Woodseer stood at his hotel door, having left Fleetwood with a band of
revellers. The night was now clear. Stars were low over the ridge of pines,
dropped to a league of our strange world to record the doings. Beneath this
roof lay the starry She. He was elected to lie beneath it also: and he beheld
his heavenly lady floating on the lull of soft white cloud among her sister
spheres. After the way of imaginative young men, he had her features more
accurately now she was hidden, and he idealized her more. He could escape
for a time from his coil of similes and paint for himself the irids of her
large, long, grey eyes darkly rimmed; purest water-grey, lucid within the
ring, beneath an arch of lashes. He had them fast; but then he fell to
contemplating their exceeding rareness; And the mystery of the divinely
grey swung a kindled fancy to the flight with some queen-witch of woods,
of whom a youth may dream under the spell of twilights, East or West,
among forest branches.
She had these marvellous eyes and the glamour for men. She had not yet
met a man with the poetical twist in the brain to prize her elementally. All
admitted the glamour; none of her courtiers were able to name it, even the
poetical head giving it a name did not think of the witch in her looks as a
witch in her deeds, a modern daughter of the mediaeval. To her giant squire
the eyes of the lady were queer: they were unlit glass lamps to her French
suppliant; and to the others, they were attractively uncommon; the charm
for them being in her fine outlines, her stature, carriage of her person, and
unalterable composure; particularly her latent daring. She had the effect on
the general mind of a lofty crag-castle with a history. There was a whiff of
gunpowder exciting the atmosphere in the anecdotal part of the history
known.
Woodseer sat for a certain time over his note-book. He closed it with a
thrilling conceit of the right thing written down; such as entomologists feel
when they have pinned the rare insect. But what is butterfly or beetle
compared with the chiselled sentences carved out of air to constitute us part
owner of the breathing image and spirit of an adored fair woman? We repeat

them, and the act of repeating them makes her come close on ours, by virtue
of the eagle thought in the stamped gold of the lines.
Then, though she is not ever to be absolutely ours (and it is an
impoverishing desire that she should be), we have beaten out the golden
sentence—the essential she and we in one. But is it so precious after all? A
suspicious ring of an adjective drops us on a sickening descent.
The author dashed at his book, examined, approved, keenly enjoyed, and
he murderously scratched the adjective. She stood better without it, as a
bright planet star issuing from clouds, which are perhaps an adornment to
our hackneyed moon. This done, he restored the book to his coat’s breast-
pocket, smiling or sneering at the rolls of bank-notes there, disdaining to
count them. They stuffed an inner waistcoat pocket and his trousers also.
They at any rate warranted that we can form a calculation of the chances, let
Lord Fleetwood rave as he may please.
Woodseer had caught a glimpse of the elbow-point of his coat when
flinging it back to the chair. There was distinctly abrasion. Philosophers
laugh at such things. But they must be the very ancient pallium
philosophers, ensconced in tubs, if they pretend to merriment over the
spectacle of nether garments gapped at the spot where man is most
vulnerable. He got loose from them and held them up to the candle, and the
rays were admitted, neither winking nor peeping. Serviceable old clothes,
no doubt. Time had not dealt them the final kick before they scored a good
record.
They dragged him, nevertheless, to a sort of confession of some
weakness, that he could not analyze for the swirl of emotional thoughts in
the way; and they had him to the ground. An eagle of the poetic becomes a
mere squat toad through one of these pretty material strokes. Where then is
Philosophy? But who can be philosopher and the fervent admirer of a
glorious lady? Ask again, who in that frowzy garb can presume to think of
her or stand within fifty miles of her orbit?
A dreary two hours brought round daylight. Woodseer quitted his restless
bed and entered the abjured habiliments, chivalrous enough to keep from
denouncing them until he could cast the bad skin they now were to his
uneasy sensations. He remembered having stumbled and fallen on the slope
of the hill into this vale, and probably then the mischief had occurred
though a brush would have, been sufficient, the slightest collision. Only, it

was odd that the accident should have come to pass just previous to his
introduction. How long antecedent was it? He belaboured his memory to
reckon how long it was from the moment of the fall to the first sight of that
lady.
His window looked down on the hotel stable-yard. A coach-house door
was open. Odd or not—and it certainly looked like fate—that he should be
bowing to his lady so shortly after the mishap expelling him, he had to
leave the place. A groom in the yard was hailed, and cheerily informed him
he could be driven to Carlsruhe as soon as the coachman had finished his
breakfast. At Carlsruhe a decent refitting might be obtained, and he could
return from exile that very day, thanks to the praiseworthy early hours of
brave old Germany.
He had swallowed a cup of coffee with a roll of stale bread, in the best of
moods, and entered his carriage; he was calling the order to start when a
shout surprised his ear: ‘The fiddler bolts!’
Captain Abrane’s was the voice. About twenty paces behind, Abrane,
Fleetwood, and one whom they called Chummy Potts, were wildly waving
arms. Woodseer could hear the captain’s lowered roar: ‘Race you, Chummy,
couple of louis, catch him first!’ The two came pelting up to the carriage
abreast.
They were belated revellers, and had been carelessly strolling under the
pinky cloudlets bedward, after a prolonged carousal with the sons and
daughters of hilarious nations, until the apparition of Virgin Luck on the
wing shocked all prospect of a dead fight with the tables that day.
‘Here, come, no, by Jove, you, Mr. Woodsir! won’t do, not a bit! can’t let
you go,’ cried Abrane, as he puffed. ‘What! cut and run and leave us, post
winnings—bankers—knock your luck on the head! What a fellow! Can’t let
you. Countess never forgive us. You promised—swore it—play for her.
Struck all aheap to hear of your play! You’ve got the trick. Her purse for
you in my pocket. Never a fellow played like you. Cool as a cook over a-
gridiron! Comme un phare! St. Ombre says—that Frenchman. You
astonished the Frenchman! And now cut and run? Can’t allow it. Honour of
the country at stake.’
‘Hands off!’ Woodseer bellowed, feeling himself a leaky vessel in dock,
his infirmities in danger of exposure. ‘If you pull!—what the deuce do you
want? Stop!’

‘Out you come,’ said the giant, and laughed at the fun to his friends, who
were entirely harmonious when not violently dissenting, as is the way with
Night’s rollickers before their beds have reconciled them to the day-beams.
Woodseer would have had to come and was coming; he happened to say:
‘Don’t knock my pipe out of my mouth,’ and touched a chord in the giant.
‘All—right; smoke your pipe,’ was answered to his remonstrance.
During the amnesty, Fleetwood inquired: ‘Where are you going?’
‘Far a drive,—to be sure. Don’t you see!’
‘You’ll return?’
‘I intend to return.’
‘He’s beastly excited,’ quoth Abrane.
Fleetwood silenced him, though indeed Woodseer appeared suspiciously
restive.
‘Step down and have a talk with me before you start. You’re not to go
yet.’
‘I must. I’m in a hurry.’
‘What ‘s the hurry?’
‘I want to smoke and think.’
‘Takes a carriage on the top of the morning to smoke and think! Hark at
that!’ Abrane sang out. ‘Oh, come along quietly, you fellow, there’s a good
fellow! It concerns us all, every man Jack; we’re all bound up in your
fortunes. Fellow with luck like yours can’t pretend to behave independently.
Out of reason!’
‘Do you give me your word you return?’ said Fleetwood.
Woodseer replied: ‘Very well, I do; there, I give my word. Hang it! now I
know what they mean by “anything for a quiet life.” Just a shake brings us
down on that cane-bottomed chair!’
‘You return to-day?’
‘To-day, yes, yes.’
Fleetwood signified the captive’s release; and Abrane immediately
suggested:
‘Pop old Chummy in beside the fellow to mount guard.’

Potts was hustled and precipitated into the carriage by the pair, with
whom he partook this last glimmer of their night’s humorous extravagances,
for he was an easy creature. The carriage drove off.
‘Keep him company!’ they shouted.
‘Escort him back!’ said he, nodding.
He remarked to Woodseer: ‘With your permission,’ concerning the seat
he took, and that ‘a draught of morning air would do him good.’ Then he
laughed politely, exchanged wavy distant farewells with his comrades,
touched a breast-pocket for his case of cigars, pulled forth one, obtained
‘the loan of a light,’ blew clouds and fell into the anticipated composure,
quite understanding the case and his office.
Both agreed as to the fine morning it was. Woodseer briefly assented to
his keeper’s reiterated encomium on the morning, justified on oath. A fine
morning, indeed. ‘Damned if I think I ever saw so fine a morning!’ Potts
cried. He had no other subject of conversation with this hybrid: and being
equally disposed for hot discourse or for sleep, the deprivation of the one
and the other forced him to seek amusement in his famous reading of
character; which was profound among the biped equine, jockeys, turfmen,
sharpers, pugilists, demireps. He fronted Woodseer with square shoulders
and wide knees, an elbow on one, a fist on the other, engaged in what he
termed the ‘prodding of his eel,’ or ‘nicking of his man,’ a method of
getting straight at the riddle of the fellow by the test of how long he could
endure a flat mute stare and return look for look unblinking. The act of
smoking fortifies and partly covers the insolence. But if by chance an
equable, not too narrowly focussed, counterstare is met, our impertinent
inquisitor may resemble the fisherman pulled into deep waters by his fish.
Woodseer perused his man, he was not attempting to fathom him: he had
besides other stuff in his head. Potts had naught, and the poor particle he
was wriggled under detection.
‘Tobacco before breakfast!’ he said disgustedly tossing his cigar to the
road. ‘Your pipe holds on. Bad thing, I can tell you, that smoking on an
empty stomach. No trainer’d allow it, not for a whole fee or double. Kills
your wind. Let me ask you, my good sir, are you going to turn? We’ve sat a
fairish stretch. I begin to want my bath and a shave, linen and coffee.
Thirsty’ as a dog.’

He heard with stupefaction, that he could alight on the spot, if he pleased,
otherwise he would be driven into Carlsruhe. And now they had a lingual
encounter, hot against cool; but the eyes of Chummy Potts having been
beaten, his arguments and reproaches were not backed by the powerful
looks which are an essential part of such eloquence as he commanded. They
fled from his enemy’s currishly, even while he was launching epithets. His
pathetic position subjected him to beg that Woodseer would direct the driver
to turn, for he had no knowledge of ‘their German lingo.’ And said he:
‘You’ve nothing to laugh at, that I can see. I’m at your mercy, you brute;
caught in a trap. I never walk;—and the sun fit to fry a mackerel along that
road! I apologize for abusing you; I can’t do more. You’re an infernally
clever player—there! And, upon my soul, I could drink ditchwater! But if
you’re going in for transactions at Carlsruhe, mark my words, your luck’s
gone. Laugh as much as you like.’
Woodseer happened to be smiling over the excellent reason for not
turning back which inflicted the wofulness. He was not without sympathy
for a thirsty wretch, and guessing, at the sight of an avenue of limes to the
left of the road, that a wayside inn was below, he said: ‘You can have coffee
or beer in two minutes,’ and told the driver where to pull up.
The sight of a grey-jacketed, green-collared sportsman, dog at heel,
crossing the flat land to the hills of the forest, pricked him enviously, and
caused him to ask what change had come upon him, that he should be
hurrying to a town for a change of clothes. Just as Potts was about to jump
out, a carriage, with a second behind it, left the inn door. He rubbed a hand
on his unshaven chin, tried a glance at his shirt-front, and remarking: ‘It
won’t be any one who knows me,’ stood to let the carriages pass. In the first
were a young lady and a gentleman: the lady brilliantly fair, an effect of
auburn hair and complexion, despite the signs of a storm that had swept
them and had not cleared from her eyelids. Apparently her maid, a damsel
sitting straight up, occupied the carriage following; and this fresh-faced
young person twice quickly and bluntly bent her head as she was driven by.
Potts was unacquainted with the maid. But he knew the lady well, or well
enough for her inattention to be the bigger puzzle. She gazed at the Black
Forest hills in the steadiest manner, with eyes betraying more than they
saw; which solved part of the puzzle, of course. Her reasons for declining to
see him were exposed by the presence of the gentleman beside her. At the
same time, in so highly bred a girl, a defenceless exposure was

unaccountable. Half a nod and the shade of a smile would have been the
proper course; and her going along on the road to the valley seemed to say
it might easily have been taken; except that there had evidently been a bit of
a scene.
Potts ranked Henrietta’s beauty far above her cousin Livia’s. He was
therefore personally offended by her disregard of him, and her bit of a scene
with the fellow carrying her off did him injury on behalf of his friend
Fleetwood. He dismissed Woodseer curtly. Thirsting more to gossip than to
drink, he took a moody draught of beer at the inn, and by the aid of a
conveyance, hastily built of rotten planks to serve his needs, and drawn by a
horse of the old wars,’ as he reported on his arrival at Baden,—reached that
home of the maltreated innocents twenty minutes before the countess and
her party were to start for lunch up the Lichtenthal. Naturally, he was
abused for letting his bird fly: but as he was shaven, refreshed, and in clean
linen, he could pull his shirt-cuffs and take seat at his breakfast-table with
equanimity while Abrane denounced him.
‘I’ll bet you the fellow’s luck has gone,’ said Potts. ‘He ‘s no new hand
and you don’t think him so either, Fleet. I’ve looked into the fellow’s eye
and seen a leery old badger at the bottom of it. Talks vile stuff. However,
‘perhaps I didn’t drive out on that sweltering Carlsruhe road for nothing.’
He screwed a look at the earl, who sent Abrane to carry a message and
heard the story Potts had to tell.
‘Henrietta Fakenham! no mistake about her; driving out from a pothouse;
man beside her, military man; might be a German. And, if you please, quite
unacquainted with your humble servant, though we were as close as you to
me. Something went wrong in that pothouse. Red eyes. There had been a
scene, one could swear. Behind the lady another carriage, and her maid.
Never saw the girl before, and sets to bowing and smirking at me, as if I
was the-fellow of all others! Comical. I made sure they were bound for this
place. They were on the Strasburg road. No sign of them?’
‘You speak to me?’ said Fleetwood.
Potts muttered. He had put his foot into it.
‘You have a bad habit of speaking to yourself,’ Fleetwood remarked, and
left him. He suffered from the rustics he had to deal with among his class,
and it was not needed that he should thunder at them to make his wrath felt.

Livia swam in, asking: ‘What has come to Russett? He passed me in one
of his black fits.’
The tale of the Carlsruhe road was repeated by Potts. She reproved him.
‘How could you choose Russett for such a report as that! The admiral was
on the road behind. Henrietta—you’re sure it was she? German girls have
much the same colouring. The gentleman with her must have been one of
the Court equerries. They were driving to some chateau or battlefield the
admiral wanted to inspect. Good-looking man? Military man?’
‘Oh! the man! pretty fair, I dare say,’ Potts rejoined. ‘If it wasn’t
Henrietta Fakenham, I see with the back of my head. German girl! The
maid was a German girl.’
‘That may well be,’ said Livia.
She conceived the news to be of sufficient importance for her to
countermand the drive up the Lichtenthal, and take the Carlsruhe road
instead; for Henrietta was weak, and Chillon Kirby an arch-plotter, and
pleader too, one of the desperate lovers. He was outstaying his leave of
absence already, she believed; he had to be in England. If he feared to lose
Henrietta, he would not hesitate to carry her off. Livia knew him, and knew
the power of his pleading with a firmer woman than Henrietta.

CHAPTER XI. THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD
Nothing to rouse alarm was discovered at Carlsruhe. Livia’s fair cousin
was there with the red-haired gaunt girl of the mountains; and it was frankly
stated by Henrietta, that she had accompanied the girl a certain distance
along the Strasburg road, for her to see the last of her brother Chillon on his
way to England. Livia was not the woman to push inquiries. On that
subject, she merely said, as soon as they were alone together:
‘You seem to have had the lion’s share of the parting.’
‘Yes, we passed Mr. Chumley Potts,’ was Henrietta’s immediate answer;
and her reference to him disarmed Livia.
They smiled at his name transiently, but in agreement: the tattler-spout of
their set was, a fatal person to encounter, and each deemed the sudden
apparition of him in the very early morning along the Carlsruhe road rather
magical.
‘You place particular confidence in Russett’s fidelity to his word, Riette
—as you have been hearing yourself called. You should be serious by this
time. Russett won’t bear much more. I counted on the night of the Ball for
the grand effect. You will extinguish every woman there—and if he is
absent?’
‘I shall excuse him.’
‘You are not in a position to be so charitable. You ought to know your
position, and yourself too, a little better than you do. How could you endure
poverty? Chillon Kirby stands in his uniform, and all’s told. He can
manoeuvre, we know. He got the admiral away to take him to those reviews
cleverly. But is he thinking of your interests when he does it? He requires
twenty years of active service to give you a roof to your head. I hate such
allusions. But look for a moment at your character: you must have ordinary
luxuries and pleasures, and if you were to find yourself grinding against
common necessities—imagine it! Russett is quite manageable. He is, trust
me! He is a gentleman; he has more ability than most young men: he can do
anything he sets his mind to do. He has his great estates and fortune all in
his own hands. We call him eccentric. He is only young, with a lot of power.

Add, he’s in love, and some one distracts him. Not love, do you say?—you
look it. He worships. He has no chance given him to show himself at his
best. Perhaps he is off again now. Will you bet me he is not?’
‘I should incline to make the bet, if I betted,’ said Henrietta. ‘His pride is
in his word, and supposing he’s in love, it’s with his pride, which never
quits him.’
‘There’s firmness in a man who has pride of that kind. You must let me
take you back to Baden. I hold to having you with me to-day. You must
make an appearance there. The admiral will bring us his Miss Kirby to-
morrow, if he is bound to remain here to-night. There’s no harm in his
bachelor dinners. I suspect his twinges of gout come of the prospect of
affairs when he lands in England. Remember our bill with Madame
Clemence. There won’t be the ghost of a bank-note for me if Russett quits
the field; we shall all be stranded.’
Henrietta inquired: ‘Does it depend on my going with you to-day?’
‘Consider, that he is now fancying a thousand things. We won’t talk of
the road to Paris.’
A shot of colour swept over Henrietta.
‘I will speak to papa:—if he can let me go. He has taken to Miss Kirby.’
‘Does she taste well?’
Henrietta debated. ‘It’s impossible to dislike her. Oh! she is wild! She
knows absolutely nothing of the world. She can do everything we can’t—or
don’t dare to try.—Men would like her. Papa’s beginning to doat. He says
she would have made a first-rate soldier. She fears blood as little as her
morning cup of milk. One of the orderlies fell rather badly from a
frightened horse close by our carriage. She was out in a moment and had his
head on her lap, calling to papa to keep the carriage fast and block the way
of the squadron, for the man’s leg was hurt. I really thought we were lost.
At these manoeuvres anything may happen, at any instant. Papa will follow
the horse-artillery. You know his vanity to be a military quite as much as a
naval commander like the Greeks and Romans, he says. We took the
bruised man into our carriage and drove him to camp, Carinthia nursing him
on the way.’
‘Carinthia! She’s well fitted with her name. What with her name and her
hair and her build and her singular style of attire, one wonders at her

coming into civilized parts. She ‘s utterly unlike Chillon.’
Henrietta reddened at the mention of one of her own thoughts in the
contrasting of the pair.
They had their points of likeness, she said.
It did not concern Livia to hear what these were. Back to Baden, with
means to procure the pleasant shocks of the galvanic battery there, was her
thought; for she had a fear of the earl’s having again departed in a huff at
Henrietta’s behaviour.
The admiral consented that his daughter should go, as soon as he heard
that Miss Kirby was to stay. He had when a young man met her famous
father; he vowed she was the Old Buccaneer young again in petticoats and
had made prize of an English man-of-war by storm; all the profit, however,
being his. This he proved with a courteous clasp of the girl and a show of
the salute on her cheek, which he presumed to take at the night’s farewell.
‘She’s my tonic,’ he proclaimed heartily. She seemed to Livia somewhat
unstrung and toneless. The separation from her brother in the morning
might account for it. And a man of the admiral’s age could be excused if he
exalted the girl. Senility, like infancy, is fond of plain outlines for the laying
on of its paints. The girl had rugged brows, a short nose, red hair; no young
man would look at her twice. She was utterly unlike Chillon! Kissing her
hand to Henrietta from the steps of the hotel, the girl’s face improved.
Livia’s little squire, Sir Meeson Corby, ejaculated as they were driving
down the main street, ‘Fleetwood’s tramp! There he goes. Now see, Miss
Fakenham, the kind of object Lord Fleetwood picks up and calls friend!—
calls that object friend!.. But, what? He has been to a tailor and a barber!’
‘Stop the coachman. Run, tell Mr. Woodseer I wish him to join us,’ Livia
said, and Sir Meeson had to thank his tramp for a second indignity. He
protested, he simulated remonstrance,—he had to go, really feeling a
sickness.
The singular-looking person, whose necessities or sense of the decencies
had, unknown to himself and to the others, put them all in motion that day,
swung round listening to the challenge to arms, as the puffy little man’s
delivery of the countess’s message sounded. He was respectably clad, he
thought, in the relief of his escape from the suit of clothes discarded, and he
silently followed Sir Meeson’s trot to the carriage. ‘Should have mistaken
you for a German to-day, sir,’ the latter said, and trotted on.

‘A stout one,’ Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his
exterior.
His dark lady’s eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens. Her fair
cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle
causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not unlike
the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At once he was
conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw the Teuton skin on
the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat, pinched at the knees,
short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot where he ought to have
been bigger or smaller. How accept or how reject the invitation to drive in
such company to Baden!
‘You’re decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,’ the vindictive
little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the
proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him at the
steps of a certain hotel.
‘Best hotel in the town!’ Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta,
reading her constraint with this comical object before her. It was the
admiral’s hotel they stopped at.
‘Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame
Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss Mr.
Woodseer’s fly,’ Livia mildly addressed her squire. He stared: again he had
to go, muttering: ‘That nondescript’s footman!’ and his mischance in being
checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a dirty-fisted vagabond
impostor astounded him. He sent the flyman to the carriage for orders.
Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended. Sir Meeson heard her cry
out: ‘Is it you!’ and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack,
affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,—bowing,
smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the
young lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker’s air; he roused the
admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss Fakenham more
than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of the preposterous
figure he cut. Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the disintegration of his
country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those clothes could be permitted to
amuse English ladies of high station, quite at home with them. Among the
signs of England’s downfall, this was decidedly one. What to think of the
admiral’s favourite when, having his arm paternally on her shoulder, she

gave the tramp her hand at parting, and then blushed! All that the ladies had
to say about it was, that a spread of colour rather went to change the
character of her face.
Carinthia had given Woodseer her hand and reddened under the
recollection of Chillon’s words to her as they mounted the rise of the
narrow vale, after leaving the lame gentleman to his tobacco on the grass
below the rocks. Her brother might have counselled her wisely and was to
be obeyed. Only, the great pleasure in seeing the gentleman again inspired
gratitude: he brought the scene to her; and it was alive, it chatted and it
beckoned; it neighboured her home; she had passed it on her walk away
from her home; the gentleman was her link to the mountain paths; he was
just outside an association with her father and mother. At least, her thinking
of them led to him, he to them. Now that she had lost Chillon, no one was
near to do so much. Besides, Chillon loved Henrietta; he was her own. His
heart was hers and his mind his country’s. This gentleman loved the
mountains; the sight of him breathed mountain air. To see him next day was
her anticipation: for it would be at the skirts of hilly forest land, where
pinetrees are a noble family, different from the dusty firs of the weariful
plains, which had tired her eyes of late.
Baden was her first peep at the edges of the world since she had grown to
be a young woman. She had but a faint idea of the significance of gambling.
The brilliant lights, the band music, the sitting groups and company of
promenaders were novelties; the Ball of the ensuing night at the Schloss
would be a wonder, she acknowledged in response to Henrietta, who was
trying to understand her; and she admired her ball-dress, she said, looking
unintelligently when she heard that she would be guilty of slaying numbers
of gentlemen before the night was over. Madame Clemence thought her
chances in that respect as good as any other young lady’s, if only she could
be got to feel interested. But at a word of the pine forest, and saying she
intended to climb the hills early with the light in the morning, a pointed
eagerness flushed Carinthia, the cold engraving became a picture of colour.
She was out with the earliest light. Yesterday’s parting between Chillon
and Henrietta had taught her to know some little about love; and if her
voice had been heeded by Chillon’s beloved, it would not have been a
parting. Her only success was to bring a flood of tears from Henrietta. The
tears at least assured her that her brother’s beautiful girl had no love for the

other one,—the young nobleman of the great wealth, who was to be at the
Ball, and had ‘gone flying,’ Admiral Fakenham shrugged to say; for Lord
Fleetwood was nowhere seen.
The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to
her thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she was
once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing pines,
broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare straight
shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward. Her old father was
arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her there. The
suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and her old
father and she were aware of one another without conversing in speech. He
pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger for the solitudes
of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling. He would not let a
sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea forward disturb the
scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing
comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of
long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as
well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the yellow
pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out, with a
strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns;
he saw what his girl saw. Power of heart was her conjuring magician.
She climbed to the rock-slabs above. This was too easily done. The poor
bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk was
towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty lowland
obstructions. And it was just then, by the chance of things—by the direction
of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be—while colour, expression, and
her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a gentleman, who was no
other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia, coming out of the deeper pine
forest.
Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to
adventure by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little
rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty feet
above the lower ground. She looked on it, and took a step down to the stem
soon after.
Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at
an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber

from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of
branches off the bill in the shape of a crest. And now a shameful spasm of
terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded to
attempt. She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright. She seated herself.
And there let her be. She was a German girl, apparently. She had an air of
breeding, something more than breeding. German families of the nobles
give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid
young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them
independent of the graces. But, if a young woman out alone in the woods
was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.
Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life. She
was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks, and
should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally straight-
growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.
Not comparable to Henrietta in feminine beauty, she was on an upper
plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the
shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were side
by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl’s face. There was in it a savage
poignancy in serenity unexampled among women—or modern women. One
might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of Goths or
Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours through the
languor of the grave:—Woodseer would comprehend and hit on the exact
image to portray her in a moment, Fleetwood thought, and longed for that
fellow.
He walked hurriedly back to the stunted rock tree. The damsel had
vanished. He glanced below. She had not fallen. He longed to tell Woodseer
he had seen a sort of Carinthia sister, cousin, one of the family. A single
glimpse of her had raised him out of his grovelling perturbations, cooled
and strengthened him, more than diverting the course of the poison
Henrietta infused, and to which it disgraced him to be so subject. He took
love unmanfully; the passion struck at his weakness; in wrath at the
humiliation, if only to revenge himself for that, he could be fiendish; he
knew it, and loathed the desired fair creature who caused and exposed to
him these cracks in his nature, whence there came a brimstone stench of the
infernal pits. And he was made for better. Of this he was right well assured.
Superior to station and to wealth, to all mundane advantages, he was the

puppet of a florid puppet girl; and he had slept at the small inn of a village
hard by, because it was intolerable to him to see the face that had been
tearful over her lover’s departure, and hear her praises of the man she
trusted to keep his word, however grievously she wounded him.
He was the prisoner of his word;—rather like the donkeys known as
married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be
present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta, suffer
torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised the bitter
coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to him, that he
was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in loneliness with
the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the antidote face of
the wood-sprite before he was to undergo it. But, as he was not by nature a
dreamer, only dreamed of the luxury of being one, he soon looked back
with loathing on a notion of relief to come from the state of ruminating
animal, and jumped up and shook off another of men’s delusions—that they
can, if they have the heart to suffer pain, deaden it with any semi-poetical
devices, similar to those which Rufus Abrane’s ‘fiddler fellow’ practised
and was able to carry out because he had no blood. The spite of a present
entire opposition to Woodseer’s professed views made him exult in the
thought, that the mouther of sentences was likely to be at work stultifying
them and himself in the halls there below during the day. An imp of
mischief offered consolatory sport in those halls of the Black Goddess;
already he regarded his recent subservience to the conceited and tripped
peripatetic philosopher as among the ignominies he had cast away on his
road to a general contempt; which is the position of a supreme elevation for
particularly sensitive young men.
Pleasure in the scenery had gone, and the wood-sprite was a flitted
vapour; he longed to be below there, observing Abrane and Potts and the
philosopher confounded, and the legible placidity of Countess Livia.
Nevertheless, he hung aloft, feeding where he could, impatient of the
solitudes, till night, when, according to his guess, the ladies were at their
robing.
Half the fun was over: but the tale of it, narrated in turn by Abrane and
his Chummy Potts on the promenade, was a very good half. The fiddler had
played for the countess and handed her back her empty purse, with a bow
and a pretty speech. Nothing had been seen of him since. He had lost all his

own money besides. ‘As of course he would,’ said Potts. ‘A fellow
calculating the chances catches at a knife in the air.’
‘Every franc-piece he had!’ cried Abrane. ‘And how could the jackass
expect to keep his luck! Flings off his old suit and comes back here with a
rig of German bags—you never saw such a figure!—Shoreditch Jew’s
holiday!—why, of course, the luck wouldn’t stand that.’
They confessed ruefully to having backed him a certain distance,
notwithstanding. ‘He took it so coolly, just as if paying for goods across a
counter.’
‘And he had something to bear, Braney, when you fell on him,’ said
Potts, and murmured aside: ‘He can be smartish. Hears me call Braney
Rufus, and says he, like a fellow-chin on his fiddle—“Captain Mountain,
Rufus Mus’. Not bad, for a counter.”’
Fleetwood glanced round: he could have wrung Woodseer’s hand. He
saw young Cressett instead, and hailed him: ‘Here you are, my gallant! You
shall flash your maiden sword tonight. When I was under your age by a
long count, I dealt sanctimoniousness a flick o’ the cheek, and you shall,
and let ‘em know you’re a man. Come and have your first boar-hunt along
with me. Petticoats be hanged.’
The boy showed some recollection of the lectures of his queen, but he
had not the vocables for resistance to an imperative senior at work upon
sneaking inclinations. ‘Promised Lady F.’—do you hear him?’ Fleetwood
called to the couple behind; and as gamblers must needs be parasites, manly
were the things they spoke to invigorate the youthful plunger and second
the whim of their paymaster.
At half-past eleven, the prisoner of his word entered under the Schloss
partico, having vowed to himself on the way, that he would satisfy the
formulas to gain release by a deferential bow to the great personages, and
straightway slip out into the heavenly starlight, thence down among the
jolly Parisian and Viennese Bacchanals.

CHAPTER XII. HENRIETTA’S LETTER
TREATING OF THE GREAT EVENT
By the first light of an autumn morning, Henrietta sat at her travelling-
desk, to shoot a spark into the breast of her lover with the story of the great
event of the night. For there had been one, one of our biggest, beyond all
tongues and trumpets and possible anticipations. Wonder at it hammered on
incredulity as she wrote it for fact, and in writing had vision of her lover’s
eyes over the page.
‘Monsieur Du Lac!
‘Grey Dawn. ‘You are greeted. This, if you have been tardy on the
journey home, will follow close on the heels of the prowest, I believe truest,
of knights, and bear perhaps to his quick mind some help to the solution he
dropped a hint of seeking.
‘The Ball in every way a success. Grand Duke and Duchess perfect in
courtesy, not a sign of the German morgue. Livia splendid. Compared to
Day and Night. But the Night eclipses the Day. A summer sea of dancing.
Who, think you, eclipsed those two?
‘I tell you the very truth when I say your Carinthia did. If you had seen
her,—the “poor dear girl” you sigh to speak of,—with the doleful outlook
on her fortunes: “portionless, unattractive!” Chillon, she was magical!
You cannot ever have seen her irradiated with happiness. Her pleasure in
the happiness of all around her was part of the charm. One should be a poet
to describe her. It would task an artist to paint the rose-crystal she became
when threading her way through the groups to be presented. This is not
meant to say that she looked beautiful. It was the something above beauty—
more unique and impressive—like the Alpine snow-cloak towering up from
the flowery slopes you know so well and I a little.
‘You choose to think, is it Riette who noticed my simple sister so closely
before...? for I suppose you to be reading this letter a second time and
reflecting as you read. In the first place, acquaintance with her has revealed
that she is not the simple person—only in her manner. Under the beams of
subsequent events, it is true I see her more picturesquely. But I noticed also

just a suspicion of the “grenadier” stride when she was on the march to
make her curtsey. But Livia had no cause for chills and quivers. She was
not the very strange bird requiring explanatory excuses; she dances
excellently, and after the first dance, I noticed she minced her steps in the
walk with her partner. She catches the tone readily. If not the image of her
mother, she has inherited her mother’s bent for the graces; she needs but a
small amount of practice.
‘Take my assurance of that; and you know who has critical eyes. Your
anxiety may rest; she is equal to any station.
‘As expected by me, my Lord Tyrant appeared, though late, near
midnight. I saw him bowing to the Ducal party. Papa had led your “simple
sister” there. Next I saw the Tyrant and Carinthia conversing. Soon they
were dancing together, talking interestedly, like cheerful comrades.
Whatever his faults, he has the merit of being a man of his word. He said he
would come, he did not wish to come, and he came.
‘His word binds him—I hope not fatally; irrevocably, it certainly does.
There is charm of character in that. His autocrat airs can be forgiven to a
man who so profoundly respects his word.
‘It occurred during their third dance. Your Riette was not in the quadrille.
O but she was a snubbed young woman last night! I refrain—the examples
are too minute for quotation.
‘A little later and he had vanished. Carinthia Kirby may already be
written Countess of Fleetwood! His hand was offered and hers demanded in
plain terms. Her brother would not be so astounded if he had seen the
brilliant creature she was—is, I could say; for when she left me here, to go
to her bed, she still wore the “afterglow.” She tripped over to me in the ball-
room to tell me. I might doubt, she had no doubt whatever. I fancied he had
subjected her to some degree of trifling. He was in a mood. His moods are
known to me. But no, he was precise; her report of him strikes the ear as
credible, in spite of the marvel it insists on our swallowing.
“‘Lord Fleetwood had asked me to marry him.” Neither assurance nor
bashfulness; newspaper print; aid an undoubting air of contentment.
‘Imagine me hearing it.
‘“To be his wife?”
‘“He said wife.”

‘“And you replied?”
‘“I—said I would.”
‘“Tell me all?”
‘“He said we were plighted.”
‘Now, “wife” is one of the words he abhors; and he loathes the hearing of
a girl as “engaged.” However, “plighted” carried a likeness.
‘I pressed her: “My dear Carinthia, you thought him in earnest?”
‘“He was.”
‘“How do you judge?”
‘“By his look when he spoke.”
‘“Not by his words?”
“‘I repeat them to you.”
‘She has repeated them to me here in my bedroom. There is no variation.
She remembers every syllable. He went so far as to urge her to say whether
she would as willingly utter consent if they were in a church and a
clergyman at the altar-rails.
‘That was like him.
‘She made answer: “Wherever it may be, I am bound, if I say yes.”
‘She then adds: “He told me he joined hands with me.”
‘“Did he repeat the word ‘wife’?”
‘“He said it twice.”
‘I transcribe verbatim scrupulously. There cannot be an error, Chillon. It
seems to show, that he has embraced the serious meaning of the word—or
seriously embraced the meaning, reads’ better. I have seen his lips form
“wife.”
‘But why wonder so staringly? They both love the mountains. Both are
wildish. She was looking superb. And he had seen her do a daring thing on
the rocks on the heights in the early morning, when she was out by herself,
unaware of a spectator, he not knowing who she was;—the Fates had
arranged it so. That was why he took to her so rapidly. So he told her. She
likes being admired. The preparation for the meeting does really seem
“under direction.” She likes him too, I do think. Between her repetitions of
his compliments, she praised his tone of voice, his features. She is ready to

have the fullest faith in the sincerity of his offer; speaks without any
impatience for the fulfilment. If it should happen, what a change in the
fortunes of a girl—of more than one, possibly.
‘Now I must rest “eyelids fall.” It will be with a heart galloping. No rest
for me till this letter flies. Good morning is my good night to you, in a
world that has turned over.’
Henrietta resumes:
‘Livia will not hear of it, calls up all her pretty languor to put it aside. It
is the same to-day as last night. “Why mention Russett’s nonsense to me?”
Carinthia is as quietly circumstantial as at first. She and the Tyrant talked of
her native home. Very desirous to see it! means to build a mansion there!
“He said it must be the most romantic place on earth.”
‘I suppose I slept. I woke with my last line to you on my lips, and the
great news thundering. He named Esslemont and his favourite—always
uninhabited—Cader Argau. She speaks them correctly. She has an unfailing
memory. The point is, that it is a memory.
‘Do not forget also—Livia is affected by her distaste—that he is a
gentleman. He plays with his nobility. With his reputation of gentleman, he
has never been known to play. You will understand the slightly hypocritical
air—it is not of sufficient importance for it to be alluded to in papa’s
presence—I put on with her.
‘Yes, I danced nearly all the dances. One, a princeling in scarlet uniform,
appearing fresh from under earth; Prussian: a weighty young Graf in green,
between sage and bottle, who seemed to have run off a tree in the forest,
and was trimmed with silver like dew-drops: one in your Austrian white,
dragon de Boheme, if I caught his French rightly. Others as well, a list.
They have the accomplishment. They are drilled in it young, as girls are,
and so few Englishmen—even English officers. How it may be for
campaigning, you can pronounce; but for dancing, the pantalon collant is
the perfect uniform. Your critical Henrietta had not to complain of her
partners, in the absence of the one.
‘I shall be haunted by visions of Chillon’s amazement until I hear or we
meet. I serve for Carinthia’s mouthpiece, she cannot write it, she says. It
would be related in two copybook lines, if at all.

‘The amazement over London! The jewel hand of the kingdom gone in a
flash, to “a raw mountain girl,” as will be said. I can hear Lady Endor, Lady
Eldritch, Lady Cowry. The reasonable woman should be Lady Arpington. I
have heard her speak of your mother, seen by her when she was in frocks.
‘Enter the “plighted.” Poor Livia! to be made a dowager of by any but a
damsel of the family. She may well ridicule “that nonsense of Russett’s last
night”! Carinthia kisses, embraces, her brother. I am to say: “What
Henrietta tells you is true, Chillon.” She is contented though she has not
seen him again and has not the look of expecting to see him. She still wears
the kind of afterglow.
‘Chillon’s Viennese waltz was played by the band: played a second time,
special request, conveyed to the leader by Prince Ferdinand. True, most
true, she longs to be home across the water. But be it admitted, that to any
one loving colour, music, chivalry, the Island of Drab is an exile. Imagine,
then, the strange magnetism drawing her there! Could warmer proof be
given?
‘Adieu. Livia’s “arch-plotter” will weigh the letter he reads to the
smallest fraction of a fraction before he moves a step.
‘I could leave it and come to it again and add and add. I foresee in Livia’s
mind a dread of the aforesaid “arch,” and an interdict. So the letter must be
closed, sealed and into the box, with the hand I still call mine, though I
should doubt my right if it were contested fervently. I am singing the waltz.

‘Adieu,
‘Ever and beyond it,
‘Your obedient Queen,
‘HENRIETTA.

‘P.S.-My Lord Tyrant has departed—as on other occasions. The prisoner
of his word is sure to take his airing before he presents himself to redeem it.
His valet is left to pay bills, fortunately for Livia. She entrusted her purse
yesterday to a man picked up on the road by my lord, that he might play for
her. Captain Abrane assured her he had a star, and Mr. Potts thought him a
rush compere, an adept of those dreadful gambling tables. Why will she
continue to play! The purse was returned to her, without so much as a piece
of silver in it; the man has flown. Sir M. Corby says, he is a man whose
hands betray him—or did to Sir M.; expects to see him one day on the
wrong side of the criminal bar. He struck me as not being worse than

absurd. He was, in any case, an unfit companion, and our C. would help to
rescue the Eccentric from such complicating associates. I see worlds of
good she may do. Happily, he is no slave of the vice of gambling; so she
would not suffer that anxiety. I wish it could be subjoined, that he has no
malicious pleasure in misleading others. Livia is inconsolable over her pet,
young Lord Cressett, whom he yesterday induced to “try his luck”—with
the result. We leave, if bills are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr.
Potts left this afternoon; just enough to carry them home. Papa and your
blissful sister out driving. Riette within her four walls and signing herself,

‘THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.’

CHAPTER XIII. AN IRRUPTION. OF
MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE
CONVENTION
‘It is a dark land,’ Carinthia said, on seeing our Island’s lowered clouds in
swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer white cliffs. —
She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane, when first she beheld
Old England’s shores, tossing in the packet-boat on a wild Channel sea, did
say it and think it, for it is in the family that she did; and no wonder that she
should, the day being showery from the bed of the sun, after a frosty three
days, at the close of autumn. We used to have an eye of our own for English
weather before printed Meteorological Observations and Forecasts
undertook to supplant the shepherd and the poacher, and the pilot with his
worn brown leather telescope tucked beneath his arm. All three would have
told you, that the end of a three days’ frost in the late season of the year and
the early, is likely to draw the warm winds from the Atlantic over Cornish
Land’s End and Lizard.
Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her father
and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can be no harm
in quoting her remark. Only—I have to say it—experience causes
apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions, and an
exposition of feelings; taken for granted,—of course, in a serious narrative;
which it really seems these moderns think designed for a frequent arrest of
the actors in the story and a searching of the internal state of this one or that
one of them: who is laid out stark naked and probed and expounded, like as
in the celebrated picture by a great painter—and we, thirsting for events as
we are, are to stop to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the
windows of the lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking,
with exterior occurrences or impatience for them to come to pass. Every
explanation is sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do, in
mercy, I say, let us bide for them.
She thought our Island all the darker because Henrietta had induced her
to talk on the boat of her mountain home and her last morning there for the

walk away with Chillon John. Soon it was to appear supernaturally bright, a
very magician’s cave for brilliancy.
Now, this had happened—and comment on it to yourselves, remembering
always, that Chillon John was a lover, and a lover has his excuses, though
they will not obviate the penalties he may incur; and dreadful they were.
After reading Henrietta’s letter to him, he rode out of his Canterbury
quarters across the country to the borders of Sussex, where his uncle Lord
Levellier lived, on the ridge of ironstone, near the wild land of a forest,
Croridge the name of the place. Now, Chillon John knew his uncle was
miserly, and dreaded the prospect of having to support a niece in the
wretched establishment at Lekkatts, or, as it was popularly called, Leancats;
you can understand why. But he managed to assure himself he must in duty
consult with the senior and chief member of his family on a subject of such
importance as the proposal of marriage to his lordship’s niece.
The consultation was short: ‘You will leave it to me,’ his uncle said: and
we hear of business affairs between them, involving payment of moneys
due to the young man; and how, whenever he touched on them, his uncle
immediately fell back on the honour of the family and Carinthia Jane’s
reputation, her good name to be vindicated, and especially that there must
be no delays, together with as close a reckoning as he could make of the
value of Lord Fleetwood’s estates in Kent and in Staffordshire and South
Wales, and his house property in London.
‘He will have means to support her,’ said the old lord, shrugging as if at
his own incapacity for that burden.
The two then went to the workshops beside a large pond, where there was
an island bordered with birch trees and workmen’s cottages near the main
building; and that was an arsenal containing every kind of sword and lance
and musket, rifle and fowling-piece and pistol, and more gunpowder than
was, I believe, allowed by law. For they were engaged in inventing a new
powder for howitzer shells, of tremendous explosive power.
Nothing further did either of them say, concerning the marriage. Nor did
Carinthia Jane hear any mention of Lord Fleetwood from her brother on the
landing-place at Dover. She was taken to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham’s
house in Hampshire; and there she remained, the delight of his life, during
two months, patiently expecting and rebuking the unmaidenliness of her
expectations, as honest young women in her position used to do. So did

they sometimes wait for years; they have waited until they withered into
their graves, like the vapours of a brief winter’s day: a moving picture of a
sex restrained by modesty in those purer times from the taking of one step
forward unless inquired for.
Two months she waited in our ‘dark land.’ January arrived, and her
brother. Henrietta communicated the news:
‘My Janey, you are asked by Lord Fleetwood whether it is your wish that
he should marry you.’
Now, usually a well-born young woman’s answer, if a willing one, is an
example of weak translation. Here it was the heart’s native tongue, without
any roundabout, simple but direct.
‘Oh, I will, I am ready, tell him.’
Remember, she was not speaking publicly.
Henrietta knew the man enough to be glad he did not hear. She herself
would have felt a little shock on his behalf: only, that answer suited the
scheme of the pair of lovers.
How far those two were innocent in not delivering the whole of Lord
Fleetwood’s message to Carinthia Jane through Lord Levellier, we are
unable to learn. We may suspect the miserly nobleman of curtailing it for
his purposes; and such is my idea. But the answer would have been the
same, I am sure.
In consequence and straight away, Chillon John betakes him to Admiral
Baldwin and informs him of Lord Fleetwood’s proposal on the night at
Baden, and renewal of it through the mouth of Lord Levellier, not
communicating, however (he may really not have known), the story of how
it had been wrung from the earl by a surprise movement on the part of the
one-armed old lord, who burst out on him in the street from the ambush of a
Club-window, where he had been stationed every day for a fortnight,
indefatigably to watch for the passing of the earl, as there seemed no other
way to find him. They say, indeed, there was a scene, judging by the result,
and it would have been an excellent scene for the stage; though the two
noblemen were to all appearance politely exchanging their remarks. But the
audience hearing what passes, appreciates the courteous restraint of an
attitude so contrasting with their tempers. Behind the ostentation of civility,
their words were daggers.

For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his Welsh
castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of the proposal
of his hand and title to the strange girl in a quadrille at a foreign castle had
been forgotten by her, and the risks of annoyance on the subject had quite
blown over, returned to town, happy in having done the penance for his
impulsiveness, and got clean again—that is to say, struck off his fetters and
escaped from importunities—the very morning of the day when Lord
Levellier sprang upon him! It shows the old campaigner’s shrewdness in
guessing where his prey would come, and not putting him on his guard by a
call at his house. Out of the window he looked for all the hours of light
during an entire fortnight. ‘In the service of my sister’s child,’ he said. ‘To
save him from the cost of maintaining her,’ say his enemies. At any rate he
did it.
He was likely to have done the worse which I suspect.
Now, the imparting of the wonderful news to Admiral Baldwin
Fakenham was, we read, the whiff of a tropical squall to lay him on his
beam ends. He could not but doubt; and his talk was like the sails of a big
ship rattling to the first puff of wind. He had to believe; and then, we read,
he was for hours like a vessel rolling in the trough of the sea. Of course he
was a disappointed father. Naturally his glance at the loss to Henrietta of the
greatest prize of the matrimonial market of all Europe and America was
vexing and saddening. Then he woke up to think of the fortunes of his
‘other girl,’ as he named her, and cried: ‘Crinny catches him!’
He cried it in glee and rubbed his hands.
So thereupon, standing before him, Chillon John, from whom he had the
news, bent to him slightly, as his elegant manner was, and lengthened the
admiral’s chaps with another proposal; easy, deliberate, precise, quite the
respectful bandit, if you please, determined on having his daughter by all
means, only much preferring the legal, formal, and friendly. Upon that, in
the moment of indecision, Henrietta enters, followed by Admiral Baldwin’s
heroine, his Crinny, whom he embraced and kissed, congratulated and
kissed again. One sees the contrivance to soften him.
So it was done, down in that Hampshire household on the heights near
the downs, whence you might behold, off a terra firma resembling a roll of
billows, England’s big battle-ships in line fronting the island; when they
were a spectacle of beauty as well as power: which now they are no more,

but will have to be, if they are both to float and to fight. For I have, had
quoted to me by a great admirer of the Old Buccaneer, one of the dark
sayings in his MAXIMS FOR MEN, where Captain John Peter Kirby
commends his fellow-men to dissatisfaction with themselves if they have
not put an end to their enemy handsomely.. And he advises the copying of
Nature in this; whose elements have always, he says, a pretty, besides a
thorough, style of doing it, when they get the better of us; and the one by
reason of the other. He instances the horse, the yacht, and chiefly the sword,
for proof, that the handsomest is the most effective. And he prints large:
‘UGLY IS ONLY HALF WAY TO A THING.’ To an invention, I suppose he
intends to say. But looking on our huge foundering sea-monsters and the
disappearance of the unwieldy in Nature, and the countenances of
criminals, who are, he bids us observe, always in the long run beaten, I
seem to see a meaning our country might meditate on.
So, as I said, it was done; for Admiral Baldwin could refuse his Crinny
nothing; as little as he would deny anything to himself, the heartiest of
kindly hosts, fathers, friends. Carinthia Jane’s grand good fortune covered
that pit, the question of money, somehow, and was, we may conceive, a
champagne wine in their reasoning faculties. The admiral was in debt,
Henrietta had no heritage, Chillon John was the heir of a miserly uncle
owing him sums and evading every application for them, yet they behaved
as people who had the cup of golden wishes. Perhaps it was because
Henrietta and her lover were so handsome a match as to make it seem to
them and others they must marry; and as to character, her father could trust
her to the man of her choice more readily than to the wealthy young
nobleman; of whose discreetness he had not the highest opinion. He
reconciled this view with his warm feeling for the Countess of Fleetwood to
be, by saying: ‘Crinny will tame him!’ His faith was in her dauntless bold
spirit, not thinking of the animal she was to tame.
Countess Livia, after receiving Henrietta’s letter of information,
descended on them and thought them each and all a crazed set. Love, as a
motive of action for a woman, she considered the female’s lunacy and
suicide. Men are born subject to it, happily, and thus the balance between
the lordly half of creation and the frail is rectified. We women dress, and
smile, sigh, if you like, to excite the malady. But if we are the fools to share
it, we lose our chance; instead of the queens, we are the slaves, and instead
of a life of pleasure, we pass from fever to fever at a tyrant’s caprice: he

does rightly in despising us. Ay, and many a worthy woman thinks the
same. Educated in dependency as they are, they come to the idea of love to
snatch at it for their weapon of the man’s weakness. For which my lord calls
them heartless, and poets are angry with them, rightly or wrongly.
It must, I fear, be admitted for a truth, that sorrow is the portion of young
women who give the full measure of love to the engagement, marrying for
love. At least, Countess Livia could declare subsequently she had foretold it
and warned her cousin. Not another reflection do you hear from me, if I
must pay forfeit of my privilege to hurry you on past descriptions of places
and anatomy of character and impertinent talk about philosophy in a story.
When we are startled and offended by the insinuated tracing of principal
incidents to a thread-bare spot in the nether garments of a man of no
significance, I lose patience.
Henrietta’s case was a secondary affair. What with her passion—it was
nothing less—and her lover’s cunning arts, and her father’s consent given,
and in truth the look of the two together, the dissuasion of them from union
was as likely to keep them apart as an exhortation addressed to magnet and
needle. Countess Livia attacked Carinthia Jane and the admiral backing her.
But the admiral, having given his consent to his daughter’s marriage, in
consequence of the earl’s pledged word to ‘his other girl,’ had become a
zealot for this marriage and there was only not a grand altercation on the
subject because Livia shunned annoyances. Alone with Carinthia Jane, as
she reported to Henrietta, she spoke to a block, that shook a head and wore
a thin smile and nursed its own idea of the better knowledge of Edward
Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, gained in the run of a silly quadrille at a ball:
What is a young man’s word to his partner in a quadrille?
Livia put the question, she put it twice rather sternly, and the girl came
out with: ‘Oh, he meant it!’
The nature, the pride, the shifty and furious moods of Lord Fleetwood
were painted frightful to her.
She had conceived her own image of him.
Whether to set her down as an enamoured idiot or a creature not a whit
less artful than her brother, was Countess Livia’s debate. Her inclination
was to misdoubt the daughter of the Old Buccaneer: she might be simple, at
her age, and she certainly was ignorant; but she clung to her prize. Still the

promise was extracted from her, that she would not worry the earl to fulfil
the word she supposed him to mean in its full meaning.
The promise was unreluctantly yielded. No, she would not write. Admiral
Fakenham, too, engaged to leave the matter to a man of honour.
Meanwhile, Chillon John had taken a journey to Lekkatts; following
which, his uncle went to London. Lord Fleetwood heard that Miss Kirby
kept him bound. He was again the fated prisoner of his word.
And following that, not so very long, there was the announcement of the
marriage of Chillon John Kirby Levellier, Lieutenant in the King’s Own
Hussars, and Henrietta, daughter of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham. A county
newspaper paragraph was quoted for its eulogy of the Beauty of Hampshire
—not too strong, those acquainted with her thought. Interest at Court
obtained an advancement for the bridegroom: he was gazetted Captain
during his honeymoon, and his prospects under his uncle’s name were
considered fair, though certain people said at the time, it was likely to be all
he would get while old Lord Levellier of Leancats remained in the flesh.
Now, as it is good for those to tell who intend preserving their taste for
romance and hate anatomical lectures, we never can come to the exact
motives of any extraordinary piece of conduct on the part of man or
woman. Girls are to read; and the study of a boy starts from the monkey.
But no literary surgeon or chemist shall explain positively the cause of the
behaviour of men and women in their relations together; and speaking to
rescue my story, I say we must with due submission accept the facts. We are
not a bit the worse for wondering at them. So it happened that Lord
Fleetwood’s reply to Lord Levellier’s hammer—hammer by post and
messenger at his door, one may call it, on the subject of the celebration of
the marriage of the young Croesus and Carinthia Jane, in which there was
demand for the fixing of a date forthwith, was despatched on the day when
London had tidings of Henrietta Pakenham’s wedding.
The letter, lost for many years, turned up in the hands of a Kentish
auctioneer, selling it on behalf of a farm-serving man, who had it from Lord
Levellier’s cook and housemaid, among the things she brought him as her
wifely portion after her master’s death, and this she had not found saleable
in her husband’s village at her price, but she had got the habit of sticking to
the scraps, being proud of hearing it said that she had skinned Leancats to
some profit: and her expectation proved correct after her own demise, for

her husband putting it up at the auction; our relative on the mother’s side,
Dr. Glossop, interested in the documents and particulars of the story as he
was, had it knocked down to him, in contest with an agent of a London
gentleman, going as high as two pounds ten shillings, for the sum of two
pounds and fifteen shillings. Count the amount that makes for each word of
a letter a marvel of brevity, considering the purport! But Dr. Glossop was
right in saying he had it cheap. The value of that letter may now be
multiplied by ten: nor for that sum would he part with it.
Thus it ran, I need not refer to it in Bundle No. 3:

‘MY LORD: I drive to your church-door on the fourteenth of the month
at ten A.M., to keep my appointment with Miss C. J. Kirby, if I do
not blunder the initials.
‘Your lordship’s obedient servant,
‘FLEETWOOD.’

That letter will ever be a treasured family possession with us.
That letter was dated from Lord Fleetwood’s Kentish mansion,
Esslemont, the tenth of the month. He must have quitted London for
Esslemont, for change of scene, for air, the moment after the news of
Henrietta’s marriage. Carinthia Jane received the summons without
transmission of the letter from her uncle on the morning of the twelfth. It
was a peremptory summons.
Unfortunately, Admiral Fakenham, a real knight and chevalier of those
past times, would not let her mount the downs to have her farewell view of
the big ships unaccompanied by him; and partly and largely in pure
chivalry, no doubt; but her young idea of England’s grandeur, as shown in
her great vessels of war, thrilled him, too, and restored his youthful
enthusiasm for his noble profession or made it effervesce. However it was,
he rode beside her and rejoiced to hear the young girl’s talk of her father as
a captain of one of England’s thunderers, and of the cruelty of that
Admiralty to him: at which Admiral Baldwin laughed, but had not the heart
to disagree with her, for he could belabour the Admiralty in season, cause or
no cause. Altogether he much enjoyed the ride, notwithstanding intimations
of the approach of ‘his visitor,’ as he called his attacks of gout.
Riding home, however, the couple passed through a heavy rainfall, and
the next day, when he was to drive with the bride to Lekkatts, gout, the
fiercest he had ever known, chained him fast to his bed. Such are the petty
accidents affecting circumstances. They are the instruments of Destiny.

There he lay, protesting that the ceremony could not possibly be for the
fourteenth, because Countess Livia had, he now remembered, written of her
engagement to meet Russett on the night of that day at a ball at Mrs.
Cowper Quillett’s place, Canleys, lying south of the Surrey hills: a house
famed for its gatherings of beautiful women; whither Lord Fleetwood
would be sure to engage to go, the admiral now said; and it racked him like
gout in his mind, and perhaps troubled his conscience about handing the girl
to such a young man. But he was lying on his back, the posture for memory
to play the fiend with us, as we read in the BOOK of MAXIMS of the Old
Buccaneer. Admiral Baldwin wished heartily to be present at his Crinny’s
wedding ‘to see her launched,’ if wedding it was to be, and he vowed the
date of the fourteenth, in Lord Levellier’s announcement of it, must be an
error and might be a month in advance, and ought to be. But it was sheer
talking and raving for a solace to his disappointment or his anxiety. He had
to let Carinthia Jane depart under the charge of his housekeeper, Mrs.
Carthew, a staid excellent lady, poorly gifted with observation.
Her report of the performance of the ceremony at Croridge village
church, a half mile from Lekkatts, was highly reassuring to the anxious old
admiral still lying on his back with memory and gout at their fiend’s play,
and livid forecasts hovering. He had recollected that there had been no
allusion in Lord Levellier’s message to settlements or any lawyer’s
preliminaries, and he raged at himself for having to own it would have been
the first of questions on behalf of his daughter.
‘All passed off correctly,’ Mrs. Carthew said. ‘The responses of the bride
and bridegroom were particularly articulate.’
She was reserved upon the question of the hospitality of Lekkatts. The
place had entertained her during her necessitated residence there, and
honour forbade her to smile concordantly at the rosy admiral’s mention of
Leancats. She took occasion, however, to praise the Earl of Fleetwood’s
eminently provident considerateness for his bride, inasmuch as he had
packed a hamper in his vehicle, which was a four-in-hand, driven by
himself.
Admiral Baldwin inquired: ‘Bride inside?’
He was informed: ‘The Countess of Fleetwood sat on the box on the left
of my lord.’
She had made no moan about the absence of bridesmaids.

‘She appeared too profoundly happy to meditate an instant upon
deficiencies.’
‘How did the bridegroom behave?’
‘Lord Fleetwood was very methodical. He is not, or was not, voluntarily
a talker.’
‘Blue coat, brass buttons, hot-house flower? old style or new?’
‘His lordship wore a rather low beaver and a buttoned white overcoat, not
out of harmony with the bride’s plain travelling-dress.’
‘Ah! he’s a good whip, men say. Keeps first-rate stables, hacks, and
bloods. Esslemont hard by will be the place for their honeymoon, I guess.
And he’s a lucky dog, if he knows his luck.’
So said Admiral Baldwin. He was proceeding to say more, for he had a
prodigious opinion of the young countess and the benefit of her marriage to
the British race. As it concerned a healthy constitution and motherhood,
Mrs. Carthew coughed and retired. Nor do I reprove either of them. The
speculation and the decorum are equally commendable. Masculine ideas are
one thing; but let feminine ever be feminine, or our civilization perishes.
At Croridge village church, then, one of the smallest churches in the
kingdom, the ceremony was performed and duly witnessed, names written
in the vestry book, the clergyman’s fee, the clerk, and the pew-woman, paid
by the bridegroom. And thus we see how a pair of lovers, blind with the one
object of lovers in view; and a miserly uncle, all on edge to save himself the
expense of supporting his niece; and an idolatrous old admiral, on his back
with gout; conduced in turn and together to the marriage gradually exciting
the world’s wonder, till it eclipsed the story of the Old Buccaneer and
Countess Fanny, which it caused to be discussed afresh.
Mrs. Carthew remembered Carinthia Jane’s last maiden remark and her
first bridal utterance. On the way, walking to the church of Croridge from
Lekkatts, the girl said: ‘Going on my feet, I feel I continue the mountain
walk with my brother when we left our home.’ And after leaving the church,
about to mount the coach, she turned to Mrs. Carthew, saying, as she
embraced her:
‘A happy bride’s kiss should bring some good fortune.’ And looking
down from her place on the top of the coach:

‘Adieu, dear Mrs. Carthew. A day of glory it is to-day.’ She must actually
have had it in her sight as a day of glory: and it was a day of the clouds off
our rainy quarter, similar in every way to the day of her stepping on English
soil and saying: ‘It is a dark land.’ For the heart is truly declared to be our
colourist. A day having the gale in its breast, sweeping the whole country
and bending the trees for the twigs to hiss like spray of the billows around
our island, was a day of golden splendour to the young bride of the Earl of
Fleetwood, though he scarcely addressed one syllable to her, and they sat
side by side all but dumb, he like a coachman driving an unknown lady
fare, on a morning after a night when his wife’s tongue may have soured
him for the sex.

CHAPTER XIV. A PENDANT OF THE
FOREGOING
Mention has been omitted or forgotten by the worthy Dame, in her
vagrant fowl’s treatment of a story she cannot incubate, will not relinquish,
and may ultimately addle, that the bridegroom, after walking with a
disengaged arm from the little village church at Croridge to his coach and
four at the cross of the roads to Lekkatts and the lowland, abruptly, and as
one pursuing a deferential line of conduct he had prescribed to himself,
asked his bride, what seat she would prefer.
He shouted: ‘Ives!’
A person inside the coach appeared to be effectually roused.
The glass of the window dropped. The head of a man emerged. It was the
head of one of the bargefaced men of the British Isles, broad, and battered
flattish, with sentinel eyes.
In an instant the heavy-headed but not ill-looking fellow was nimble and
jumped from the coach.
‘Napping, my lord,’ he said.
Heavy though the look of him might be, his feet were light; they flipped a
bar of a hornpipe at a touch of the ground. Perhaps they were allowed to go
with their instinct for the dance, that his master should have a sample of his
wakefulness. He quenched a smirk and stood to take orders; clad in a flat
blue cap, a brown overcoat, and knee-breeches, as the temporary bustle of
his legs had revealed.
Fleet-wood heard the young lady say: ‘I would choose, if you please, to
sit beside you.’
He gave a nod of enforced assent, glancing at the vacated box.
The man inquired: ‘A knee and a back for the lady to mount up, my
lord?’
‘In!’ was the smart command to him; and he popped in with the agility of
his popping out.

Then Carinthia made reverence to the grey lean figure of her uncle and
kissed Mrs. Carthew. She needed no help to mount the coach. Fleetwood’s
arm was rigidly extended, and he did not visibly wince when this foreign
girl sprang to the first hand-grip on the coach and said: ‘No, my husband, I
can do it’; unaided,’ was implied.
Her stride from the axle of the wheel to the step higher would have been
a graceful spectacle on Alpine crags.
Fleetwood swallowed that, too, though it conjured up a mocking
recollection of the Baden woods, and an astonished wild donkey preparing
himself for his harness. A sour relish of the irony in his present position
sharpened him to devilish enjoyment of it, as the finest form of loathing: on
the principle that if we find ourselves consigned to the nether halls, we do
well to dance drunkenly. He had cried for Romance—here it was!
He raised his hat to Mrs. Carthew and to Lord Levellier. Previous to the
ceremony, the two noblemen had interchanged the short speech of
mannered duellists punctiliously courteous in the opening act. Their civility
was maintained at the termination of the deadly work. The old lord’s bosom
thanked the young one for not requiring entertainment and a repast; the
young lord’s thanked the old one for a strict military demeanour at an
execution and the abstaining from any nonsensical talk over the affair.
A couple of liveried grooms at the horses’ heads ran and sprang to the
hinder seats as soon as their master had taken the reins. He sounded the
whip caressingly: off those pretty trotters went.
Mrs. Carthew watched them, waving to the bride. She was on the present
occasion less than usually an acute or a reflective observer, owing to her
admiration of lordly state and masculine commandership; and her thought
was: ‘She has indeed made a brilliant marriage!’
The lady thought it, notwithstanding an eccentricity in the wedding
ceremony, such as could not but be noticeable. But very wealthy noblemen
were commonly, perhaps necessarily, eccentric, for thus they proved
themselves egregious, which the world expected them to be.
Lord Levellier sounded loud eulogies of the illustrious driver’s team. His
meditation, as he subsequently stated to Chillon, was upon his vanquished
antagonist’s dexterity, in so conducting matters, that he had to be taken at
once, with naught of the customary preface and apology for taking to
himself the young lady, of which a handsome settlement, is the memorial.

We have to suppose, that the curious occupant of the coach inside
aroused no curiosity in the pair of absorbed observers.
Speculations regarding the chances of a fall of rain followed the coach
until it sank and the backs of the two liveried grooms closed the chapter of
the wedding, introductory to the honeymoon at Esslemont, seven miles
distant by road, to the right of Lekkatts. It was out of sight that the coach
turned to the left, Northwestward.

CHAPTER XV. OPENING STAGE OF THE
HONEYMOON
A famous maxim in the book of the Old Buccaneer, treating of
PRECAUTION, as ‘The brave man’s clean conscience,’ with sound counsel
to the adventurous, has it:—
‘Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe
wine.’
It should mean, that brave men entering the jaws of hurricanes are found
to have cheerful hearts in them when they know they have done their best.
But, touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous Bacchic
spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles, and you find comparison neighbour
closely between the sealed wine-flask and the bride, who is being driven by
her husband to the nest of the unknown on her marriage morn.
Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange
land, travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale, this
Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness exalted,
virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled the inanimate and
most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past memory, beyond the
hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air, since she laid her hand
in this young man’s. His not speaking to her was accepted. Her blood rather
than recollection revived their exchanges during the dance at Baden, for
assurance that their likings were one, their aims rapturously one; that he
was she, she he, the two hearts making one soul.
Could she give as much as he? It was hardly asked. If we feel we can
give our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers. It bubbles
perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult. Two hearts that
make one soul do not separately count their gifts.
For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience
of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were seized
as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality. Driving was
the piece of skill she could not do. Her husband’s mastery of the reins
endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he guided and

kept to their pace; and the humming rush of the pace, the smooth torrent of
the brown heath-knolls and reddish pits and hedge-lines and grass-flats and
copses pouring the counter-way of her advance, belonged to his wizardry.
The bearing of her onward was her abandonment to him. Delicious as
mountain air, the wind sang; it had a song of many voices. Quite as much as
on the mountains, there was the keen, the blissful, nerve-knotting catch of
the presence of danger in the steep descents, taken as if swallowed, without
swerve or check. She was in her husband’s hands. At times, at the pitch of a
rapid shelving, that was like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next
throb exalted before it rose, not reasoning why;—her confidence was in
him; she was his comrade whatever chanced. Up over the mountain-peaks
she had known edged moments, little heeded in their passage, when life is
poised as a crystal pitcher on the head, in peril of a step. Then she had been
dependent on herself. Now she had the joy of trusting to her husband.
His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she
bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the man inside
pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms across their
chests. Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled: the creature did
not count among timid girls—or among civilized. She had got what she
wanted from her madman—mad in his impulses, mad in his reading of
honour. She was the sister of Henrietta’s husband. Henrietta bore the name
she had quitted. Could madness go beyond the marrying of the creature? He
chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence, her withholding the
brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he would have hated.
He, however, was dragged to look down. Neither Gorgon nor Venus, nor
a mingling of them, she had the chasm of the face, recalling the face of his
bondage, seen first that night at Baden. It recalled and it was not the face; it
was the skull of the face, or the flesh of the spirit. Occasionally she looked,
for a twinkle or two, the creature or vision she had been, as if to mock by
reminding him. She was the abhorred delusion, who captured him by his
nerves, ensnared his word—the doing of a foul witch. How had it leapt
from his mouth? She must have worked for it. The word spoken—she must
have known it—he was bound, or the detested Henrietta would have said:
Not even true to his word!
To see her now, this girl, insisting to share his name, for a slip of his
tongue, despite the warning sent her through her uncle, had that face much

as a leaden winter landscape pretends to be the country radiant in colour.
She belonged to the order of the variable animals—a woman indeed!—
womanish enough in that. There are men who love women—the idea of
woman. Woman is their shepherdess of sheep. He loved freedom, loathed
the subjection of a partnership; could undergo it only in adoration of an
ineffable splendour. He had stepped to the altar fancying she might keep to
her part of the contract by appearing the miracle that subdued him. Seen by
light of day, this bitter object beside him was a witch without her spells; that
is, the skeleton of the seductive, ghastliest among horrors and ironies. Let
her have the credit of doing her work thoroughly before the exposure. She
had done it. She might have helped—such was the stipulation of his mad
freak in consenting to the bondage—yes, she might have helped to soften
the sting of his wound. She was beside him bearing his name, for the
perpetual pouring of an acid on the wound that vile Henrietta—poisoned
honey of a girl!—had dealt.
He glanced down at his possession:—heaven and the yawning pit were
the contrast! Poisoned honey is after all honey while you eat it. Here there
was nothing but a rocky bowl of emptiness. And who was she? She was the
sister of Henrietta’s husband. He was expected to embrace the sister of
Henrietta’s husband. Those two were on their bridal tour.
This creature was also the daughter of an ancient impostor and desperado
called the Old Buccaneer; a distinguished member of the family of the
Lincolnshire Kirbys, boasting a present representative grimly acquitted,
men said, on a trial for murder. An eminent alliance! Society considered the
Earl of Fleetwood wildish, though he could manage his affairs. He and his
lawyers had them under strict control. How of himself? The prize of the
English marriage market had taken to his bosom for his winsome bride the
daughter of the Old Buccaneer. He was to mix his blood with the blood of
the Lincolnshire Kirbys, lying pallid under the hesitating acquittal of a
divided jury.
How had he come to this pass, which swung him round to think almost
regretfully of the scorned multitude of fair besiegers in the market, some of
whom had their unpoetic charms?
He was renowned and unrivalled as the man of stainless honour: the one
living man of his word. He had never broken it—never would. There was
his distinction among the herd. In that, a man is princely above princes. The

nobility of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, surpassed the nobility of
common nobles. But, by all that is holy, he pays for his distinction.
The creature beside him is a franked issue of her old pirate of a father in
one respect—nothing frightens her. There she sits; not a screw of her brows
or her lips; and the coach rocked, they were sharp on a spill midway of the
last descent. It rocks again. She thinks it scarce worth while to look up to
reassure him. She is looking over the country.
‘Have you been used to driving?’ he said.
She replied: ‘No, it is new to me on a coach.’
Carinthia felt at once how wild the wish or half expectation that he would
resume the glowing communion of the night which had plighted them.
She did not this time say ‘my husband,’ still it flicked a whip at his ears.
She had made it more offensive, by so richly toning the official title just
won from him as to ring it on the nerves; one had to block it or be invaded.
An anticipation that it would certainly recur haunted every opening of her
mouth.
Now that it did not, he felt the gap, relieved, and yet pricked to imagine a
mimicry of her tones, for the odd foreignness of the word and the sound.
She had a voice of her own besides her courage. At the altar, her responses
had their music. No wonder: the day was hers. ‘My husband’ was a manner
of saying ‘my fish.’
He, spoke very civilly. ‘Oblige me by telling me what name you are
accustomed to answer to.’
She seemed unaware of an Arctic husband, and replied: ‘My father called
me Carin—short for Carinthia. My mother called me Janey; my second
name is Jane. My brother Chillon says both. Henrietta calls me Janey.’
The creature appeared dead flesh to goads. But the name of her sister-in-
law on her lips returned the stroke neatly. She spared him one whip, to cut
him with another.
‘You have not informed me which of these names you prefer.’
‘Oh, my husband, it is as you shall please.’
Fleetwood smartened the trot of his team, and there was a to-do with the
rakish leaders.

Fairies of a malignant humour in former days used to punish the
unhappiest of the naughty men who were not favourites, by suddenly
planting a hump on their backs. Off the bedevilled wretches pranced, and
they kicked, they snorted, whinnied, rolled, galloped, outflying the wind,
but not the dismal rider. Marriage is our incubus now. No explanation is
offered of why we are afflicted; we have simply offended, or some one
absent has offended, and we are handy. The spiteful hag of power ties a
wife to us; perhaps for the reason, that we behaved in the spirit of a better
time by being chivalrously honourable. Wives are just as inexplicable
curses, just as ineradicable and astonishing as humps imposed on shapely
backs.
Fleetwood lashed his horses until Carinthia’s low cry of entreaty rose to
surprise. That stung him.
‘Leave the coachman to his devices: we have an appointment and must
keep it,’ he said.
‘They go so willingly.’
‘Good beasts, in their way.’
‘I do not like the whip.’
‘I have the same objection.’
They were on the level of the vale, going along a road between farms and
mansions, meadows and gardenplots and park-palings. A strong warm wind
drove the pack of clouds over the tree-tops and charged at the branches.
English scenery, animating air; a rouse to the blood and the mind. Carinthia
did not ask for hues. She had come to love of the dark land with the warm
lifting wind, the big trees and the hedges, and the stately houses, and people
requiring to be studied, who mean well and are warm somewhere below, as
chimneypots are, though they are so stiff.
English people dislike endearments, she had found. It might be that her
husband disliked any show of fondness. He would have to be studied very
much. He was not like others, as Henrietta had warned her. From thinking
of him fervidly, she was already past the marvel of the thought that she
called him husband. At the same time, a curious intimation, gathered she
knew not whence, of the word ‘husband’ on a young wife’s lips as being a
foreign sound in England, advised her to withhold it. His behaviour was
instructing her.

‘Are you weather-wise?—able to tell when the clouds will hold off or
pelt,’ he said, to be very civil to a neighbour.
She collected her understanding, apparently; treating a conversational run
of the tongue as a question to be pondered; and the horses paid for it.
Ordinarily he was gentle with his beasts. He lashed at her in his heart for
perverting the humanest of men.
‘Father was,’ she replied.
‘Oh! I have heard of him.’
Her face lightened. ‘Father had a great name in England.’
‘The Old Buccaneer, I think.’
‘I do not know. He was a seaman of the navy, like Admiral Fakenham is.
Weather at sea, weather on the mountains, he could foretell it always. He
wrote a book; I have a copy you will read. It is a book of Maxims. He often
speaks of the weather. English weather and women, he says. But not my
mother. My mother he stood aside by herself—pas capricieuse du tout!
Because she would be out in the weather and brave the weather. She rode,
she swam, best of any woman. If she could have known you, what pleasure
for me! Mother learnt to read mountain weather from father. I did it too. But
sometimes on the high fields’ upper snows it is very surprising. Father has
been caught. Here the cloud is down near the earth and the strong wind
keeps the rain from falling. How long the wind will blow I cannot guess.
But you love the mountains. We spoke... And mountains’ adventures we
both love. I will talk French if you like, for, I think, German you do not
speak. I may speak English better than French; but I am afraid of my
English with you.’
‘Dear me!’ quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily,
attentive to his coachman business. She had a voice that clove the noise of
the wheels, and she had a desire to talk—that was evident. Talk of her father
set her prattling. It became clear also to his not dishonest, his
impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural. Or she was
mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.
He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden. There, however,
she was in a state of enthusiasm—the sort of illuminated transparency they
show at the end of fireworks. Mention of her old scapegrace of a father lit
her up again. The girl there and the girl here were no doubt the same. It

could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it for himself—acted
on by a particular agency. This creature had not the capacity to dupe. He
had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his idiocy, and she had dealt
the stroke; different in scarce a degree by nature from other young women
of prey.
But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she
counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage. The
calculation was excessive. No woman had done it yet. Idiocy plunged him
the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind alert
on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he frankly
referred to the cause. Not female arts, but nature’s impulses, it was his
passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman’s face, the new morning of
the idea of women in the look, and the peep into imaginary novel character,
did the trick of enslaving him. Call it idiocy. Such it was. Once
acknowledged, it is not likely to recur. An implacable reason sits in its
place, with a keen blade for efforts to carry the imposture further afield or
make it agreeable. Yet, after giving his word to Lord Levellier, he had
prodded himself to think the burden of this wild young woman might be
absurdly tolerable and a laugh at the world.
A solicitude for the animal was marked by his inquiry ‘You are not
hungry yet?’
‘Oh no, not yet,’ said she, oddly enlivened.
They had a hamper and were independent of stoppages for provision, he
informed her. What more delightful? cried her look, seeing the first mid-
day’s rest and meal with Chillon on the walk over the mountain from their
empty home.
She could get up enthusiasm for a stocked hamper! And when told of
some business that drew him to a meadow they were nearing, she said she
would be glad to help, if she could. ‘I learn quickly, I know.’
His head acquiesced. The daughter of the Old Buccaneer might learn the
business quickly, perhaps; a singularly cutting smile was on his tight lips, in
memory of a desire he had as a boy to join hands with an Amazonian
damsel and be out over the world for adventures, comrade and bride as one.
Here the creature sat. Life is the burlesque of young dreams; or they
precipitate us on the roar and grin of a recognized beast world.

The devil possessing him gnawed so furiously that a partial mitigation of
the pain was afforded by sight of waving hats on a hill-rise of the road. He
flourished his whip. The hats continued at wind-mill work. It signified brisk
news to him, and prospect of glee to propitiate any number of devils.
‘You will want a maid to attend on you,’ he said.
She replied: ‘I am not used to attendance on me. Henrietta’s maid would
help. I did not want her. I had no maid at home. I can do for myself. Father
and mother liked me to be very independent.’
He supposed he would have to hear her spelling her words out next.
The hill-top was gained; twenty paces of pretty trotting brought up the
coach beside an inn porch, in the style of the finish dear to whips, and even
imperative upon them, if they love their art. Two gentlemen stood in the
road, and a young woman at the inn door; a dark-haired girl of an anxious
countenance. Her puckers vanished at some signal from inside the coach.
‘All right, Madge; nothing to fear,’ Fleetwood called to her, and she
curtseyed.
He alighted, saying to her, before he spoke to his friends: ‘I’ve brought
him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours. He’ll do the
trick to-day. You don’t bet?’
‘Oh! my lord, no.’
‘Help the lady down. Out with you, Ines!’
The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering. He was
greeted ‘Kit’ by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he
had faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge. She flounced from
him, holding her arms up to the lady. Landlord, landlady, and hostler
besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder. Carinthia stepped,
leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking:
‘We are very independent, Chummy Potts.’
‘Cordy bally, by Jove!’ Potts cried. But the moment after this disengaged
ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment. ‘At the Opera?’ he
questioned of his perplexity.
‘No, sir, not at the Opera,’ Fleetwood rejoined. ‘The lady’s last public
appearance was at the altar.’

‘Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere. Left her husband
behind, has she?’
‘You see: she has gone in.’
The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused
him and the other gentleman, who was hailed ‘Mallard!’ and cared nothing
for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore
as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood’s chosen Kit Ines, with
Lord Brailstone’s unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.
Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third
year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the annals of
the Ring. The point, however, was, that the pockets of his backers had
seriously felt his latest fight. He received a dog’s licking at the hands of
Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one of the odds; and all
because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of his trainer’s imposed fast in
liquids on, the night before the battle. Right through his training, up to that
hour, the rascal was devout; the majority’s money rattled all on the snug
safe side. And how did he get at the bottle? His trainers never could say. But
what made him turn himself into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a
night to sit among friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon
tumbler with the honours? It was past his wits to explain. Endurance of his
privation had snapped in him; or else, which is more likely, this Genius of
the Ring was tempted by his genius on the summit of his perfected powers
to believe the battle his own, and celebrate it, as became a victor despising
the drubbed antagonist.
In any case, he drank, and a minor man gave him the dog’s licking..
‘Went into it puffy, came out of it bunged,’ the chronicle resounding over
England ran. Old England read of an ‘eyeless carcase’ heroically stepping
up to time for three rounds of mashing punishment. If he had won the day
after all, the country would have been electrified. It sympathized on the side
of his backers too much to do more than nod a short approval of his
fortitude. To sink with flag flying is next to sinking the enemy. There was
talk of a girl present at the fight, and of how she received the eyeless,
almost faceless, carcase of her sweetheart Kit, and carried him away in a
little donkey-cart, comfortably cushioned to meet disaster. This petty
incident drew the attention of the Earl of Fleetwood, then beginning to be

known as the diamond of uncounted facets, patron of the pick of all
departments of manly activity in England.
The devotion of the girl Madge to her sweetheart was really a fine story.
Fleetwood touched on it to Mr. Mallard, speaking of it like the gentleman
he could be, while Chumley Potts wagged impatient acquiescence in a
romantic episode of the Ring, that kept the talk from the hotter theme.
‘Money’s Bank of England to-day, you think?’ he interposed, and had his
answer after Mallard had said:
‘The girl ‘s rather good-looking, too.’
‘You may double your bets, Chummy. I had the fellow to his tea at my
dinner-table yesterday evening; locked him in his bedroom, and had him up
and out for a morning spin at six. His trainer, Flipper’s on the field, drove
from Esslemont at nine, confident as trumps.’
‘Deuce of a good-looking girl,’ Potts could now afford to say; and he
sang out: ‘Feel fit, lucky dog?’
‘Concert pitch!’ was the declaration of Kit Ives.
‘How about Lord Brailstone’s man?’
‘Female partner in a quadrille, sir.’
‘Ah!’ Potts doated on his limbs with a butcher’s eye for prize joints.
‘Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset,’ Mallard observed.
Fleetwood offered him to take his bets.
‘You’re heavy on it with Brailstone?’ said Mallard.
‘Three thousand.’
‘I’d back you for your luck blindfold.’
A ruffle of sourness shot over the features of the earl, and was noticed by
both eager betters, who exchanged a glance.
Potts inspected his watch, and said half aloud: ‘Liver, ten to one! That
never meant bad luck—except bad to act on. We slept here last night, you
know. It ‘s a mile and a quarter from the Royal Sovereign to the field of
glory. Pretty well time to start. Brailstone has a drive of a couple of miles.
Coaches from London down by this time. Abrane’s dead on Ben Todds, any
odds. Poor old Braney! “Steady man, Todds.” Backs him because he’s a
“respectable citizen,”—don’t drink. A prize-fighter total abstainer has no
spurts. Old Braney’s branded for the losing side. You might bet against

Braney blindfold, Mallard. How long shall you take to polish him off, Kit
Ines?’
The opponent of Ben Todds calculated.
‘Well, sir, steady Benny ought to be satisfied with his dose in, say, about
forty minutes. Maybe he won’t own to it before an hour and ten. He’s got a
proud English stomach.’
‘Shall we be late?’ Potts asked.
‘Jump in,’ Fleetwood said to his man. ‘We may be five minutes after
time, Chummy. I had a longer drive, and had to get married on the way, and
—ah, here they are!’
‘Lady coming?’
‘I fancy she sticks to the coach; I don’t know her tastes. Madge must see
her through it, that’s positive.’
Potts deferred his astonishment at the things he was hearing and seeing,
which were only Fleetwood’s riddles. The fight and the bets rang every
other matter out of his head. He beheld the lady, who had come down from
the coach like a columbine, mount it like Bean-stalk Jack. Madge was not
half so clever, and required a hand at her elbow.
After, giving hurried directions to Rundles, the landlord of the Royal
Sovereign, Fleetwood took the reins, and all three gentlemen touched hats
to the curtseying figure of Mrs. Rundles.
‘You have heard, I dare say—it’s an English scene,’ he spoke, partly
turning his face, to Carinthia; ‘particularly select to-day. Their Majesties
might look on, as the Caesars did in Rome. Pity we can’t persuade them.
They ought to set the fashion. Here we have the English people at their
grandest, in prime condition, if they were not drunk overnight; and dogged,
perfectly awake, magnanimous, all for fair play; fine fellows, upon my
word. A little blood, of course.’
But the daughter of the Old Buccaneer would have inherited a tenderness
for the sight of blood. She should make a natural Lady Patroness of
England’s National Sports. We might turn her to that purpose; wander over
England with a tail of shouting riff-raft; have exhibitions, join in them,
display our accomplishments; issue challenges to fence, shoot, walk, run,
box, in time: the creature has muscle. It’s one way of crowning a freak; we
follow the direction, since the deed done can’t be undone; and a precious

poetical life, too! You may get as royally intoxicated on swipes as on choice
wine; win a name for yourself as the husband of such a wife; a name in
sporting journals and shilling biographies: quite a revival of the Peerage
they have begun to rail at!
‘I would not wish to leave you,’ said Carinthia.
‘You have chosen,’ said Fleetwood.

CHAPTER XVI. IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM
FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD
ENGLAND
Cheers at an open gate of a field saluted the familiar scarlet of the Earl of
Fleetwood’s coach in Kentish land. They were chorister cheers, the
spontaneous ringing out of English country hearts in homage to the
nobleman who brightened the heaviness of life on English land with a
spectacle of the noble art distinguishing their fathers. He drove along over
muffling turf; ploughboys and blue butcher-boys, and smocked old men,
with an approach to a hundred-weight on their heels, at the trot to right and
left; all hoping for an occasional sight of the jewel called Kitty, that he
carried inside. Kitty was there.
Kitty’s eyes are shut. Think of that: cradled innocence and angels’ dreams
and the whole of the hymn just before ding-dong-bang on noses and jaws!
That means confidence? Looks like it. But Kitty’s not asleep you try him.
He’s only quiet because he has got to undergo great exertion. Last fight he
was knocked out of time, because he went into it honest drunk, they tell.
And the earl took him up, to give him a chance of recovering his good
name, and that’s Christian. But the earl, he knows a man as well as a horse.
He’s one to follow. Go to a fayte down at Esslemont, you won’t forget your
day. See there, he’s brought a lady on the top o’ the coach. That seems for to
signify he don’t expect it’s going to be much of a bloody business. But
there’s no accounting. Anyhow, Broadfield ‘ll have a name in the papers for
Sunday reading. In comes t’ other lord’s coach. They’ve timed it together
closes they have.
They were pronounced to be both the right sort of noblemen for the
country. Lord Brailstone’s blue coach rattled through an eastern gate to the
corner of the thirty-acre meadow, where Lord Fleetwood had drawn up, a
toss from the ring. The meeting of the blue and scarlet coaches drew forth
Old England’s thunders; and when the costly treasures contained in them
popped out heads, the moment was delirious. Kit Ines came after his head
on a bound. Ben Todds was ostentatiously deliberate: his party said he was

no dancing-master. He stepped out, grave as a barge emerging from a lock,
though alive to the hurrahs of supporters and punctilious in returning the
formal portion of his rival’s too roguish nod. Their look was sharp into the
eyes, just an instant.
Brailstone and Fleetwood jumped to the grass and met, talking and
laughing, precise upon points of business, otherwise cordial:
plenipotentiaries of great powers, whom they have set in motion and bind to
the ceremonial opening steps, according to the rules of civilized warfare.
They had a short colloquy with newspaper reporters;—an absolutely fair,
square, upright fight of Britons was to be chronicled. Captain Abrane, a
tower in the crowd, registered bets whenever he could. Curricles, gigs,
carts, pony-traps, boys on ponies, a swarm on legs, flowed to the central
point and huddled there.
Was either champion born in Kent? An audacious boy proclaimed Kit
Ines a man of Kent. Why, of course he was! and that was why the Earl of
Fleetwood backed our cocky Kitty, and means to land him on the top of his
profession. Ben Todds was shuffled aside; as one of their Londoners,
destitute of county savour.
All very well, but have a spy at Benny Todds. Who looks the square
man? And hear what that big gentleman of the other lord’s party says. A
gentleman of his height and weight has a right to his opinion. He ‘s dead
against Kit Ines: it’s fists, not feet, he says, ‘ll do it to-day; stamina, he says.
Benny has got the stamina.
Todds’ possession of the stamina, and the grand voice of Captain Abrane,
and the Father Christmas, roast-beef-of-Old England face of the umpire
declared to be on the side of Lord Brailstone’s colour blue, darkened the
star of Kit Ines till a characteristic piece of behaviour was espied. He
dashed his cap into the ring and followed it, with the lightest of vaults
across the ropes. There he was, the first in the ring: and that stands for
promise of first blow, first blood, first flat knock-down, and last to cry for
quarter. His pair of seconds were soon after him. Fleetwood mounted his
box.
‘Is it to fight?’ said Carinthia.
‘To see which is the master.’
‘They fight to see?’

‘Generally until one or the other can’t see. You are not obliged to see it;
you can be driven away if you wish.’
‘I will be here, if you are here.’
‘You choose it.’
Fleetwood leaned over to Chumley Potts on the turf. ‘Abrane’s ruining
himself.’
Potts frankly hoped that his friend might be doing so. ‘Todds is jolly well
backed. He’s in prime condition. He’s the favourite of the knowing ones.’
‘You wouldn’t have the odds, if he weren’t.’
‘No; but the odds are like ten per cent.: they conjure the gale, and be
hanged,’ said Potts; he swore at his betting mania, which destroyed the
pleasure of the show he loved.
All in the ring were shaking hands. Shots of a desire to question and
comment sped through Carinthia’s veins and hurt her. She had gathered that
she spoke foolishly to her husband’s ear, so she kept her mouth shut, though
the unanswered of her inquisitive ignorance in the strange land pricked
painfully at her bosom. She heard the girl behind her say: ‘Our colours!’
when the colour scarlet unwound with Lord Brailstone’s blue was tied to
the stake: and her husband nodded; he smiled; he liked to hear the girl.
Potts climbed up, crying: ‘Toilets complete! Now for paws out, and then
at it, my hearties!’
Choice of corners under the leaden low cloud counted for little. A signal
was given; a man outside the ring eyed a watch, raised a hand; the two
umpires were on foot in their places; the pair of opposing seconds hurried
out cheery or bolt-business words to their men; and the champions
advanced to the scratch. Todds first, by the courtesy of Ines, whose
decorous control of his legs at a weighty moment was rightly read by his
party.
Their hands grasped firmly: thereupon becoming fists of a hostile couple
in position. And simply to learn which of us two is the better man! Or in
other words, with four simple fists to compass a patent fact and stand it on
the historic pedestal, with a little red writing underneath: you never can
patent a fact without it. But mark the differences of this kind of contention
from all other—especially the Parliamentary: this is positive, it has a
beginning and an end; and it is good-humoured from beginning to end; trial

of skill, trial of stamina; Nature and Art; Old English; which made us what
we are; and no rancours, no vows of vengeance; the beaten man of the two
bowing to the bit of history he has helped to make.
Kittites had need to be confident in the skill of their lither lad. His facer
looked granite. Fronting that mass, Kit you might—not to lash about for
comparisons—call a bundle of bamboo. Ay, but well knitted, springy, alive
every inch of him; crafty, too, as you will soon bear witness. He knows he
has got his task, and he’s the man to do it.
There was wary sparring, and mirrors watched them.
‘Bigger fellow: but have no fear,’ the earl said over his shoulder to
Madge.
She said in return: ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m praying.’
Kit was now on his toes, all himself, like one who has found the key. He
feinted. Quick as lightning, he landed a bolt on Ben’s jib, just at the toll-bar
of the bridge, between the eyes, and was off, out of reach, elastic; Ben’s
counter fell short by a couple of inches. Cheers for first blow.
The earl clucked to Madge. Her gaze at the ring was a sullen intensity.
Will you believe it?—Ben received a second spanking cracker on the
spectacles-seat: neat indeed; and, poor payment for the compliment, he
managed to dig a drive at the ribs. As much of that game as may suit you,
sturdy Ben! But hear the shout, and behold!
First blood to Kit Ines! That tell-tale nose of old Ben’s has mounted the
Earl of Fleetwood’s colours, and all his party are looking Brailstone-blue.
‘So far!’ said Fleetwood. His grooms took an indication: the hamper was
unfastened; sandwiches were handed. Carinthia held one; she tried to
nibble, in obedience to her husband’s example. Madge refused a bite of
food.
Hearing Carinthia say to her: ‘I hope he will not be beaten, I hope, I
hope,’ she made answer: ‘You are very good, Miss’; and the young lady
flushed.
Gentlemen below were talking up to the earl. A Kentish squire of an
estate neighbouring Esslemont introduced a Welsh squire he had driven to
see the fun, by the name of Mr. Owain Wythan, a neighbour of the earl’s
down in Wales. Refreshments were offered. Carinthia submissively sipped
the sparkling wine, which stings the lips when they are indisposed to it. The

voice of the girl Madge rang on the tightened chords of her breast. Madge
had said she was praying: and to pray was all that could be done by two
women. Her husband could laugh loudly with Mr. Potts and the other
gentlemen and the strangers. He was quite sure the man he supported would
win; he might have means of knowing. Carinthia clung to his bare words,
for the sake of the girl.
A roaring peal went up from the circle of combat. Kit had it this time.
Attacking Ben’s peepers, he was bent on defending his own, and he caught
a bodyblow that sent him hopping back to his pair of seconds, five clear
hops to the rear, like a smashed surge-wave off the rock. He was respectful
for the remainder of the round. But hammering at the system he had
formed, in the very next round he dropped from a tremendous repetition of
the blow, and lay flat as a turbot. The bets against him had simultaneously a
see-saw rise.
‘Bellows, he appears to have none,’ was the comment of Chumley Potts.
‘Now for training, Chummy!’ said Lord Fleetwood.
‘Chummy!’ signifying a crow over Potts, rang out of the hollows of
Captain Abrane on Lord Brailstone’s coach.
Carinthia put a hand behind her to Madge. It was grasped, in gratitude for
sympathy or in feminine politeness. The girl murmured: ‘I’ve seen worse.’
She was not speaking to ears.
Lord Fleetwood sat watch in hand. ‘Up,’ he said; and, as if hearing him,
Kit rose from the ministering second’s knee. He walked stiffly, squared
after the fashion of a man taught caution. Ben made play. They rounded the
ring, giving and taking. Ben rushed, and had an emollient; spouted again
and was corked; again, and received a neat red-waxen stopper. He would
not be denied at Kit’s door, found him at home and hugged him. Kit got
himself to grass, after a spell of heavy fibbing, Ben’s game.
It did him no great harm; it might be taken for an enlivener; he was dead
on his favourite spot the ensuing round, played postman on it. So cleverly,
easily, dancingly did he perform the double knock and the retreat, that
Chumley Potts was moved to forget his wagers and exclaim: ‘Racket-ball,
by Jove!’
‘If he doesn’t let the fellow fib the wind out of him,’ Mallard addressed
his own crab eyeballs.

Lord Fleetwood heard and said coolly: ‘Tightstrung. I kept him fasting
since he earned his breakfast. You don’t wind an empty rascal fit for action.
A sword through the lungs won’t kill when there’s no air in them.’
That was printed in the ‘Few Words before the Encounter’, in the Book
Of MAXIMS FOR MEN. Carinthia, hearing everything her husband
uttered, burned to remind him of the similarity between his opinions and her
father’s.
She was learning, that for some reason, allusions to her father were not
acceptable. She squeezed the hand of Madge, and felt a pressure, like a
scream, telling her the girl’s heart was with the fight beneath them. She
thought it natural for her. She wished she could continue looking as intently.
She looked because her husband looked. The dark hills and clouds
curtaining the run of the stretch of fields relieved her sight.
The clouds went their way; the hills were solid, but like a blue smoke; the
scene here made them very distant and strange. Those two men were still
hitting, not hating one another; only to gratify a number of unintelligible
people and win a success. But the earth and sky seemed to say, What is the
glory? They were insensible to it, as they are not—they are never insensible
to noble grounds of strife. They bless the spot, they light lamps on it; they
put it into books of history, make it holy, if the cause was a noble one or a
good one.
Or supposing both those men loved the girl, who loved one of them!
Then would Carinthia be less reluctantly interested in their blows.
Her infant logic stumbled on for a reason while she repressed the torture
the scene was becoming, as though a reason could be found by her
submissive observation of it. And she was right in believing that a reason
for the scene must or should exist. Only, like other bewildered instinctive
believers, she could not summon the great universe or a life’s experience to
unfold it. Her one consolation was in squeezing the hand of the girl from
time to time.
Not stealthily done, it was not objected to by the husband whose eye was
on all. But the persistence in doing it sank her from the benignity of her
station to the girl’s level: it was conduct much too raw, and grated on the
deed of the man who had given her his name.
Madge pleased him better. She had the right to be excited, and she was
very little demonstrative. She had—well, in justice, the couple of them had,

only she had it more—the tone of the women who can be screwed to
witness a spill of blood, peculiarly catching to hear;—a tone of every string
in them snapped except the silver string. Catching to hear? It is worth a
stretching of them on the rack to hear that low buzz-hum of their inner
breast... By heaven! we have them at their best when they sing that note.
His watch was near an hour of the contest, and Brailstone’s man had
scored first knock-down blow, a particularly clean floorer. Thinking of that,
he was cheered by hearing Chummy Potts, whose opinions he despised, cry
out to Abrane:—
‘Yeast to him!’ For the face of Todds was visibly swelling to the ripest of
plums from Kit’s deliveries.
Down he went. He had the sturdy legs which are no legs to a clean blow.
Odds were offered against him.
‘Oh! pretty play with your right, Kit!’ exclaimed Mallard, as Kit fetched
his man an ugly stroke on the round of the waist behind, and the crowd sent
up the name of the great organs affected: a sickener of a stroke, if dealt
soundly. It meant more than 4 showed. Kit was now for taking liberties.
Light as ever on his pins, he now and then varied his attentions to the yeasty
part, delivering a wakener in unexpected quarters: masterly as the skilled
cook’s carving of a joint with hungry guests for admirers.
‘Eh, Madge?’ the earl said.
She kept her sight fixed, replying: ‘Yes, I think...’ Carinthia joined with
her: ‘I must believe it that he will: but will the other man, poor man,
submit? I entreat him to put away his pride. It is his—oh, poor man!’
Ben was having it hot and fast on a torso physiognomy.
The voices of these alien women thrilled the fray and were a Bardic harp
to Lord Fleetwood.
He dropped a pleasant word on the heads in the curricle.
Mr. Owain Wythan looked up. ‘Worthy of Theocritus. It’s the Boxing
Twin and the Bembrycian giant. The style of each. To the letter!’
‘Kit is assiduously fastening Ben’s blinkers,’ Potts remarked.
He explained to the incomprehensible lady he fancied he had somewhere
seen, that the battle might be known as near the finish by the behaviour on
board Lord Brailstone’s coach.

‘It’s like Foreign Affairs and the Stock Exchange,’ he said to the more
intelligent males. ‘If I want to know exactly how the country stands, I turn
to the Money Article in the papers. That’s a barometrical certainty. No use
inquiring abroad. Look at old Rufus Abrane. I see the state of the fight on
the old fellow’s mug. He hasn’t a bet left in him!’
‘Captain Mountain—Rufus Mus!’ cried Lord Fleetwood, and laughed at
the penetrative portrait Woodseer’s epigram sketched; he had a desire for
the presence of the singular vagabond.
The Rufus Mus in the Captain Mountain exposed his view of the
encounter, by growing stiller, apparently growing smaller, without a squeak,
like the entrapped; and profoundly contemplative, after the style of the
absolutely detached, who foresee the fatal crash, and are calculating, far
ahead of events, the means for meeting their personal losses.
The close of the battle was on the visage of Rufus Abrane fifteen minutes
before that Elgin marble under red paint in the ring sat on the knee of a
succouring seconder, mopped, rubbed, dram-primed, puppy-peeping,
inconsolably comforted, preparatory to the resumption of the great-coat he
had so hopefully cast from his shoulders. Not downcast by any means. Like
an old Roman, the man of the sheer hulk with purple eyemounds found his
legs to do the manful thing, show that there was no bad blood, stand equal
to all forms. Ben Todds, if ever man in Old England, looked the picture you
might label ‘Bellyful,’ it was remarked. Kit Ines had an appearance of
springy readiness to lead off again. So they faced on the opening step of
their march into English History.
Vanquisher and vanquished shook hands, engaged in a parting rally of
good-humoured banter; the beaten man said his handsome word; the best
man capped it with a compliment to him. They drink of different cups to-
day. Both will drink of one cup in the day to come. But the day went too
clearly to crown the light and the tight and the right man of the two, for
moralizing to wag its tail at the end. Oldsters and youngsters agreed to that.
Science had done it: happy the backers of Science! Not one of them alluded
to the philosophical ‘hundred years hence.’ For when England, thanks to a
spirited pair of our young noblemen, has exhibited one of her characteristic
performances consummately, Philosophy is bidden fly; she is a foreign bird.

CHAPTER XVII. RECORDS A SHADOW
CONTEST CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING
Kit Ines cocked an eye at Madge, in the midst of the congratulations and
the paeans pumping his arms. As he had been little mauled, he could present
a face to her, expecting a wreath of smiles for the victor.
What are we to think of the contrarious young woman who, when he lay
beaten, drove him off the field and was all tenderness and devotion? She
bobbed her head, hardly more than a trifle pleased, one might say. Just like
females. They’re riddles, not worth spelling. Then, drunk I’ll get to-night,
my pretty dear! the man muttered, soured by her inopportune staidness, as
an opponent’s bruisings could never have rendered him.
She smiled a lively beam in answer to the earl; ‘Oh yes I ‘m glad. It’s
your doing, my lord.’ Him it was that she thanked, and for the moment
prized most. The female riddle is hard to read, because it is compounded of
sensations, and they rouse and appeal to the similar cockatrices in us, which
either hiss back or coil upon themselves. She admired Kit Ines for his
valour: she hated that ruinous and besotting drink. It flung skeletons of a
married couple on the wall of the future. Nevertheless her love had been all
maternal to him when he lay chastised and disgraced on account of his vice.
Pity had done it. Pity not being stirred, her admiration of the hero declared
victorious, whose fortunes in uncertainty had stopped the beating of her
heart, was eclipsed by gratitude toward his preserver, and a sentiment
eclipsed becomes temporarily coldish, against our wish and our efforts, in a
way to astonish; making her think that she cannot hold two sentiments at a
time; when it is but the fact that she is unable to keep the two equally warm.
Carinthia said to her: ‘He is brave.’
‘Oh yes, he’s brave,’ Madge assented.
Lord Brailstone, flourishing his whip, cried out: ‘At Canleys to-night?’
The earl nodded: ‘I shall be there.’
‘You, too, Chummy?’ came from Abrane.
‘To see you dance,’ Potts rejoined, and mumbled

‘But will he dance! Old Braney’s down on his luck; he’s a specimen of a
fellow emptier and not lighter. And won’t be till supper-time. But, I say,
Fleet, how the deuce?—funny sort of proceeding!—You haven’t introduced
me.’
‘The lady bears my name, Mr. Chumley Potts.’
With a bow to the lady’s profile and a mention of a glimpse at Baden,
Potts ejaculated: ‘It happened this morning?’
‘You allude to the marriage. It happened this morning.’
‘How do I get to Canleys?’
‘I drive you. Another team from the Esslemont stables is waiting at the
Royal.’
‘You stay at Canleys?’
‘No.’
‘No? Oh! Funny, upon my word. Though I don’t know why not—except
that people...’
‘Count your winnings, Chummy.’
Fleetwood remarked to his bride: ‘Our friend has the habit of
soliloquizing in company. I forgot to tell you of an appointment of mine at a
place called Canleys, about twenty miles or more from here. I gave my
word, so I keep it. The landlady at the inn, Mrs. Rundles, motherly kind of
woman; she will be attentive. They don’t cook badly, for an English inn, I
have heard. Madge here will act as your lady’s-maid for the time. You will
find her serviceable; she’s a bruiser’s lass and something above it. Ines
informed me, Madge, you were going to friends of yours at the Wells. You
will stay at the Royal and wait on this lady, who bears my name. You
understand?—A girl I can trust for courage, if the article is in request,’ he
resumed to his bride; and talked generally of the inn and the management of
it, and its favoured position outside the village and contiguous to the river,
upon which it subsisted.
Carinthia had heard. She was more than ever the stunned young woman
she had been since her mounting of the coach, between the village church
and Lekkatts.
She said not a word. Why should she? her object was won. Give her that,
and a woman’s tongue will consent to rest. The dreaded weapon rest, also

when she is kept spinning by the whip. She gives out a pleasant hum, too.
Her complexion must be pronounced dull in repose. A bride on her travels
with an aspect of wet chalk, rather helps to scare mankind from marriage:
which may be good or bad; but she reflects a sicklier hue on the captured
Chessman calling her his own. Let her shine in privacy.
Fleetwood drew up at the Royal Sovereign, whereof the reigning
monarch, in blue uniform on the signboard, curtseyed to his equally windy
subjects; and a small congregation of the aged, and some cripples and
infants, greeted the patron of Old England’s manfullest display, cheering at
news of the fight, brought them by many little runners.
‘Your box has been conveyed to your room,’ he said to his bride.
She bowed. This time she descended the coach by the aid of the ladder.
Ines, victorious in battle, had scant notice from his love. ‘Yes, I ‘m glad,’
and she passed him to follow her newly constituted mistress. His pride was
dashed, all the foam of the first draw on the top of him blown off, as he
figuratively explained the cause of his gloom to the earl. ‘I drink and I gets
a licking—that girl nurses and cossets me. I don’t drink and I whops my
man—she shows me her back. Ain’t it encouragement, my lord?’
‘You ought to know them by this time, you dolt,’ returned his patron, and
complimented him on his bearing in the fight. ‘You shall have your two
hundred, and something will be added. Hold handy here till I mount. I start
in ten minutes.’
Whether to speak a polite adieu to the bride, whose absurd position she
had brought on her own head, was debated for half a minute. He considered
that the wet chalk-quarry of a beauty had at all events the merit of not being
a creature to make scenes. He went up to the sitting-room. If she was not
there, he would leave his excuses.
She was there, and seated; neither crying, nor smiling, nor pointedly
serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either. And so clearly was
he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of expression, that he took
without a spurn at it the picture of a woman half drained of her blood,
veiling the wound. And a young woman, a stranger to suffering: perhaps—
as the creatures do looking for the usual flummery tenderness, what they
call happiness; wondering at the absence of it and the shifty ghost of a
husband she has got by floundering into the bog known as Marriage. She
would have it, and here she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy of
it. Surface emotions were not seen on her. She might be a creature with a
soul. Here and there the thing has been found in women. It is priceless
when found, and she could not be acting. One might swear the creature had
no power to act.
She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no solicitudes,
put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches: spoke to him as if so it happened
—he had necessarily a journey to perform. One could see all the while big
drops falling from the wound within. One could hear it in her voice.
Imagine a crack of the string at the bow’s deep stress. Or imagine the bow
paralyzed at the moment of the deepest sounding. And yet the voice did not
waver. She had now the richness of tone carrying on a music through
silence.
Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought
himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.
More, she had beauty—of its kind. Or splendour or grandeur, was the
term for it. But it bore no name. None of her qualities—if they were
qualities—had a name. She stood with a dignity that the word did not
express. She endured meekly, when there was no meekness. Pain breathed
out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible. She had, under his present
observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking in revolt from
beauty—or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to show the harmony.
He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her insensitive, and
therefore slow of a woman’s understanding. She drew the breath of pain
through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes were tearless, not
alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but look, much like the skies
opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her reddish hair-chestnut, if you
will—let fall a skein over one of the rugged brows, and softened the
ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a great bird were winging across a
shoulder of the mountain ridges. Conceived of the mountains, built in their
image, the face partook alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly,
he remembered, of the splendour when her blood ran warm. No longer the
chalk-quarry face,—its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon
chasing the shadows.
She might be casting her spells again.

‘You remember I told you,’ he said, ‘I have given my word—I don’t
break it—to be at a Ball. Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over.
These clashes occur. The people here—I have spoken of that: people of
good repute for attention to guests. I am uncertain of the time... we have all
to learn to wait. So then, good-bye till we meet.’
He was experiencing a novel nip of torment, of just the degree which
takes a partial appeasement from the inflicting of it, and calls up a loathed
compassion. She might have been in his arms for a step, though she would
not have been the better loved.
He was allowed his escape, bearing with him enough of husband to
execrate another enslaving pledge of his word, that begat a frenzy to wreak
some caresses on the creature’s intolerably haunting image. Of course, he
could not return to her. How would she receive him? There was no salt in
the thought of it; she was too submissive.
However, there would be fun with Chummy Potts on the drive to
Canleys; fun with Rufus Abrane at Mrs. Cowper Quillett’s; and with the
Countess Livia, smothered, struggling, fighting for life with the title of
Dowager. A desire for unbridled fun had hold of any amount of it, to excess
in any direction. And though this cloud as a dry tongue after much wine
craves water, glimpses of his tramp’s walk with a fellow tramp on a
different road, enjoying strangely healthy vagabond sensations and vast
ideas; brought the vagrant philosopher refreshfully to his mind: chiefly for
the reason that while in Woodseer’s company he had hardly suffered a
stroke of pain from the thought of Henrietta. She was now a married
woman, he was a married man by the register. Stronger proof of the
maddest of worlds could not be furnished.
Sane in so mad a world, a man is your flabby citizen among outlaws,
good for plucking. Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot in such a
world. And the fun is not to stop. If it does, we are likely to be got hold of,
and lugged away to the altar—the terminus. That foul disaster has
happened, through our having temporarily yielded to a fit of the dumps and
treated a mad world’s lunatic issue with some seriousness. But fun shall be
had with the aid of His Highness below. The madder the world, the madder
the fun. And the mixing in it of another element, which it has to beguile us
—romance—is not at all bad cookery. Poetic romance is delusion—a tale of

a Corsair; a poet’s brain, a bottle of gin, and a theatrical wardrobe. Comic
romance is about us everywhere, alive for the tapping.
A daughter of the Old Buccaneer should participate in it by right of birth:
she would expect it in order to feel herself perfectly at home. Then, be sure,
she finds an English tongue and prattles away as merrily as she does when
her old scapegrace of a father is the theme. Son-in-law to him! But the path
of wisdom runs in the line of facts, and to have wild fun and romance on
this pantomime path, instead of kicking to break away from it, we follow
things conceived by the genius of the situation, for the delectation of the
fair Countess of Fleetwood and the earl, her delighted husband, quite in the
spirit of the Old Buccaneer, father of the bride.
Carinthia sat beside the fire, seeing nothing in the room or on the road.
Up in her bedchamber, the girl Madge was at her window. She saw Lord
Fleetwood standing alone, laughing, it seemed, at some thought; he threw
up his head. Was it a newly married man leaving his bride and laughing?
The bride was a dear lady, fit for better than to be driven to look on at a
prize-fight—a terrible scene to a lady. She was left solitary: and this her
wedding day? The earl had said it, he had said she bore his name, spoke of
coming from the altar, and the lady had blushed to hear herself called Miss.
The pressure of her hand was warm with Madge: her situation roused the
fervid latent sisterhood in the breast of women.
Before he mounted the coach, Lord Fleetwood talked to Kit Ives. He
pointed at an upper window, seemed to be issuing directions. Kit nodded;
he understood it, whatever it was. You might have said, a pair of burglars.
The girl ran downstairs to bid her lover good-bye and show him she really
rejoiced in his victory. Kit came to her saying: ‘Given my word of honour I
won’t make a beast of myself to-night. Got to watch over you and your
lady.’
Lord Fleetwood started his fresh team, casting no glance at the windows
of the room where his bride was. He and the gentlemen on the coach were
laughing.
His leaving of his young bride to herself this day was classed among the
murky flashes which distinguished the deeds of noblemen. But his laughter
on leaving her stamped it a cruelty; of the kind that plain mortals, who can
be monsters, commit. Madge conceived a pretext for going into the
presence of her mistress, whose attitude was the same as when she first sat

in the chair. The lady smiled and said: ‘He is not hurt much?’ She thought
for them about her.
The girl’s, heart of sympathy thumped, and her hero became a very
minute object. He had spoken previously of the making or not making a
beast of himself; without inflicting a picture of the beast. His words took
shape now, and in consequence a little self-pity began to move. It stirred to
swell the great wave of pity for the lady, that was in her bosom. ‘Oh, he!’
she said, and extinguished the thought of him; and at once her under-lip was
shivering, her eyes filled and poured.
Carinthia rose anxiously. The girl dropped at her feet. ‘You have been so
good to me to-day, my lady! so good to me to-day! I can’t help it—I don’t
often just for this moment; I’ve been excited. Oh, he’s well, he will do; he’s
nothing. You say “poor child!” But I’m not; it’s only. excitement. I do long
to serve you the best I can.’
She stood up in obedience and had the arms of her young mistress
pressing her. Tears also were streaming from Carinthia’s eyes. Heartily she
thanked the girl for the excuse to cry.
They were two women. On the road to Canleys, the coach conveying
men spouted with the lusty anecdote, relieved of the interdict of a tyrannical
sex.

CHAPTER XVIII. DOWN WHITECHAPEL
WAY
Contention begets contention in a land of the pirate races. Gigs were at
high rival speed along the road from the battle-field to London. They were
the electrical wires of the time for an expectant population bursting to have
report of so thundering an event as the encounter of two champion light
weights, nursed and backed by a pair of gallant young noblemen, pick of
the whole row of coronets above. London panted gaping and the gigs flew
with the meat to fill it.
Chumley Potts offered Ambrose Mallard fair odds that the neat little trap
of the chief sporting journal, which had a reputation to maintain, would be
over one or other of the bridges crossing the Thames first. Mallard had been
struck by the neat little trap of an impudent new and lower-priced journal,
which had a reputation to gain. He took the proffered odds, on the cry as of
a cracker splitting. Enormous difficulties in regard to the testimony and the
verifications were discussed; they were overcome. Potts was ready for any
amount of trouble; Mallard the same. There was clearly a race. There would
consequently be a record. Visits to the offices of those papers, perhaps half
a day at the south end of London or on Westminster bridge, examining
witnesses, corner shopmen, watermen, and the like, would or should
satisfactorily establish the disputed point.
Fleetwood had his fun; insomuch that he laughed himself into a
sentiment of humaneness toward the couple of donkeys and forgot his
contempt of them. Their gamblings and their bets increased his number of
dependents; and imbeciles were preferable to dolts or the dry gilt figures of
the circle he had to move in. Matter for some astonishment had been
furnished to the latter this day; and would cause an icy Signor stare and
rather an angry Signora flutter. A characteristic of that upper circle, as he
knew it, is, that the good are dull, the vicious very bad. They had nothing to
please him but manners. Elsewhere this land is a land of no manners. Take
it and make the most of it, then, for its quality of brute honesty: which is
found to flourish best in the British prize-ring.

His irony landed him there. It struck the country a ringing blow. But it
struck an almost effacing one at the life of the young nobleman of
boundless wealth, whose highest renown was the being a patron of
prizefighters. Husband of the daughter of the Old Buccaneer as well!
perchance as a result. That philosopher tramp named her ‘beautiful
Gorgon.’ She has no beauty; and as for Gorgon, the creature has a look of
timid softness in waiting behind her rocky eyes. A barbaric damsel
beginning to nibble at civilization, is nearer the mark; and ought she to be
discouraged?
Fleetwood’s wrath with his position warned him against the dupery of
any such alcove thoughts. For his wrath revenged him, and he feared the
being stripped of it, lest a certain fund of his own softness, that he knew of;
though few did, should pull him to the creature’s feet. She belonged to him
indeed; so he might put her to the trial of whether she had a heart and
personal charm, without the ceremony of wooing—which, in his case,
tempted to the feeling desperately earnest and becoming enslaved. He
speculated upon her eyelids and lips, and her voice, when melting, as
women do in their different ways; here and there with an execrable—
perhaps pardonable—art; one or two divinely. The vision drew him to a
headlong plunge and swim of the amorous mind, occupying a minute,
filling an era. He corrected the feebleness, and at the same time threw a
practical coachman’s glance on peculiarities of the road, requiring some
knowledge of it if traversed backward at a whipping pace on a moonless
night. The drive from Canleys to the Royal Sovereign could be done by
good pacers in an hour and a half, little more—with Ives and the stables
ready, and some astonishment in a certain unseen chamber. Fleetwood
chuckled at a vision of romantic devilry—perfectly legitimate too.
Something, more to inflict than enjoy, was due to him.
He did, not phrase it, that a talk with the fellow Woodseer of his
mountains and his forests, and nature, philosophy, poetry, would have been
particularly healthy for him, almost as good as the good counsel be needed
and solicited none to give him. It swept among his ruminations while he
pricked Potts and Mallard to supply his craving for satanical fare.
Gower Woodseer; the mention of whom is a dejection to the venerable
source of our story, was then in the act of emerging from the Eastward into
the Southward of the line of Canterbury’s pilgrims when they set forth to

worship, on his homeward course, after a walk of two days out of Dover.
He descended London’s borough, having exactly twopence halfpenny for
refreshment; following a term of prudent starvation, at the end of the walk.
It is not a district seductive to the wayfarer’s appetite; as, for example, one
may find the Jew’s fry of fish in oil, inspiriting the Shoreditch region, to be.
Nourishment is afforded, according to the laws of England’s genius in the
arts of refection, at uninviting shops, to the necessitated stomach. A
penn’orth of crumb of bread, assisted on its laborious passage by a
penn’orth of the rinsings of beer, left the natural philosopher a ha’penny for
dessert at the stall of an applewoman, where he withstood an inclination
toward the juicy fruit and chose nuts. They extend a meal, as a grimace
broadens the countenance, illusorily; but they help to cheat an emptiness in
time, where it is nearly as offensive to our sensations as within us; and that
prolonged occupation of the jaws goes a length to persuade us we are
filling. All the better when the substance is indigestible. Tramps of the
philosophical order, who are the practically sagacious, prefer tough grain
for the teeth. Woodseer’s munching of his nuts awakened to fond
imagination the picture of his father’s dinner, seen one day and little envied:
a small slice of cold boiled mutton-flesh in a crescent of white fat, with a
lump of dry bread beside the plate.
Thus he returned to the only home he had, not disheartened, and bearing
scenes that outvied London’s print-shops for polychrome splendour, an
exultation to recall. His condition, moreover, threw his father’s life and
work into colour: the lean Whitechapel house of the minister among the
poor; the joy in the saving of souls, if he could persuade himself that such
good labour advanced: and at the fall of light, the pastime task of
bootmaking—a desireable occupation for a thinker. Thought flies best when
the hands are easily busy. Cobblers have excursive minds. Their occasional
rap at the pegs diversifies the stitchings and is often happily timed to settle
an internal argument. Seek in a village for information concerning the
village or the state of mankind, you will be less disappointed at the
cobbler’s than elsewhere, it has been said.
As Gower had anticipated, with lively feelings of pleasure, Mr. Woodseer
was at the wonted corner of his back room, on the stool between two tallow
candleflames, leather scented strongly, when the wanderer stood before
him, in the image of a ball that has done with circling about a stable point.

‘Back?’ the minister sang out at once, and his wrinkles gleamed:
Their hands grasped.
‘Hungry, sir, rather.’
‘To be sure, you are. One can read it on your boots. Mrs. Jones will
spread you a table. How many miles to-day? Show the soles. They tell a tale
of wear.’
They had worn to resemble the thin-edged layers of still upper cloud
round the peep of coming sky.
‘About forty odd to-day, sir. They’ve done their hundreds of miles and
have now come to dock. I ‘ll ask Mrs. Jones to bring me a plate here.’
Gower went to the housekeeper in the kitchen. His father’s front door
was unfastened by day; she had not set eyes on him yet, and Mr. Woodseer
murmured:
‘Now she’s got the boy. There ‘s clasping and kissing. He’s all wild
Wales to her.’
The plate of meat was brought by Mary Jones with Gower beside her,
and a sniffle of her happiness audible. She would not, although invited to
stay and burning to hear Gower, wait in the room where father and son had
to talk together after a separation, long to love’s counting. She was a
Welshwoman of the pure blood, therefore delicately mannered by nature.
‘Yes, dear lad, tobacco helps you on to the marrow of your story, and I
too will blow the cloud,’ said Mr. Woodseer, when the plate was pushed
aside and the pipe appeared.
So Gower’s recital of his wanderings began, more puffs than speech at
the commencement. He was alternately picturesque and sententious until he
reached Baden; there he became involved, from thinking of a revelation of
beauty in woman.
Mr. Woodseer rapped the leather on his block.
‘A place where they have started public gambling, I am told.’
‘We must look into all the corners of the world to know it, sir, and the
world has to be riddled or it riddles us.’
‘Ah. Did you ever tell a lie, Gower Woodseer?’
‘I played.’

‘You played. The Lord be thanked you have kept your straight tongue!
The Lord can always enter a heart of truth. Sin cannot dwell with it. But
you played for gain, and that was a licenced thieving; and that was a
backsliding; and there will have to be a climbing up. And what that means,
your hold on truth will learn. Touch sin and you accommodate yourself to
its vileness. Ay, you love nature. Nature is not anchorage for vessels like
men. If you loved the Book you would float in harbour. You played. I do
trust you lost.’
‘You have your wish, sir.’
‘To have won their money, Gower! Rather starve.’
‘I did.’
‘Your reason for playing, poor lad?’
‘The reason eludes reason.’
‘Not in you.’
‘Sight of the tables; an itch to try them—one’s self as well; a notion that
the losers were playing wrong. In fine, a bit of a whirl of a medley of
atoms; I can’t explain it further.’
‘Ah. The tippler’s fumes in his head! Spotty business, Gower Woodseer.
“Lead us not into temptation” is worldly wisdom in addition to heavenly.’
After listening to an extended homily, with a general assent and tobacco’s
phlegm, Gower replied to his father’s ‘You starved manfully?’ nodding:
‘From Baden to Nancy. An Alsatian cottager at times helped me along, milk
and bread.’
‘Wholesome for body and for soul.’
‘Entering Nancy I subscribed to the dictum of our first fathers, which
dogs would deliver, if they could speak: that there is no driver like stomach:
and I went head on to the College, saw the Principal: plea of urgency. No
engagement possible, to teach either French or English. But he was
inquisitive touching the urgency. That was my chance. The French are
humane when they are not suspicious of you. They are generous, if you put
a light to their minds. As I was dealing with a scholarly one, I made use of
such ornamental literary skill as I possessed, to prove urgency. He supplied
me with bread, fruit, and wine. In the end he procured me pupils. I lodged
over a baker’s shop. I had food walks, and learnt something of forestry
there—a taking study. When I had saved enough to tramp it home, I said my

adieux to that good friend and tramped away, entering London with about
the same amount in small coin as when I entered Nancy. A manner of
exactly hitting the mark, that some would not find so satisfactory as it is to
me.’
The minister sighed. ‘There comes in the “philosophy,” I suppose. When
will you understand, that this “philosophy” is only the passive of a religious
faith? It seems to suit you gentlemen of the road while you are young. Work
among the Whitechapel poor. It would be a way for discovering the
shallows of your “philosophy” earlier.’
Gower asked him: ‘Going badly here, sir?’
‘Murders, robberies, misusage of women, and misconduct of women!—
Drink, in short: about the same amount. Drink is their death’s river, rolling
them on helpless as corpses, on to—may they find mercy! I and a few stand
—it’s in the tide we stand here, to stop them, pluck them out, make life a bit
sweet to them before the poor bodies go beneath. But come! all’s not dark,
we have our gleams. I speak distressed by one of our girls: a good girl, I
believe; and the wilfullest that ever had command of her legs. A well-
favoured girl! You’ll laugh, she has given her heart to a prize-fighter. Well,
you can say, she might have chosen worse. He drinks, she hates it; she loves
the man and hates his vice. He swears amendment, is hiccupping at night;
fights a match on the morrow, and gets beaten out of formation. No matter:
whenever, wherever, that man goes to his fight, that girl follows to nurse
him after it. He’s her hero. Women will have one, and it’s their lottery. You
read of such things; here we have it alive and walking. I am led to think
they ‘re an honest couple. They come of established families. Her mother
was out of Caermarthen; died under my ministration, saintly, forgiving the
drunkard. You may remember the greengrocer, Tobias Winch? He passed
away in shrieks for one drop. I had to pitch my voice to the top notes to get
hearing for the hymn. He was a reverent man, with the craving by fits. That
should have been a lesson to Madge.’
‘A little girl at the greengrocer’s hard by? She sold me apples; rather
pretty,’ said Gower.
‘A fine grown girl now—Madge Winch; a comely wench she is. It breaks
her sister Sarah’s heart. They both manage the little shop; they make it
prosper in a small way; enough, and what need they more? Then
Christopher Ines has on one of his matches. Madge drives her cart out, if it

‘s near town. She’s off down into Kent to-day by coach, Sarah tells me. A
great nobleman patronizes Christopher; a Lord Fleetwood, a lord of wealth.
And he must be thoughtful for these people: he sent Sarah word that
Christopher should not touch drink. You may remember a butcher Ines in
the street next to us. Christopher was a wild lad, always at “best man” with
every boy he met: went to sea—ran away. He returned a pugilist. The girl
will be nursing him now. I have spoken to her of him; and I trust to her; but
I mourn her attachment to the man who drinks.’
‘The lord’s name?’ said Gower.
‘Lord Fleetwood, Sarah named him. And so it pleases him to spend his
money!’
‘He has other tastes. I know something of him, sir. He promises to be a
patron of Literature as well. His mother was a South Wales woman.’
‘Could he be persuaded to publish a grand edition of the Triads?’ Mr.
Woodseer said at once.
‘No man more likely.’
‘If you see him, suggest it.’
‘Very little chance of my meeting him again. But those Triads! They’re in
our blood. They spring to tie knots in the head. They push me to condense
my thoughts to a tight ball. They were good for primitive times: but they—
or the trick of the mind engendered by them—trip my steps along the lines
of composition. I produce pellets instead of flowing sheets. It’ll come right.
At present I ‘m so bent to pick and perfect, polish my phrase, that I lose my
survey. As a consequence, my vocabulary falters.’
‘Ah,’ Mr. Woodseer breathed and smote. ‘This Literature is to be your
profession for the means of living?’
‘Nothing else. And I’m so low down in the market way of it, that I could
not count on twenty pounds per annum. Fifty would give me standing, an
independent fifty.’
‘To whom are you crying, Gower?’
‘Not to gamble, you may be sure.’
‘You have a home.’
‘Good work of the head wants an easy conscience. I’ve too much of you
in me for a comfortable pensioner.’

‘Or is it not, that you have been living the gentleman out there, with just
a holiday title to it?’
Gower was hit by his father’s thrust. ‘I shall feel myself a pieman’s
chuckpenny as long as I’m unproductive, now I ‘ve come back and have to
own to a home,’ he said.
Tea brought in by Mrs. Mary Jones rather brightened him until he
considered that the enlivenment was due to a purchase by money, of which
he was incapable, and he rejected it, like an honourable man.
Simultaneously, the state of depression threw critic shades on a prized
sentence or two among his recent confections. It was rejected for the best of
reasons and the most discomforting: because it racked our English;
signifying, that he had not yet learnt the right use of his weapons.
He was in this wrestle, under a placid demeanour, for several days,
hearing the shouts of Whitechapel Kit’s victory, and hearing of Sarah
Winch’s anxiety on account of her sister Madge; unaffected by sounds of
joy or grief, in his effort to produce a supple English, with Baden’s
Madonna for sole illumination of his darkness. To her, to the illimitable
gold-mist of perspective and the innumerable images the thought of her
painted for him, he owed the lift which withdrew him from contemplation
of himself in a very disturbing stagnant pool of the wastes; wherein often
will strenuous youth, grown faint, behold a face beneath a scroll inscribed
Impostor. All whose aim was high have spied into that pool, and have seen
the face. His glorious lady would not let it haunt him.
The spell she cast had likewise power to raise him clean out of a
neighbourhood hinting Erebus to the young man with thirst for air,
solitudes, and colour. Scarce imaginable as she was, she reigned here, in the
idea of her, more fixedly than where she had been visible; as it were, by
right of her being celestially removed from the dismal place. He was at the
same time not insensible to his father’s contented ministrations among these
homes of squalor; they pricked the curiosity, which was in the youthful
philosopher a form of admiration. For his father, like all Welshmen, loved
the mountains. Yet here he lived, exhorting, ministering, aiding, supported
up to high good cheer by some, it seemed, superhuman backbone of
uprightness;—his religious faith? Well, if so, the thing might be studied.
But things of the frozen senses, lean and hueless things, were as repellent to
Gower’s imagination as his father’s dishes to an epicure. What he envied

was, the worthy old man’s heart of feeling for others: his feeling at present
for the girl Sarah Winch and her sister Madge, who had not been heard of
since she started for the fight. Mr. Woodseer had written to her relatives at
the Wells, receiving no consolatory answer.
He was relieved at last; and still a little perplexed. Madge had returned,
he informed Gower. She was well, she was well in health; he had her
assurances that she was not excited about herself.
‘She has brought a lady with her, a great lady to lodge with her. She has
brought the Countess of Fleetwood to lodge with her.’
Gower heard those words from his father; and his father repeated them.
To the prostrate worshipper of the Countess of Fleetwood, they were a blow
on the head; madness had set in here, was his first recovering thought, or
else a miracle had come to pass. Or was it a sham Countess of Fleetwood
imposing upon the girl? His father was to go and see the great lady, at the
greengrocer’s shop; at her request, according to Madge. Conjectures shot
their perishing tracks across a darkness that deepened and made shipwreck
of philosophy. Was it the very Countess of Fleetwood penitent for her
dalliance with the gambling passion, in feminine need of pastor’s aid,
having had report from Madge of this good shepherd? His father expressed
a certain surprise; his countenance was mild. He considered it a merely
strange occurrence.
Perhaps, in a crisis, a minister of religion is better armed than a
philosopher. Gower would not own that, but he acknowledged the
evidences, and owned to envy; especially when he accompanied his father
to the greengrocer’s shop, and Mr. Woodseer undisturbedly said:
‘Here is the place.’ The small stuffed shop appeared to grow portentously
cavernous and waveringly illumined.

CHAPTER XIX. THE GIRL MADGE
Customers were at the counter of the shop, and these rational figures,
together with the piles of cabbages, the sacks of potatoes, the pale small
oranges here and there, the dominant smell of red herrings, denied the
lurking of an angelical presence behind them.
Sarah Winch and a boy served at the counter. Sarah led the Mr.
Woodseers into a corner knocked off the shop and called a room. Below the
top bars of a wizened grate was a chilly fire. London’s light came piecemeal
through a smut-streaked window. If the wonderful was to occur, this was
the place to heighten it.
‘My son may be an intruder,’ Mr. Woodseer said. ‘He is acquainted with
a Lord Fleetwood...’
‘Madge will know, sir,’ replied Sarah, and she sent up a shrill cry for
Madge from the foot of the stairs.
The girl ran down swiftly. She entered listening to Sarah, looking at
Gower; to whom, after a bob and pained smile where reverence was owing,
she said, ‘Can you tell me, sir, please, where we can find Lord Fleetwood
now?’
Gower was unable to tell. Madge turned to Mr. Woodseer, saying soon
after: ‘Oh, she won’t mind; she’ll be glad, if he knows Lord Fleetwood. I’ll
fetch her.’
The moments were of the palpitating order for Gower, although his
common sense lectured the wildest of hearts for expecting such a possibility
as the presence of his lofty lady here.
And, of course, common sense proved to be right: the lady was quite
another. But she struck on a sleeping day of his travels. Her face was not
one to be forgotten, and to judge by her tremble of a smile, she remembered
him instantly.
They were soon conversing, each helping to paint the scene of the place
where they had met.
‘Lord Fleetwood has married me,’ she said.

Gower bent his head; all stood silent.
‘May I?’ said Madge to her. ‘It is Lord Fleetwood’s wedded wife, sir. He
drove her from her uncle’s, on her wedding day, the day of a prize-fight,
where I was; he told me to wait on his lady at an inn there, as I ‘ve done and
will. He drove away that evening, and he hasn’t’—the girl’s black eyebrows
worked: ‘I’ve not seen him since. He’s a great nobleman, yes. He left his
lady at the inn, expenses paid. He left her with no money. She stayed on till
her heart was breaking. She has come to London to find him. She had to
walk part of the way. She has only a change of linen we brought in a parcel.
She’s a stranger to England: she knows nobody in London. She had no
place to come to but this poor hole of ours she ‘s so good as let welcome
her. We can’t do better, and it ‘s no use to be ashamed. She ‘s not a lady to
scorn poor people.’
The girl’s voice hummed through Gower.
He said: ‘Lord Fleetwood may not be in London,’ and chafed at himself
for such a quaver.
‘It’s his house we want, sir, he has not been at his house in Kent. We
want his London house.’
‘My dear lady,’ said Mr. Woodseer; ‘it might be as well to communicate
the state of things to your family without delay. My son will call at any
address you name; or if it is a country address, I can write the items, with
my assurances of your safety under my charge, in my house, which I beg
you to make your home. My housekeeper is known to Sarah and Madge for
an excellent Christian woman.’
Carinthia replied: ‘You are kind to me, sir. I am grateful. I have an uncle;
I would not disturb my uncle; he is inventing guns and he wishes peace. It
is my husband I have come to find. He did not leave me in anger.’
She coloured. With a dimple of tenderness at one cheek, looking from
Sarah to Madge, she said: ‘I would not leave my friends; they are sisters to
me.’ Sarah, at these words, caught up her apron. Madge did no more than
breathe deep and fast.
An unoccupied cold parlour in Mr. Woodseer’s house that would be
heated for a guest, urged him to repeat his invitation, but he took the check
from Gower, who suggested the doubt of Mary Jones being so good an

attendant upon Lady Fleetwood as Madge. ‘And Madge has to help in the
shop at times.’
Madge nodded, looked into the eyes of her mistress, which sanctioned
her saying: ‘She will like it best here, she is my lady and I understand her
best. My lady gives no trouble: she is hardy, she’s not like other ladies. I
and Sarah sleep together in the room next. I can hear anything she wants.
She takes us as if she was used to it.’
Sarah had to go to serve a customer. Madge made pretence of pricking
her ears and followed into the shop.
‘Your first visit to London is in ugly weather, Lady Fleetwood,’ said
Gower.
‘It is my first,’ she answered.
How the marriage came about, how the separation, could not be asked
and was not related.
‘Our district is not all London, my dear lady,’ said Mr. Woodseer. ‘Good
hearts are here, as elsewhere, and as many, if one looks behind the dirt. I
have found it since I laboured amongst them, now twenty years. Unwashed
human nature, though it is natural to us to wash, is the most human, we
find.’
Gower questioned the naturalness of human nature’s desire to wash; and
they wrangled good-humouredly, Carinthia’s eyes dwelling on them each in
turn; until Mr. Woodseer, pursuing the theme started by him to interest her,
spoke of consolations derived from his labours here, in exchange for the
loss of his mountains. Her face lightened.
‘You love the mountains?’
‘I am a son of the mountains.’
‘Ah, I love them! Father called me a daughter of the mountains. I was
born in the mountains. I was leaving my mountains on the day, I think it
yesterday, when I met this gentleman who is your son.’
‘A glorious day it was!’ Gower exclaimed.
‘It was a day of great glory for me,’ said Carinthia. ‘Your foot did not
pain you for long?’
‘The length of two pipes. You were with your brother.’

‘With my brother. My brother has married a most beautiful lady. He is
now travelling his happy time—my Chillon!’
There came a radiance on her under-eyelids. There was no weeping.
Struck by the contrast between the two simultaneous honeymoons, and a
vision of the high-spirited mountain girl, seen in this place a young bride
seeking her husband, Gower Woodseer could have performed that
unphilosophical part. He had to shake himself. She seemed really a soaring
bird brought down by the fowler.
Lord Fleetwood’s manner of abandoning her was the mystery.
Gower stood waiting for her initiative, when the minister interposed:
‘There are books, books of our titled people-the Peers, books of the
Peerage. They would supply the address. My son will discover where to
examine them. He will find the address. Most of the great noblemen have a
London house.’
‘My husband has a house in London,’ Carinthia said.
‘I know him, to some degree,’ said Gower.
She remarked: ‘I have heard that you do.’
Her lips were shut, as to any hint at his treatment of her.
Gower went into the shop to speak with Madge. The girl was talking in
the business tone to customers; she finished her commission hurriedly and
joined him on the pavement by the doorstep. Her voice was like the change
for the swing of a door from street to temple.
‘You’ve seen how brave she is, sir. She has things to bear. Never cries,
never frets. Her marriage day—leastways... I can’t, no girl can tell. A great
nobleman, yes. She waited, believing in him; she does. She hasn’t spoken to
me of what she’s had to bear. I don’t know; I guess; I’m sure I’m right—and
him a man! Girls learn to know men, call them gentlemen or sweeps. She
thinks she has only to meet him to persuade him she ‘s fit to be loved by
him. She thinks of love. Would he—our tongues are tied except among
ourselves to a sister. Leaves her by herself, with only me, after—it knocks
me dumb! Many a man commits a murder wouldn’t do that. She could force
him to—no, it isn’t a house she wants, she wants him. He’s her husband,
Mr. Woodseer. You will do what you can to help; I judge by your father. I
and Sarah ‘ll slave for her to be as comfortable—as we—can make her; we
can’t give her what she ‘s used to. I shall count the hours.’

‘You sold me apples when your head was just above the counter,’ said
Gower.
‘Did I?—you won’t lose time, sir?’ she rejoined. ‘Her box is down at the
beastly inn in Kent. Kind people, I dare say; their bill was paid any extent,
they said. And he might do as he liked in it—enter it like a thief, if it
pleased him, and off like one, and they no wiser. She walked to his big
house Esslemont for news of him. And I’m not a snivelling wench either;
but she speaks of him a way to make a girl drink her tears, if they ain’t to be
let fall.’
‘But you had a victory down there,’ Gower hinted congratulations.
‘Ah,’ said she.
‘Christopher Ines is all right now?’
‘I’ve as good as lost my good name for Kit Ines, Mr. Woodseer.’
‘Not with my dad, Madge.’
‘The minister reads us at the heart. Shall we hear the street of his house
in London before night?’
‘I may be late.’
‘I’ll be up, any hour, for a rap at the shutters. I want to take her to the
house early next morning. She won’t mind the distance. She lies in bed, her
eyes shut or open, never sleeping, hears any mouse. It shouldn’t go on, if
we can do a thing to help.’
‘I’m off,’ said Gower, unwontedly vexed at his empty pocket, that could
not offer the means for conveyance to a couple of young women.
The dark-browed girl sent her straight eyes at him. They pushed him to
hasten. On second thoughts, he stopped and hailed her; he was moved to
confirm an impression of this girl’s features.
His mind was directed to the business burning behind them, honestly
enough, as soon as he had them in sight again.
‘I ought to have the address of some of her people, in case,’ he said.
‘She won’t go to her uncle, I ‘m sure of that,’ said Madge. ‘He ‘s a lord
and can’t be worried. It ‘s her husband to find first.’
‘If he’s to be found!—he’s a lord, too. Has she no other relatives or
friends?’

‘She loves her brother. He’s an officer. He’s away on honeymoon. There
‘s an admiral down Hampshire way, a place I’ve been near and seen. I’d not
have you go to any of them, sir, without trying all we can do to find Lord
Fleetwood. It’s Admiral Fakenham she speaks of; she’s fond of him. She’s
not minded to bother any of her friends about herself.’
‘I shall see you to-night,’ said Gower, and set his face Westward,
remembering that his father had named Caermarthen as her mother’s
birthplace.
Just in that tone of hers do Welshwomen talk of their country; of its
history, when at home, of its mountains, when exiled: and in a language like
hers, bare of superlatives to signify an ardour conveyed by the fire of the
breath. Her quick devotion to a lady exciting enthusiasm through admiring
pity for the grace of a much-tried quiet sweetness, was explained; apart
from other reasons, feminine or hidden, which might exist. Only a Welsh
girl would be so quick and all in it, with a voice intimating a heated
cauldron under her mouth. None but a Welsh-blooded girl, risking her good
name to follow and nurse the man she considered a hero, would carry her
head to look virgin eyes as she did. One could swear to them, Gower
thought. Contact with her spirited him out of his mooniness.
He had the Cymric and Celtic respect of character; which puts aside the
person’s environments to face the soul. He was also an impressionable
fellow among his fellows, a philosopher only at his leisure, in his courted
solitudes. Getting away some strides from this girl of the drilling voice,—
the shudder-voice, he phrased it,—the lady for whom she pleaded came
clearer into his view and gradually absorbed him; though it was an
emulation with the girl Madge, of which he was a trifle conscious, that
drove him to do his work of service in the directest manner. He then fancied
the girl had caught something of the tone of her lady: the savage intensity or
sincerity; and he brooded on Carinthia’s position, the mixture of the
astounding and the woful in her misadventure. One could almost laugh at
our human fate, to think of a drop off the radiant mountain heights upon a
Whitechapel greengrocer’s shop, gathering the title of countess midway.
But nothing of the ludicrous touched her; no, and if we bring reason to
scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in the place of the
ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows. Had he not named her,
Carinthia, Saint and Martyr, from a first perusal of her face? And Lord

Fleetwood had read and repeated it. Lord Fleetwood had become the
instrument to martyrize her? That might be; there was a hoard of bad stuff
in his composition besides the precious: and this was a nobleman owning
enormous wealth, who could vitiate himself by disposing of a multitude of
men and women to serve his will, a shifty will. Wealth creates the magician,
and may breed the fiend within him. In the hands of a young man, wealth is
an invitation to devilry. Gower’s idea of the story of Carinthia inclined to
charge Lord Fleetwood with every possible false dealing. He then quashed
the charge, and decided to wait for information.
At the second of the aristocratic Clubs of London’s West, into which he
stepped like an easy member, the hall-porter did not examine his clothing
from German hat to boots, and gave him Lord Fleetwood’s town address.
He could tell Madge at night by the door of the shuttered shop, that Lord
Fleetwood had gone down to Wales.
‘It means her having to wait,’ she said. ‘The minister has been to the
coach-office, to order up her box from that inn. He did it in his name; they
can’t refuse; no money’s owing. She must have a change. Sally has fifteen
pounds locked up in case of need.’
Sally’s capacity and economy fetched the penniless philosopher a slap.
‘You’ve taken to this lady,’ he said.
‘She held my hand, while Kit Ines was at his work; and I was new to her,
and a prize-fighter’s lass, they call me:—upon the top of that nobleman’s
coach, where he made me sit, behind her, to see the fight; and she his
wedded lady that morning. A queer groom. He may keep Kit Ines from
drink, he’s one of you men, and rides over anything in his way. I can’t speak
about it; I could swear it before a judge, from what I know. Those Rundles
at that inn don’t hear anything it suits him to do. All the people down in
those parts are slaves to him. And I thought he was a real St. George before,
—yes, ready I was to kiss the ground his feet crossed. If you could, it’s
Chinningfold near where Admiral Fakenham lives, down Hampshire way.
Her friends ought to hear what’s happened to her. They’ll find her in a queer
place. She might go to the minister’s. I believe she’s happier with us girls.’
Gower pledged his word to start for Chinningfold early as the light next
day. He liked the girl the better, in an amicable fashion, now that his nerves
had got free of the transient spell of her kettle tone—the hardly varied one
note of a heart boiling with sisterly devotion to a misused stranger of her

sex;—and, after the way of his race, imagination sprang up in him, at the
heels of the quieted senses, releasing him from the personal and physical to
grasp the general situation and place the protagonist foremost.
He thought of Carinthia, with full vision of her. Some wrong had been
done, or some violation of the right, to guess from the girl Madge’s molten
words in avoidance of the very words. It implied—though it might be but
one of Love’s shrewder discords—such suspected traitorous dealing of a
man with their sister woman as makes the world of women all woman
toward her. They can be that, and their being so illuminates their hidden
sentiments in relation to the mastering male, whom they uphold.
But our uninformed philosopher was merely picking up scraps of
sheddings outside the dark wood of the mystery they were to him, and
playing imagination upon them. This primary element of his nature soon
enthroned his chosen lady above their tangled obscurities. Beneath her
tranquil beams, with the rapture of the knowledge that her name on earth
was Livia, he threaded East London’s thoroughfares,—on a morning when
day and night were made one by fog, to journey down to Chinningfold, by
coach, in the service of the younger Countess of Fleetwood, whose right to
the title he did not doubt, though it directed surprise movements at his
understanding from time to time.

CHAPTER XX. STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN
OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND
THE MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF
A BORROWED SHIRT
Money of his father’s enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in
fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,
were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature’s face did not
arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank
sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his
father’s hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold. Without it, he would have
been useless in this case of need. The philosopher could starve with
equanimity, and be the stronger. But one had, it seemed here clearly, to put
on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one’s help.
Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were teaching an
exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised were doctorial
giants beside it.
The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham’s
butler refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating
the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib good
English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was
induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.
She sprang up alarmed. After having seen the young lady happily married
and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from the
bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the scenes and
incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable stood forth
appallingly. The messenger, the butler said, was no gentleman. She
inspected Gower and heard him speak. An anomaly had come to the house;
for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a nondescript; he
looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was frank as soon as
the butler was out of hearing. In return for the compliment, she invited him
to her sitting-room. The story of the young countess, whom she had seen

driven away by her husband from the church in a coach and four, as being
now destitute, praying to see her friends, in the Whitechapel of London—
the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts, bankrupts and the abandoned; set
her asking for the first time, who was the man with dreadful countenance
inside the coach? A previously disregarded horror of a man. She went
trembling to the admiral, though his health was delicate, his temper
excitable. It was, she considered, an occasion for braving the doctor’s
interdict.
Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral
Fakenham reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair. He told a
plain tale. Its effect was to straighten the admiral’s back, and enlarge in grey
glass a pair of sea-blue eyes. And, ‘What’s that? Whitechapel?’ the admiral
exclaimed,—at high pitch, far above his understanding. The particulars
were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with, ‘Greengrocer?’ He
stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in his pet girl’s
honeymoon: ‘A prizefight?’
To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.
Gower’s habiliments were those of the ‘queer fish,’ the admiral saw. But the
meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy effort to
remember it. ‘Prize-fight!—Greengrocer! Whitechapel!’ he rang the
changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he cried:
‘Where’s the husband?’
That was the emissary’s question likewise.
‘If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.’
‘Disappeared? Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman! Prize-
fight the first day of her honeymoon? Good Lord! Leaves her at the inn?’
‘She was left.’
‘When was she left?’
‘As soon as the fight was over—as far as I understand.’
The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.
‘Her brother’s travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees—married my
daughter. She has an uncle, a hermit.’ He became pale. ‘I must do it. The
rascal insults us all. Flings her off the day he married her! It ‘s a slap in the
face to all of us. You are acquainted with the lady, sir. Would you call her a
red-haired girl?’

‘Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.’
‘She has the eyes for a man to swear by. I feel the loss of her, I can tell
you. She was wine and no penalty to me. Is she much broken under it?—if I
‘m to credit... I suppose I must. It floors me.’
Admiral Baldwin’s frosty stare returned on him. Gower caught an image
of it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten by
the beams.
‘Nothing breaks her courage,’ he said.
‘To be sure, my poor dear! Who could have guessed when she left my
house she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer’s in
Whitechapel. But the dog’s not mad, though his bite ‘s bad; he ‘s an
eccentric mongrel. He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from
his first breeching. He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will,
mark me. This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don’t start to-
night. Oblige me, half a minute.’
The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood, and
dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word ‘Head.’
Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the
admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an error
of judgement. The butler had argued it with her. She belonged to the list of
persons appointed to cut life’s thread when it strains, their general kindness
being so liable to misdirection.
Gower left the room and went into the garden. He had never seen a death;
and the admiral’s peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of cold
mist and a dripping stillness. How we go, was the question among his
problems:—if we are to go! his youthful frame insistingly added.
The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of
his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to
believe in it. Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously, and a
picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and paper, and a
piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies, held ground with
a pathetic heroism against the inevitable. He got his wits to the front by
walking faster; and then thought of the young countess and the friend she
might be about to lose. She could number her friends on her fingers.
Admiral Fakenham’s exclamations of the name of the place where she now

was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had undergone. Counting her
absent brother, with himself, his father, and the two Whitechapel girls, it
certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of her, that they and those two girls
had become by the twist of circumstances the most serviceable of her
friends.
Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young lord,
—burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the moment it
was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the gamingtables,
—fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be magnificent in
generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty in women
hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower judged by the
light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent observations of him.
Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude philosopher asked it as
helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what did the girl Madge mean by the
drop of her voice to a hum of enforced endurance under injury, like the
furnace behind an iron door? Older men might have understood, as he was
aware; he might have guessed, only he had the habit of scattering
meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.
Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that is
the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the succession
of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not instruct; so the
breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the uninstructive are the
humanly deficient: they remain with us like the tolerated old aristocracy,
which may not govern, and is but socially seductive. The deuteragonist or
secondary person can at times tell us more of them than circumstances at
furious heat will help them to reveal; and the Dame will have him only as
an index-post. Hence her endless ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the
inscrutability of character,—in a plain world, in the midst of such readable
people! To preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it
go), we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more
than shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing
activity of the head.
Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham’s order that the visitor was to stay
at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey with him to

London, doctor or no doctor. The doctor would not hear of it. The admiral
threatened it every night for the morning, every morning for the night; and
Gower had to submit to postponements balefully affecting his linen.
Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a mere show of reluctance
the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat the bed where he lay, a gouty
volcano. Gower’s one shirt was passing through the various complexions,
and had approached the Nubian on its way to negro. His natural candour
checked the downward course. He mentioned to Mrs. Carthew, with
incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that this article of his attire
‘was beginning to resemble London snow.’ She was amused; she promised
him a change more resembling country snow. ‘It will save me from
buttoning so high up,’ he said, as he thanked her. She then remembered the
daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a reflection upon his patient
waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer speech to expose his minor
needs, touched her unused sense of humour on the side where it is tender in
women, from being motherly.
In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the
Countess Livia, who had come down to see the admiral ‘concerning an
absurd but annoying rumour running over London.’ Gower was out for a
walk. He knew of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her
excuses of his clothing.
‘But I know the man,’ said Livia. ‘Lord Fleetwood picked him up
somewhere, and brought him to us. Clever: Why, is he here?’
‘He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.’
‘Sent by whom?’
Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs.
Carthew stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and
naming herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that
the admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor’s next visit; Mr.
Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten minutes,
to divert him with his talk. She protected in this wretched manner the poor
gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of secresy, that Livia
wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to Admiral Baldwin at
once. Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was unheeded.
The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs—to descend them with
the knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood! Henrietta

had spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood’s hatred of the title of Dowager.
But when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear
to excite him? If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire ‘one of
his broadsides,’—as they said in the family, to assert its and that might
exhaust him; and there was peril in that. And who was guilty? Mrs. Carthew
confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided. She made
appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.
Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the
choice of his thoughts as well. He was in the house with his devoutly,
simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work
without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral’s shirt-collar cutting
his ears. The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know whether it
was for rapture or annoyance. As a result he was but histrionically master of
himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of the lady appeared in the
room.
She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
summoned immediately. The remorseful woman flew.
‘Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting
news. Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed. You are Lord Fleetwood’s
friend and will not allow him to be prejudged. He will be in town shortly. I
know him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty
—and to a woman? He is the soul of chivalry. So, in his way, is the admiral.
If he were only more patient! Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood’s version. I
am certain it will satisfy me. The admiral wishes you to step up to him. Be
very quiet; you will be; consent to everything. I was unaware of his
condition: the things I heard were incredible. I hope the doctor will not
delay. Now go. Beg to retire soon.’
Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.
Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
extreme exhaustion. He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: ‘Kill myself? Not half so
quick as they’d do it. I can’t rest for that Whitechapel of yours. Please fetch
pen and paper: it’s a letter.’
The letter began, ‘Dear Lady Arpington.’

The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life’s
ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old friend
in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky brevity. It said
that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl of Fleetwood in the
first week of last month, and was now to be found at a shop No. 45
Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to stir; that he would
be in London within eight-and-forty hours at furthest. He begged Lady
Arpington to send down to the place and have the young countess fetched to
her, and keep her until he came.
Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.
‘Yes, and write “miracles happen when the devil’s abroad”—done it!’ he
said, sinking back. ‘Now seal, you’ll find wax—the ring at my watch-
chain.’
He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of
the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.
Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address
of Lady Arpington’s town house.
‘You have a letter for her?’ said Livia, and held her hand for it in a way
not to be withstood.
‘There’s no superscription,’ he remarked.
‘I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.’
‘I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.’
‘By no means.’ She touched his arm. ‘You are Lord Fleetwood’s friend.’
A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral’s shirt-collar at his
ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in
overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had wits
alive enough, just to perceive a duty.
‘The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.’
‘You are afraid to entrust it to the post?’
‘I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.’
‘You will entrust it to me.’
‘Anything on earth of my own.’
‘The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care.’

‘It is important.’
‘No.’
‘Indeed it is.’
‘Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important that it
should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood’s friend? Lady
Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and me.
Besides, I don’t think she has come to town yet. She generally sees out the
end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go. You, with your
keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle has not his
whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case. Lord
Fleetwood’s friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up to his
enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I drive back to
town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my carriage.’
He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.
They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse
was a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with
him. He spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson
Corby’s reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed
absurdly and seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him
again would not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the
head testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to
conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of
admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.
Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
admiral’s chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.
Admiral Baldwin’s condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages
downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest’s departure until they two
could make the journey together next day. The tortured and blissful young
man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher’s cloak, hung conscience-ridden
in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of the vaults,
offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and mixed with his cup
of amorous worship.

CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH WE HAVE
FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS
MECHANISM OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded his
last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly after
a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one of
Gower’s crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a dying man,
to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him,
contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary bare
staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had been
trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of the lie
was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge, besides
the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no comprehension,
therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to him. For Nature is the Truth.
He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the petition,
with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour; and her
countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the right to a
sense of honour. ‘We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr. Woodseer,’ she
said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it manifested. There was a
look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common grounds between them,
accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the letter, and the letter safe
under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to bestow a touch of her hand on
his coatsleeve in declining to return it. A face languidly and benevolently
querulous was bent on him, when he, so clever a man, resumed his very
silly petition.
She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed to
London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison; enamoured
of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the journey’s end, that he
had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing observed nor a thing
imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a flowing river.

The best help to health for him was a day in his father’s house. We are
perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart of
him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower with
an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too, reproached him
for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a
bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration of a woman
takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to say sheer donkey,
he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say worse in this case; for the
words are, liar and traitor.
Carinthia’s attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect for
the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight of her
lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go the rounds
beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke of the scenes she
witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having only the wish to
assist in ministering. Probably the great wretchedness bubbling over the
place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of Admiral Baldwin’s end; her
bosom sprang up: ‘He was next to father,’ was all she said; and she soon
reverted to this and that house of the lodgings of poverty. She had
descended on the world. There was of course a world outside Whitechapel,
but Whitechapel was hot about her; the nests of misery, the sharp note of
want in the air, tricks of an urchin who had amused her.
As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
‘They have no mornings here’; and the childish remark set her quivering on
her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower’s memory. Scarce
anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she had
come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
brother’s return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of
Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and
its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter need
of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not of so
halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was planted.
Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father similarly at

work: ‘A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of souls, a born
charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she—does and thinks to
the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her on the day of their
nuptials.
She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the
doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?’
Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:
‘Yes, I can imagine it, I’m doing it myself. I shall be doing it till I’ve
written a letter and paid a visit.’
He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the plant
henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because of the
insensibility to beauty. Out of which he passed to the writing of the letter to
Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended immediately to
deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from Admiral Baldwin
Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood. A duty was easily done
by Gower when he had surmounted the task of conceiving his resolution to
do it; and this task, involving an offence to the Lady Livia and intrusion of
his name on a nobleman’s recollection, ranked next in severity to the
chopping off of his fingers by a man suspecting them of the bite of rabies.
An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.
She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat for
her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance with
the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand beside
her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the conclusion that
Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.
‘Really, really, that young man’s freaks appear designed for the express
purpose of heightening our amazement!’ she exclaimed. ‘He won’t easily
get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there’s no knowing.
Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham’s I hold sacred. At least I can see
for myself. You can’t tell me more of the facts? If Lord Fleetwood’s in
town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to this address you give
me. She is a civil person?’
‘Her breeding is perfect,’ said Gower.

‘Perfect breeding, you say?’ Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.
She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-
possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She was of an
eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of an opinion
from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to his clothing.
Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the complexities
inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the humblest who bear
the main elements of it must be. Certain humorous turns in his conversation
won him an amicable smile when he bowed to leave: they were the needed
finish of a favourable impression.
One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer’s brief
words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a
great lady’s plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the
paternal side.
He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
Marriage, turning over documents, here say. He went to Lady Arpington
disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum of
the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way. When very
young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had spiritualized
the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another fit of it, in the
Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his latest dilemma, to
relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had plunged for a short
space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic life—‘the clean soul
for the macerated flesh,’ as that fellow Woodseer said once: and such as his
friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre, moodily talked of getting in his
intervals. He had gone down to a young and novel trial establishment of
English penitents in the forest of a Midland county, and had watched and
envied, and seen the escape from a lifelong bondage to the ‘beautiful
Gorgon,’ under cover of a white flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and
he gave his body into chains of a woman, to redeem his word.
But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered might
have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to chase
and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could, he now

conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil inhabiting
him had at least been easier, ‘up in a corner.’
He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual
feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our
heart’s holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of her, and
alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for compensation the
exorcising of a devil.
Oh, but no mere devil by title!—a very devil. It was alert and frisky,
flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in the
thought it made Carinthia’s intimate charm appear as no better than a thing
to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command the
charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta’s incomparable beauty and
the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the world to
tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman—married
to the brother of the woman calling him husband:—‘It is my husband.’ The
young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not love Henrietta;
but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at the hint of her loving
the man she had married. Did she? It might be tried.
She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a ship that
will not sail a sea.
Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast. Absolutely
to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his tasting Carinthia’s
charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not ‘money of the country’ beside that
golden Henrietta’s.
Yet who can say?—women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,
apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are graceless;
or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of the poetic.
Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How they
loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them to the
hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the round of the

month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock! Fleetwood
had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds in superior
appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature’s products, not
esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she—‘Red Hair and Rugged Brows,’ as
the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with ‘Mountain Face to
Sun’—she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly; graceful in the furnace
of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal his burning sensitiveness to
grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and was rather better than not
withered by it.
On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue, ethereal, a
transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly furnace. And how?—
but that it must have been the naked shining forth of her character, startled
to show itself:—‘It is my husband’:—it must have been love.
The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him in
his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the veritable
passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the yewwood of the
forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very favourite
maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was the
explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she had not
Henrietta’s golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined with such a
love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of love. Would she? For
credulous men she would be golden coin of the currency. She would not
have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the running doe that has taken a
dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter’s heart with pity.
Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor’s patient
entering the chemist’s shop, with a prescription for a drug of healing virtue,
upon which the palate is as little consulted as a robustious lollypop boy in
the household of ceremonial parents, who have rung for the troop of their
orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken the intonation of good words.

CHAPTER XXII. A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT
LADY
The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as
the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens courtliness
to hard attention.
After the names of Admiral Baldwin and ‘the Mr. Woodseer,’ the name of
Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the
name of any other place.
‘Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,’ she said, observing the young
earl. ‘I drove down there yesterday. I saw the lady calling herself Countess
of Fleetwood. By right? She was a Miss Kirby.’
‘She has the right,’ Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge of
musketry.
‘Marriage not contested. You knew of her being in that place?—I can’t
describe it.’
‘Your ladyship will pardon me?’
London’s frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to
penetrate.
He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.
As iron as he looked, he said: ‘She stays there by choice.’
The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.
‘You are not acquainted with the district.’
‘One of my men comes out of it.’
‘The coming out of it!... However, I understand her story, that she
travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without resources. She
waited weeks; I forget how many. She has a description of maid in
attendance on her. She came to London to find her husband. You were at the
mines, we heard. Her one desire is to meet her husband. But, goodness!
Fleetwood, why do you frown? You acknowledge the marriage, she has the
name of the church; she was married out of that old Lord Levellier’s house.

You drove her—I won’t repeat the flighty business. You left her, and she did
her best to follow you. Will the young men of our time not learn that life is
no longer a game when they have a woman for partner in the match!
You don’t complain of her flavour of a foreign manner? She can’t be so
very... Admiral Baldwin’s daughter has married her brother; and he is a
military officer. She has germs of breeding, wants only a little rub of the
world to smooth her. Speak to the point:—do you meet her here? Do you
refuse?’
‘At present? I do.’
‘Something has to be done.’
‘She was bound to stay where I left her.’
‘You are bound to provide for her becomingly.’
‘Provision shall be made, of course.’
‘The story will... unless—and quickly, too.’
I know, I know!’
Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel
at him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree fire
and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.
The black flash flew.
‘It ‘s a thing to mend as well as one can,’ Lady Arpington said. ‘I am not
inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any. Get her away
from that place. She won’t come to me unless it ‘s to meet her husband. Ah,
well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are, if you married
her. We’ll leave the husband undiscussed: with this reserve, that it seems to
me men are now beginning to play the misunderstood.’
‘I hope they know themselves better,’ said Fleetwood; and he begged for
the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who
was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her
dwelling.
Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an assault
on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old Buccaneer; it
compelled to urgent measures. He, as he felt horribly in pencilling her
address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the goad. Her mask

of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft, which could be power;
and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed to hatred.
‘A shop,’ Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: ‘potatoes,
vegetable stuff. Honest people, I am to believe. She is indifferent to her
food, she says. She works, helping one of their ministers—one of their
denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves! Anything to
escape from the Church! She’s likely to become a Methodist. With Lord
Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared
Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time. Well, she
may claim to belong to it now. She would not be persuaded against
visitations to pestiferous hovels. What else is there to do in such a place?
She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in the dark
back room of a small greengrocer’s shop in Whitechapel. There—you have
the word for the Countess of Fleetwood’s present address.’
It drenched him with ridicule.
‘I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,’ he said, and
maintained his rigidity.
The great lady stiffened.
‘I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once. The
admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I warn
you—very well, very well. In your own interests, it will be. If she is left
there another two or three days, the name of the place will stick to her.’
‘She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,’ said Fleetwood. ‘She
will have Esslemont to live in.’
‘There will be more than one to speak as to that. You should know her.’
‘I do not know her.’
‘You married her.’
‘The circumstances are admitted.’
‘If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a
previous interview. She is bent on meeting you.’
‘I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of
the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it. Those are the
terms.’
‘She has a brother living, I remind you.’

‘State the deduction, if you please, my lady.’
‘She is not of ‘a totally inferior family.’
‘She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a
diligent reader of his book of MAXIMS FOR MEN.’
‘Dear me! Then Kirby—Captain Kirby! I remember. That’s her origin, is
it?’ the great lady cried, illumined. ‘My mother used to talk of the Cressett
scandal. Old Lady Arpington, too. At any rate, it ended in their union—the
formalities were properly respected, as soon as they could be.’
‘I am unaware.’
‘I detest such a tone of speaking. Speaking as you do now—married to
the daughter? You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.’
‘Quite, ma’am, let me assure you. Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would
be dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion’s Maxims.
They will learn that I am myself.’
‘You don’t improve as you proceed. I tell you this, you’ll not have me for
a friend. You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal to a
prophecy, you won’t have London with you; and you’ll hear of Lord
Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.’
The preluding box on them reddened him.
‘She will have the offer of Esslemont.’
‘Undertake to persuade her in person.’
‘I have spoken on that head.’
‘Well, I may be mistaken,—I fancied it before I knew of the pair she
springs from: you won’t get her consent to anything without your
consenting to meet her. Surely it’s the manlier way. It might be settled for
to-morrow, here, in this room. She prays to meet you.’
With an indicated gesture of ‘Save me from it,’ Fleetwood bowed.
He left no friend thinking over the riddle of his conduct. She was a loud-
voiced lady, given to strike out phrases. The ‘Whitechapel Countess’ of the
wealthiest nobleman of his day was heard by her on London’s wagging
tongue. She considered also that he ought at least have propitiated her; he
was in the position requiring of him to do something of the kind, and he had
shown instead the dogged pride which calls for a whip. Fool as he must
have been to go and commit himself to marriage with a girl of whom he

knew nothing or little, the assumption of pride belonged to the order of
impudent disguises intolerable to behold and not, in a modern manner,
castigate.
Notwithstanding a dislike of the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood, Lady
Arpington paid Livia an afternoon visit; and added thereby to the stock of
her knowledge and the grounds of her disapprobation.
Down in Whitechapel, it was known to the Winch girls and the
Woodseers that Captain Kirby and his wife had spent the bitterest of hours
in vainly striving to break their immoveable sister’s will to remain there.
At the tea-time of simple people, who make it a meal, Gower’s appetite
for the home-made bread of Mary Jones was checked by the bearer of a
short note from Lord Fleetwood. The half-dozen lines were cordial,
breathing of their walk in the Austrian highlands, and naming a renowned
city hotel for dinner that day, the hour seven, the reply yes or no by
messenger.
‘But we are man to man, so there’s no “No” between us two,’ the note
said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been
philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important
fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when for
men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.
Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him
magnanimous.
‘It may be the solution,’ his father remarked.
Both had the desire; and Gower’s reply was the yes, our brave male
word, supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it
as a form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.

CHAPTER XXIII. IN DAME GOSSIP’S VEIN
Right soon the London pot began to bubble. There was a
marriage.

‘There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not
consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,’ the Old Buccaneer,
writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a series of Maxims
for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.
This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences,
black as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations,
disastrous eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise,
Phaethon’s descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world.
Asserted here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a
serpent of vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible.
Contradiction retired into corners, only to be swept out of them. For this
marriage, abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story
filled the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world’s
cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.
For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last
night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been
enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches riding
after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them! She caught
him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him with the
customary facility of a pecking pullet.
But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so
gobbled?
There is the mystery of it. On his coming of age, that young man gave
sign of his having a city head. He put his guardians deliberately aside, had
his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control: managed a
particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of her lovely cousin;
and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he chose to go and no
other. He had a will.

The world accounted him wildish?
Always from his own offset, to his own ends. Never for another’s
dictation or beguilement. Never for a woman. He was born with a suspicion
of the sex. Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag men in the
foulest ruts of prose.
We are to believe he has been effectively captured?
It is positively a marriage; he admits it.
Where celebrated?
There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment. Three counties claim the
church; two ends of London.
She is not a person of society, lineage?
Nor of beauty. She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking
like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade witch.
The kind is famous. Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of her; she is just
as much at home in life, and springs usually from the mire to enthral our
knightliest. Is it a popular hero? She has him, sooner or later. A planet
Croesus? He falls to her.
That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of a
corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.
Small is her need to be young—especially if it is the man who is very
young. She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for
the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it. Self-respecting women
treat men as their tamed housemates. She blows the horn of the wild old
forest, irresistible to the animal. O the droop of the eyelids, the curve of a
lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle; and the sparkling
agreement, the reserve—the motherly feminine petition that she may retain
her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate or not, by permission of
superior authority!—proof at once of her intelligence and her
appreciativeness. Her infinitesimal spells are seen; yet, despite experience,
the magnetism in their repulsive display is barely apprehended by sedate
observers until the astounding capture is proclaimed. It is visible enough
then:—and O men! O morals! If she can but trick the smallest bit in
stooping, she has the pick of men.
Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.
Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it. Speaks foreign English. He thinks her

more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off the
highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye. Sir
Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the horror of the hands of
that tramp the young lord had her from. They afflict him malariously still.
The man, he says, the man as well was an infatuation, because he talks like
a Dictionary Cheap Jack, and may have had an education and dropped into
vagrancy, owing to indiscretions. Lord Fleetwood ran about in Germany
repeating his remarks. But the man is really an accomplished violinist, we
hear. She dances the tambourine business. A sister of the man, perhaps, if
we must be charitable. They are, some say, a couple of Hungarian gypsies
Lord F. found at a show and brought over to England, and soon had it on his
conscience that he ought to marry her, like the Quixote of honour that he is;
which is equal to saying crazy, as there is no doubt his mother was.
The marriage is no longer disputable; poor Lady Fleetwood, whatever her
faults as a step-mother, does no longer deny the celebration of a marriage;
though she might reasonably discredit any such story if he, on the evening
of the date of the wedding day, was at a Ball, seen by her at the supper-
table; though it is admitted he left the Ball-room at night. But the next day
he certainly was in his place among the Peers and voted against the
Government, and then went down to his estates in Wales, being an excellent
holder of the reins, whether on the coach box or over the cash box.
More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight from
the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special delectation.
She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne. Young Mr.
Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and cheered the victor
for being her husband’s man. And after the shocking exhibition, good-bye;
the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant of a wayside inn, and
may have learnt in her solitude that she would have been wise to feign
disgust; for men to the smallest degree cultivated are unable to pardon a
want of delicacy in a woman who has chosen them, as they are taught to
think by their having chosen her.
So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the
early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be
called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.
Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants
for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the tongues, to

explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and
Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged both innocence
and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when their withering
suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank of Ophelia’s ditch.
Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir Meeson Corby, Lord
Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the blush, by a pursuit of
inquiries conducted with beaks. High-nosed dames will surpass eminent
judges in their temerity on the border-line where Ahem sounds the warning
note to curtained decency. The courtly M. de St. Ombre had to stand
confused. He, however, gave another version of Captain Abrane’s ‘fiddler,’
and precipitated the great ladies into the reflection, that French gentlemen,
since the execrable French Revolution, have lost their proper sense of the
distinctions of Class. Homme d’esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a
scarce other than vagabond, was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a
further example of the French deficiency in humour.
Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is. Lady Cowry has it from Sir
Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has
installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table;
fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving oranges
at a small fruit-shop. With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her there; and
she can’t be got to leave the place unless her husband drives his coach down
to fetch her. That he declines to do; so she remains the Whitechapel
Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a shilling of her
husband’s money, if she ‘s not to bring him to his knees; and goes about at
night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those dreadful streets,
while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments. One signal from the
man he has hired, and he stops drinking—he will stop speaking as soon as
the man’s mouth is open. He is under a complete fascination, attributable,
some say, to passes of the hands, which the man won’t wash lest he should
weaken their influence.
For it cannot be simply his violin playing. They say he was a pupil of a
master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us think
his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious. Lord
Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously. But the
man’s influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and fetch
the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists—if the man wishes
it. Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.

Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man,
formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no
connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at
the most. He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German
philosophy; otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and
dress. It is my lord who has had the chief influence. And the Countess Livia
now backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young
man to be found. She may have her reasons.
As for the Whitechapel Countess... the whole story of the Old Buccaneer
and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo, presage of
rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had
incomprehensibly espoused to discard. Those two had a son and a daughter
born aboard:—in wedlock, we trust. The girl may be as wild a one as the
mother. She has a will as determined as her husband’s. She is offered
Esslemont, the earl’s Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none of
it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to entreat her.
The injury was deep on one side or the other. It may be almost surely
prophesied that the two will never come together. Will either of them deal
the stroke for freedom? And which is the likelier?
Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the
laugh of London. Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang
from his shades at a call of the great world’s appetite for more, and, rushing
upon stationary Fact, supplied the required. Marvel upon marvel was
recounted. The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined,
where all was increasingly funny.
Always the shout for more produced it. She and her band of Whitechapel
boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went. She stood
knocking at his door through a whole night. He dared not lug her before a
magistrate for fear of exposure. Once, riding in the park with a troop of
friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was
levelled, and she cried: ‘There is the English nobleman who marries a girl
and leaves her to go selling cabbages!’
He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:—my
lady the countess was on board! A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the square
kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a sovereign; their

humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name of Die Grafin von
Fleetwood.
The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best. They let pass
incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the nobility and
gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of potatoes by
newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their residences, at so much
per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript, Vive L’aristocratie! Their
informant had seen a card, and the stamp of the Fleetwood dragoncrest was
on it.
He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman. But it
was nothing worse than the parasite that he had. This was the parasite’s
gentle treason. He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug fancy
in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his patron
kindly. Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were personages
during the town’s excitement, besought for having something to say. Petrels
of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they created, and felt
the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh wherever they
alighted. Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an eminent degree,
enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his fellows. They crowded
round the bore who had scattered them.
He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl’s fortunes to the cunning
of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a
gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young
nobleman he was plotting to ruin. Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane’s
latest effort to hit the dirty object’s name, by calling him ‘Fleetwood’s Mr.
Woodlouse.’ And was the rascal a sorcerer? Sir Meeson spoke of him in the
hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his disgust,
corrected him sharply, and said: ‘I begin to be of Russett’s opinion, that his
fault is his honesty.’ The rascal had won or partly won the empress of her
sex! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most fastidious of our younger great
dames, had become the indulgent critic of the tramp’s borrowed plumes!
Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory word on him from her cousin
Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.
Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of
Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long
since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable. Thither one fair

June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her beautiful
cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what were the
pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to conduct
them,—merely a parade of observation once round;—the ladies veiled, the
gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of whom, dressed in
quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my lord’s pugilist,
Christopher Ives.
Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History
is.
The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for
supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous generation.
Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no less than the
famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing Mrs. Kirby-
Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his anecdotes, both
inexhaustible, proved, as he said, ‘that a dried fish is no stale fish, and a
smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often render it more piquant to
the taste than one jumping fresh off the incident.’ His exact meaning in
‘smoky flavour’ we are not to know; but whether that M. de St. Ombre
should witness the effect of English humour upon them, or that the ladies
could permit themselves to laugh, their voices accompanied the gentlemen
in silvery volleys. There had been ‘Mackrell’ at Fleetwood’s dinner-table;
which was then a way of saying that dry throats made no count of the
quantity of champagne imbibed, owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused.
However, there was loud laughter as they strolled, and it was noticed; and
Fleetwood crying out, ‘Mackrell! Mackrell!’ in delighted repudiation of the
wag’s last sally, the cry of ‘Hooray, Mackrell!’ was caught up by the crowd.
They were not the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party
is bad breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.
So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was good-
humoured about it.
Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his
dancing. He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine, sure of
pleasing his patron; and the maid, passing from surprise to merriment,
entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without emulation, for she
likewise had the passion for the dance. Whereby it befell that the pair footed
in a way to gather observant spectators; and if it had not been that the man

from whom the maid was willy-nilly snatched, conceived resentment,
things might have passed comfortably; for Kit’s quips and cuts and high
capers, and the Sunday gravity of the barge face while the legs were at their
impish trickery, double motion to the music, won the crowd to cheer. They
conjectured him to be a British sailor. But the destituted man said, sailor or
no sailor,—bos’en be hanged! he should pay for his whistle.
Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the
worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short loan
of her.—The man had an itch to strike. Choosing rather to be struck first, he
vented nasty remarks. My lord spoke to Kit and moved on. At the moment
of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a waggery of some sort, heard
to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous effect, that the prompt and
immoderate laugh succeeding it might reasonably be taken for a fling of
scorn at himself, by an injured man. They were a party; he therefore
proceeded to make one, appealing to English sentiment and right feeling.
The blameless and repentant maid plucked at his coat to keep him from
dogging the heels of the gentlemen. Fun was promised; consequently the
crowd waxed.
‘My lord,’ had been let fall by Kit Ines. Conjoined to ‘Mackrell,’ it rang
finely, and a trumpeting of ‘Lord Mackrell’ resounded. Lord Mackrell was
asked for ‘more capers and not so much sauce.’ Various fish took part in his
title of nobility. The wag Mackrell continuing to be discreetly silent, and Kit
Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd fell in love with their display
of English humour, disposed to the surly satisfaction of a big street dog that
has been appeased by a smaller one’s total cessation of growls.
All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures of
young women on the scene. They fronted the advance of the procession.
They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell. Not a bit of it—he won’t
listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him. It’s regular
imploring: ‘my lord! my lord!’
O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell! Listen to the
young woman, you Mackrell, or you’ll get Billingsgate! Here’s Mr. Jig-and-
Reel behind here, says she’s done him! By Gosh! What’s up now?
One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young
woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell’s way. The crowd pressed to see.
Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off. They performed an envelopment

of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women. Kit left his
mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two. He rattled
at her. But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him. What did she
say?
Merely to hear, for no other reason,’ a peace-loving crowd of clerks and
tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions,
night-larks of different classes, both sexes, there in that place for simple
entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour, contracted,
so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to the most
orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir Meeson
Corby.
He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.
‘Cock Robin crowing’ provoked a jolly round of barking chaff. The noise in
a dense ring drew Fleetwood’s temper. He gave the word to Kit Ines, and
immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit. The fists worked
right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for sickle or scythe.
And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed her venerable self in
the style and the perfect sufficiency of the strokes. A bruiser delivered them.
No shame to back away before a bruiser. There was rather an admiring envy
of the party claiming the nimble champion on their side, until the very
moderate lot of the Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path
with sticks pointed.
If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to
get through. An aggressive minority, and with Cock Robin squealing for
constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to have a
lesson. The sticks were fallen on; bump came the mass. Kit Ines had to fight
his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish ring, but the
gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to cheer the spirits of the
ladies:—‘All right, my friend, you’re a trifle mistaken, it ‘s my stick, not
yours.’ Therewith the wrestle for the stick.
The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson
Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not a
common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him. Her
stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby’s ebony
stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the sconces, then to
dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl, perhaps a lady, her

cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much as tightening her
lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched for by Rose Mackrell,
who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head, cried: ‘Damn it all, she’s
clever, though!’ She took her station beside Lord Fleetwood.
He had been as cool as she, or almost. Now he was maddened; she
defended him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a
touch; unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow’s
public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule. Have
you seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables that
betrays the mishandling of him by his groom? Something so did Fleetwood
plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul cried out on her
sticking to him like a plaster!
Welcome were the constables. His guineas winked at their chief, as fair
women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers
of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words
of his: ‘Right, my lord,’ smelling my lord in the unerring manner of those
days. My lord’s party were escorted to the gates, not a little jeered; though
they by no means had the worst of the tussle. But the puffing indignation of
Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and torn frill and buttons plucked
from his coat, and his threat of the magistrates, excited the crowd to
derisive yells.
My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.
The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language. They, according to
the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported
themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race. Both
gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done
such gallant service with Sir Meeson’s ebony wand. He was beginning to
fuss vociferously about the loss of the stick—a family stick, goldheaded,
the family crest on it, priceless to the family—when Mrs. Kirby-Levellier
handed it to him inside the coach.
‘But where is she?’ M. de St. Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia’s
touch on his arm in the dark.
At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured,
‘Ah!’
He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a
manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.

They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on
the subject. Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection
with a boiling topic of current scandal,—glaringly illustrative of it,
moreover,—were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been
sworn to secresy. Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an
exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself. So
he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give the last wink
of reason to the wine-cup. Persecuted as he was, nothing remained for him
but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.
That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at Sir
Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its being
the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young nobleman to
exhibit. She pitied him: she had done him some wrong. She read into him,
too, as none else could. Seeing the solitary tortures behind the pleasant
social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask seemed
pathetic. She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her bosom of
tears. Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly mentionable.
Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this! The incorrigible
cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her pictured, at a word
of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world acting audience.
Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house and were alone.
Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which is more eloquent
than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads. My lord, it was thought by
the ladies, had directed his man to convey her safely to her chosen home,
whence she might be expected very soon to be issuing and striking the gong
of London again.

CHAPTER XXIV. A KIDNAPPING AND NO
GREAT HARM
Ladies who have the pride of delicate breeding are not more than rather
violently hurled back on the fortress it is, when one or other of the gross
mishaps of circumstance may subject them to a shock: and this happening
in the presence of gentlemen, they are sustained by the within and the
without to keep a smooth countenance, however severe their affliction. Men
of heroic nerve decline similarly to let explosions shake them, though earth
be shaken. Dragged into the monstrous grotesque of the scene at the
Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal, masking any signs
that they were stripped for a flagellation. Only, the fair cousins were unable
to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if the world was for laughing,
as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the world was an ignoble beast.
They did not discuss Carinthia’s latest craziness at night, hardly alluded to it
while they were in the interjectory state.
Henrietta was Livia’s guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
‘To get money! money!’ her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had fallen.
She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible economy:
—‘think of the smallest trifles!’ so that her Chillon travelled
unaccompanied, they were separated. Her iterations upon money were the
vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers. She,
the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a line
between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself with the
fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the enforced
calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings; and that miserly
Lord Levellier’s indebtedness to Chillon—large sums! and Chillon’s
praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father’s estate; and of how
he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the money he had given
Janey—weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance; but her brother
would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been for weeks,
because of her stubborn resistance to the earl—quite unreasonably, whether
right or wrong—in the foul retreat she had chosen; apparently with a notion

that the horror of it was her vantage ground against him: and though a
single sign of submission would place the richest purse in England at her
disposal. ‘She refuses Esslemont! She insists on his meeting her! No child
could be so witless. Let him be the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she
might show a little tact—for her brother’s sake! She loves her brother? No:
deaf to him, to me, to every consideration except her blind will.’
Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.
It refreshed a phlegmatic lady’s disposition for prophecy. Lovers abruptly
tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but they are,
or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who tugs at them for
subsistence or existence. The condition, if they are much beaten about,
prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness, to be bitterly
misanthropical.
Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta’s
unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law’s misconduct, or the crude
expression of it. She could not guess that Carinthia’s unhappiness in
marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by the
conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to bring
it to pass. Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she blamed
Carinthia in another’s hearing.
After some repose, the cousins treated their horrible misadventure as a
piece of history. Livia was cool; she had not a husband involved in it, as
Henrietta had; and London’s hoarse laugh surely coming on them, spared
her the dread Henrietta suffered, that Chillon would hear; the most sensitive
of men on any matter touching his family.
‘And now a sister added to the list! Will there be names, Livia?’
‘The newspapers!’ Livia’s shoulders rose.
‘We ought to have sworn the gentlemen to silence.’
‘M. de St. Ombre is a tomb until he writes his Memoirs. I hold Sir
Meeson under lock. But a spiced incident, a notorious couple,—an
anecdotal witness to the scene,—could you expect Mr. Rose Mackrell to
contain it? The sacredest of oaths, my dear!’
That relentless force impelling an anecdotist to slaughter families for the
amusement of dinner-tables, was brought home to Henrietta by her prospect
of being a victim; and Livia reminding her of the excessive laughter at Rose

Mackrell’s anecdotes overnight, she bemoaned her having consented to go
to those Gardens in mourning.
‘How could Janey possibly have heard of the project to go?
‘You went to please Russett, he to please you, and that wild-cat to please
herself,’ said Livia. ‘She haunts his door, I suppose, and follows him, like a
running footman. Every step she takes widens the breach. He keeps his
temper, yes, keeps his temper as he keeps his word, and one morning it
breaks loose, and all that’s done has to be undone. It will bemust. That
extravaganza, as she is called, is fatal, dogs him with burlesque—of all
men!’
‘Why not consent to meet her once, Chillon asks.’
‘You are asking Russett to yield an inch on demand, and to a woman.’
‘My husband would yield to a woman what he would refuse to all the
men in Europe and America,’ said Henrietta; and she enjoyed her thrill of
allegiance to her chivalrous lord and courtier.
‘No very extraordinary specimen of a newly married man, who has won
the Beauty of England and America for his wife-at some cost to some
people,’ Livia rejoined.
There came a moisture on the eyelashes of the emotional young woman,
from a touch of compassion for the wealthy man who had wished to call her
wife, and was condemned by her rejection of him to call another woman
wife, to be wifeless in wedding her, despite his wealth.
She thinks he loves her; it is pitiable, but she thinks it—after the
treatment she has had. She begs to see him once.’
‘And subdue him with a fit of weeping,’ Livia was moved to say by sight
of the tear she hated. ‘It would harden Russett—on other eyes, too! Salt-
water drops are like the forced agony scenes in a play: they bring down the
curtain, they don’t win the critics. I heard her “my husband” and saw his
face.’
‘You didn’t hear a whimper with it,’ Henrietta said. ‘She’s a mountain
girl, not your city madam on the boards. Chillon and I had her by each
hand, implored her to leave that impossible Whitechapel, and she trembled,
not a drop was shed by her. I can almost fancy privation and squalor have
no terrors for Janey. She sings to the people down there, nurses them. She
might be occupying Esslemont—our dream of an English home! She is the

destruction of the idea of romantic in connection with the name of marriage.
I talk like a simpleton. Janey upsets us all. My lord was only—a little queer
before he knew her: His Mr. Woodseer may be encouraging her. You tell me
the creature has a salary from him equal to your jointure.’
‘Be civil to the man while it lasts,’ Livia said, attentive to a degradation
of tone—in her cousin, formerly of supreme self-containment.
The beautiful young woman was reminded of her holiday in town. She
brightened, and the little that it was, and the meanness of the satisfaction,
darkened her. Envy of the lucky adventurer Mr. Woodseer, on her husband’s
behalf, grew horridly conscious for being reproved. So she plucked
resolution to enjoy her holiday and forget the contrasts of life-palaces
running profusion, lodgings hammered by duns; the pinch of poverty
distracting every simple look inside or out. There was no end to it; for her
husband’s chivalrous honour forced him to undertake the payment of her
father’s heavy debts. He was right and admirable, it could not be contested;
but the prospect for them was a grinding gloom, an unrelieved drag, as of a
coach at night on an interminable uphill flinty road.
These were her sensations, and she found it diverting to be admired;
admired by many while she knew herself to be absorbed in the possession
of her by one. It bestowed the before and after of her marriage. She felt she
was really, had rapidly become, the young woman of the world, armed with
a husband, to take the flatteries of men for the needed diversion they
brought. None moved her; none could come near to touching the happy
insensibility of a wife who adored her husband, wrote to him daily, thought
of him by the minute. Her former worshippers were numerous at Livia’s
receptions; Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and the rest. Odd to reflect on
—they were the insubstantial but coveted wealth of the woman fallen upon
poverty, ignoble poverty! She could not discard her wealth. She wrote
amusingly of them, and fully, vivacious descriptions, to Chillon; hardly so
much writing to him as entering her heart’s barred citadel, where he resided
at his ease, heard everything that befell about her. If she dwelt on Lord
Fleetwood’s kindness in providing entertainments, her object was to mollify
Chillon’s anger in some degree. She was doing her utmost to gratify him,
‘for the purpose of paving a way to plead Janey’s case.’ She was almost
persuading herself she was enjoying the remarks of his friend, confidant,
secretary, or what not, Livia’s worshipper, Mr. Woodseer, ‘who does as he

wills with my lord; directs his charities, his pleasures, his opinions, all
because he is believed to have wonderful ideas and be wonderfully honest.’
Henrietta wrote: ‘Situation unchanged. Janey still At that place’; and before
the letter was posted, she and Livia had heard from Gower Woodseer of the
reported disappearance of the Countess of Fleetwood and her maid.
Gower’s father had walked up from Whitechapel, bearing news of it to the
earl, she said.
‘And the earl is much disturbed?’ was Livia’s inquiry.
‘He has driven down with my father,’ Gower said carelessly,
ambiguously in the sound.
Troubled enough to desire the show of a corresponding trouble, Henrietta
read at their faces.
‘May it not be—down there—a real danger?’
The drama, he could inform her, was only too naked down there for
disappearances to be common.
‘Will it be published that she is missing?’
‘She has her maid with her, a stout-hearted girl. Both have courage. I
don’t think we need take measures just yet.’
‘Not before it is public property?’
Henrietta could have bitten her tongue for laying her open to the censure
implied in his muteness. Janey perverted her.
Women were an illegible manuscript, and ladies a closed book of the
binding, to this raw philosopher, or he would not so coldly have judged the
young wife, anxious on her husband’s account, that they might escape
another scorching. He carried away his impression.
Livia listened to a remark on his want of manners.
‘Russett puts it to the credit of his honesty,’ she said. ‘Honesty is
everything with us at present. The man has made his honesty an excellent
speculation. He puts a piece on zero and the bank hands him a sackful. We
may think we have won him to serve us, up comes his honesty. That’s how
we have Lady Arpington mixed in it—too long a tale. But be guided by me;
condescend a little.’
‘My dear! my whole mind is upon that unhappy girl. It would break
Chillon’s heart.’

Livia pished. ‘There are letters we read before we crack the seal. She is
out of that ditch, and it suits Russett that she should be. He’s not often so
patient. A woman foot to foot against his will—I see him throwing high
stakes. Tyrants are brutal; and really she provokes him enough. You needn’t
be alarmed about the treatment she ‘ll meet. He won’t let her beat him, be
sure.’
Neither Livia nor Gower wondered at the clearing of the mystery, before
it went to swell the scandal. A young nobleman of ready power, quick
temper, few scruples, and a taxed forbearance, was not likely to stand
thwarted and goaded-and by a woman. Lord Fleetwood acted his part,
inscrutable as the blank of a locked door. He could not conceal that he was
behind the door.

CHAPTER XXV. THE PHILOSOPHER MAN
OF ACTION
Gower’s bedroom window looked over the shrubs of the square, and as
his form of revolt from a city life was to be up and out with the sparrows in
the early flutter of morning, for a stretch of the legs where grass was green
and trees were not enclosed, he rarely saw a figure below when he stood
dressing. Now there appeared a petticoated one stationary against the rails,
with her face lifted. She fronted the house, and while he speculated
abstractedly, recognition rushed on him. He was down and across the
roadway at leaps.
‘It’s Madge here!’
The girl panted for her voice.
‘Mr. Woodseer, I’m glad; I thought I should have to wait hours. She’s
safe.’
‘Where?’
‘Will you come, sir?’
‘Step ahead.’
Madge set forth to north of the square.
He judged of the well-favoured girl that she could steer her way through
cities: mouth and brows were a warning to challenger pirate craft of a vessel
carrying guns; and the red lips kept their firm line when they yielded to the
pressure for speech.
‘It’s a distance. She’s quite safe, no harm; she’s a prisoner; she’s well fed;
she’s not ill treated.’
‘You ‘re out?’
‘That’s as it happens. I’m lucky in seeing you early. He don’t mean to
hurt her; he won’t be beaten. All she asks is ten minutes with him. If he
would!—he won’t. She didn’t mean to do him offence t’ other night in that
place—you’ve heard. Kit Ines told me he was on duty there—going. She
couldn’t help speaking when she had eyes on her husband. She kisses the

ground of his footsoles, you may say, let him be ever so unkind. She and I
were crossing to the corner of Roper Street a rainy night, on way to Mile
End, away down to one of your father’s families, Mother Davis and her sick
daughter and the little ones, and close under the public-house Goat and
Beard we were seized on and hustled into a covered carriage that was there,
and they drove sharp. She ‘s not one to scream. We weren’t frightened. We
both made the same guess. They drove us to the house she ‘s locked in, and
me, too, up till three o’clock this morning.’
‘You’ve seen nobody, Madge?’
‘He ‘s fixed she ‘s to leave London, Mr. Woodseer. I’ve seen Kit Ines.
And she ‘s to have one of the big houses to her use. I guessed Kit Ines was
his broom. He defends it because he has his money to make—and be a dirty
broom for a fortune! But any woman’s sure of decent handling with Kit Ines
—not to speak of lady. He and a mate guard the house. An old woman
cooks.’
‘He guards the house, and he gave you a pass?’
‘Not he. His pride’s his obedience to his “paytron”—he calls his master,
and won’t hear that name abused. We are on the first floor; all the lower
doors are locked day and night. New Street, not much neighbours; she
wouldn’t cry out of the window. She ‘s to be let free if she’ll leave London.’
‘You jumped it!’
‘If I’d broke a leg, Mr. Kit Ines would have had to go to his drams. It
wasn’t very high; and a flower-bed underneath. My mistress wanted to be
the one. She has to be careful. She taught me how to jump down not to hurt.
She makes you feel you can do anything. I had a bother to get her to let me
and be quiet herself. She’s not one to put it upon others, you’ll learn. When
I was down I felt like a stick in the ground and sat till I had my feet, she at
the window waiting; and I started for you. She kissed her hand. I was to
come to you, and then your father, you nowhere seen. I wasn’t spoken to. I
know empty London.’
‘Kit Ines was left sleeping in the house?’
‘Snoring, I dare say: He don’t drink on duty.’
‘He must be kept on duty.’
‘Drink or that kind of duty, it’s a poor choice.’
‘You’ll take him in charge, Madge.’

‘I’ve got a mistress to look after.’
‘You’ve warmed to her.’
‘That’s not new; Mr. Woodseer. I do trust you, and you his friend. But
you are the minister’s son, and any man not a great nobleman must have
some heart for her. You’ll learn. He kills her so because she’s fond of him—
loves him, however he strikes. No, not like a dog, as men say of us. She’d
die for him this night, need were. Live with her, you won’t find many men
match her for brave; and she’s good. My Sally calls her a Bible saint. I
could tell you stories of her goodness, short the time though she’s been
down our way. And better there for her than at that inn he left her at to pine
and watch the Royal Sovereign come swing come smirk in sailor blue and
star to meet the rain—would make anybody disrespect Royalty or else go
mad! He’s a great nobleman, he can’t buy what she’s ready to give; and if
he thinks he breaks her will now, it’s because she thinks she’s obeying a
higher than him, or no lord alive and Kit Ines to back him ‘d hold her.
Women want a priest to speak to men certain times. I wish I dared; we have
to bite our tongues. He’s master now, but, as I believe God’s above, if he
plays her false, he’s the one to be brought to shame. I talk.’
‘Talk on, Madge,’ said Gower, to whom the girl’s short-syllabled run of
the lips was a mountain rill compared with London park waters.
‘You won’t let him hurry her off where she’ll eat her heart for never
seeing him again? She prays to be near him, if she’s not to see him.’
‘She speaks in that way?’
‘I get it by bits. I’m with her so, it’s as good as if I was inside her. She
can’t obey when it goes the wrong way of her heart to him.’
‘Love and wisdom won’t pull together, and they part company for good
at the church door,’ said Gower. ‘This matrimony’s a bad business.’
Madge hummed a moan of assent. ‘And my poor Sally ‘ll have to marry.
I can’t leave my mistress while she wants me, and Sally can’t be alone. It
seems we take a step and harm’s done, though it’s the right step we take.’
‘It seems to me you’ve engaged yourself to follow Sally’s lead, Madge.’
‘Girls’ minds turn corners, Mr. Woodseer.’
He passed the remark. What it was that girls’ minds occasionally or
habitually did, or whether they had minds to turn, or whether they took their
whims for minds, were untroubled questions with a young man studying

abstract and adoring surface nature too exclusively to be aware of the
manifestation of her spirit in the flesh, as it is not revealed so much by men.
However, she had a voice and a face that led him to be thoughtful over her
devotedness to her mistress, after nearly losing her character for the prize-
fighter, and he had to thank her for invigorating him. His disposition was to
muse and fall slack, helpless to a friend. Here walked a creature exactly the
contrary. He listened to the steps of the dissimilar pair on the detonating
pavement, and eyed a church clock shining to the sun.
She was sure of the direction: ‘Out Camden way, where the murder was.’
They walked at a brisk pace, conversing or not.
‘Tired? You must be,’ he said.
‘Not when I’m hot to do a thing.’
‘There’s the word of the thoroughbred!’
‘You don’t tire, sir,’ said she. ‘Sally and I see you stalking out for the
open country in the still of the morning. She thinks you look pale for want
of food, and ought to have some one put a biscuit into your pocket
overnight.’
‘Who’d have guessed I was under motherly observation!’
‘You shouldn’t go so long empty, if you listen to trainers.’
‘Capital doctors, no doubt. But I get a fine appetite.’
‘You may grind the edge too sharp.’
He was about to be astonished, and reflected that she had grounds for her
sagacity. His next thought plunged him into contempt for Kit Ines, on
account of the fellow’s lapses to sottishness. But there would be no
contempt of Kit Ines in a tussle with him. Nor could one funk the tussle and
play cur, if Kit’s engaged young woman were looking on. We get to our
courage or the show of it by queer screws.
Contemplative over these matters, the philosopher transformed to man of
action heard Madge say she read directions in London by churches, and
presently exclaiming disdainfully, and yet relieved, ‘Spooner Villas,’ she
turned down a row of small detached houses facing a brickfield, that had
just contributed to the erection of them, and threatened the big city with
further defacements.

Madge pointed to the marks of her jump, deep in flower-bed earth under
an open window.
Gower measured the height with sensational shanks.
She smote at the door. Carinthia nodded from her window. Close upon
that, Kit Ines came bounding to the parlour window; he spied and stared.
Gower was known to him as the earl’s paymaster; so he went to the passage
and flung the door open, blocking the way.
‘Any commands, your honour?’
‘You bring the countess to my lord immediately,’ said Gower.
Kit swallowed his mouthful of surprise in a second look at Madge and
the ploughed garden-bed beneath the chamber window.
‘Are the orders written, sir?’
‘To me?—for me to deliver to you?—for you to do my lord’s bidding?
Where’s your head?’
Kit’s finger-nails travelled up to it. Madge pushed past him. She and her
mistress, and Kit’s mate, and the old woman receiving the word for a cup of
tea, were soon in the passage. Kit’s mate had a ready obedience for his pay,
nothing else,—no counsel at all, not a suggestion to a head knocked to a
pudding by Madge’s jump and my lord’s paymaster here upon the scene.
‘My lady was to go down Wales way, sir.’
‘That may be ordered after.’
‘I ‘m to take my lady to my lord?’ and, ‘Does it mean my lady wants a
fly?’ Kit asked, and harked back on whether Madge had seen my lord.
‘At five in the morning?—don’t sham donkey with me,’ said Gower.
The business looked inclined to be leaky, but which the way for proving
himself other than a donkey puzzled Kit: so much so, that a shove made
him partly grateful. Madge’s clever countermove had stunned his
judgement. He was besides acting subordinate to his patron’s paymaster;
and by the luck of it, no voice of woman interposed. The countess and her
maid stood by like a disinterested couple. Why be suspicious, if he was to
keep the countess, in sight? She was a nice lady, and he preferred her good
opinion. She was brave, and he did her homage. It might be, my lord had
got himself round to the idea of thanking her for saving his nob that night,
and his way was to send and have her up, to tell her he forgave her, after the

style of lords. Gower pricked into him by saying aside: ‘Mad, I suppose, in
case of a noise?’ And he could not answer quite manfully, lost his eyes and
coloured. Neighbours might have required an explanation of shrieks, he
confessed. Men have sometimes to do nasty work for their patrons.
They were afoot, walking at Carinthia’s pace before half-past seven. She
would not hear of any conveyance. She was cheerful, and, as it was pitiful
to see, enjoyed her walk. Hearing of her brother’s departure for the Austrian
capital, she sparkled. Her snatches of speech were short flights out of the
meditation possessing her. Gower noticed her easier English, that came
home to the perpetual student he was. She made use of some of his father’s
words, and had assimilated them mentally besides appropriating them: the
verbalizing of ‘purpose,’ then peculiar to his father, for example. She said,
in reply to a hint from him: ‘If my lord will allow me an interview, I
purpose to be obedient.’ No one could imagine of her that she spoke
broken-spiritedly. Her obedience was to a higher than a mortal lord: and
Gower was touched to the quick through the use of the word.
Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think
her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the world;
but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion, and she had
at least natural grace, a deerlike step. Although her picturesqueness did not
swarm on him with images illuminating night, subduing day, like the
Countess Livia’s, it was marked, it could tower and intermittently eclipse;
and it was of the uplifting and healing kind by comparison, not a delicious
balefulness.
The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences,
were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.
‘My lord lives in a square,’ she said.
‘We shall soon be there now,’ he encouraged her, doubtful though the
issue appeared.
‘It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the
Venediger,—all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.’
‘If we could fly!’
‘We love them.’
‘Why, then we beat a wing—yes.’

‘For I have them when I want them to sight. It is the feet are so desirous.
I feel them so this morning, after prisonership. I could not have been driven
to my lord.’
‘I know the feeling,’ said Gower; ‘any movement of us not our own
impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind. And by the way, my dear
lady, I spoke of the earl’s commands to this man behind us walking with
your Madge. My father would accuse me of Jesuitry. Ines mentioned
commands, and I took advantage of it.’
‘I feared,’ said Carinthia. ‘I go for my chance.’
Gower had a thought of the smaller creature, greater by position, to
whom she was going for her chance. He alluded to his experience of the
earl’s kindness in relation to himself, from a belief in his ‘honesty’; dotted
outlines of her husband’s complex character, or unmixed and violently
opposing elements.
She remarked: ‘I will try and learn.’
The name of the street of beautiful shops woke a happy smile on her
mouth. ‘Father talked of it; my mother, too. He has it written down in his
Book of Maxims. When I was a girl, I dreamed of one day walking up Bond
Street.’
They stepped from the pavement and crossed the roadway for a side-
street leading to the square. With the swift variation of her aspect at times,
her tone changed.
‘We are near. My lord will not be troubled by me. He has only to meet
me. There has been misunderstanding. I have vexed him; I could not help it.
I will go where he pleases after I have heard him give orders. He thinks me
a frightful woman. I am peaceful.’
Gower muttered her word ‘misunderstanding.’ They were at the earl’s
house door. One tap at it, and the two applicants for admission would
probably be shot as far away from Lord Fleetwood as when they were on
the Styrian heights last autumn. He delivered the tap, amused by the idea. It
was like a summons to a genie of doubtful service.
My lord was out riding in the park.
Only the footman appeared at that early hour, and his countenance was
blank whitewash as he stood rigid against the wall for the lady to pass.
Madge followed into the morning room; Ines remained in the hall, where he

could have the opening speech with his patron, and where he soon had
communication with the butler.
This official entered presently to Gower, presenting a loaded forehead. A
note addressed to Mrs. Kirby-Levellier at the Countess Livia’s house hard
by was handed to him for instant despatch. He signified a deferential wish
to speak.
‘You can speak in the presence of the Countess of Fleetwood, Mr.
Waytes,’ Gower said.
Waytes checked a bend of his shoulders. He had not a word, and he
turned to send the note. He was compelled to think that he saw a well-
grown young woman in the Whitechapel Countess.
Gower’s note reached Henrietta on her descent to the breakfast-table. She
was, alone, and thrown into a torture of perplexity: for she wanted advice as
to the advice to be given to Janey, and Livia was an utterly unprofitable
person to consult in the case. She thought of Lady Arpington, not many
doors distant. Drinking one hasty cup of tea, she sent for her bonnet, and
hastened away to the great lady, whom she found rising from breakfast with
the marquis.
Lady Arpington read Gower’s note. She unburdened herself: ‘Oh! So it ‘s
no longer a bachelor’s household!’
Henrietta heaved the biggest of sighs. ‘I fear the poor dear may have
made matters worse.’
To which Lady Arpington said: ‘Worse or better, my child!’ and
shrugged; for the present situation strained to snapping.
She proposed to go forthwith, and give what support she could to the
Countess of Fleetwood.
They descended the steps of the house to the garden and the Green Park’s
gravel walk up to Piccadilly. There they had view of Lord Fleetwood on
horseback leisurely turning out of the main way’s tide. They saw him alight
at the mews. As they entered the square, he was met some doors from the
south corner by his good or evil genius, whose influence with him came
next after the marriage in the amazement it caused, and was perhaps to be
explained by it; for the wealthiest of young noblemen bestowing his name
on an unknown girl, would be the one to make an absurd adventurer his

intimate. Lord Fleetwood bent a listening head while Mr. Gower Woodseer,
apparently a good genius for the moment, spoke at his ear.
How do we understand laughter at such a communication as he must be
hearing from the man? Signs of a sharp laugh indicated either his cruel
levity or that his presumptuous favourite trifled—and the man’s talk could
be droll, Lady Arpington knew: it had, she recollected angrily, diverted her,
and softened her to tolerate the intruder into regions from which her class
and her periods excluded the lowly born, except at the dinner-tables of stale
politics and tattered scandal. Nevertheless, Lord Fleetwood mounted the
steps to his house door, still listening. His ‘Asmodeus,’ on the tongue of the
world, might be doing the part of Mentor really. The house door stood open.
Fleetwood said something to Gower; he swung round, beheld the ladies
and advanced to them, saluting. ‘My dear Lady Arpington! quite so, you
arrive opportunely. When the enemy occupies the citadel, it’s proper to
surrender. Say, I beg, she can have the house, if she prefers it. I will fall
back on Esslemont. Arrangements for her convenience will be made. I
thank you, by anticipation.’
His bow included Henrietta loosely. Lady Arpington had exclaimed:
‘Enemy, Fleetwood?’ and Gower, in his ignorance of the smoothness of
aristocratic manners, expected a remonstrance; but Fleetwood was allowed
to go on, with his air of steely geniality and a decision, that his friend
imagined he could have broken down like an old partition board under the
kick of a sarcasm sharpening an appeal.
‘Lord Fleetwood was on the point of going in,’ he assured the great lady.
‘Lord Fleetwood may regret his change of mind,’ said she. ‘The Countess
of Fleetwood will have my advice to keep her footing in this house.’
She and Henrietta sat alone with Carinthia for an hour. Coming forth,
Lady Arpington ejaculated to herself: ‘Villany somewhere!—You will do
well, Henrietta, to take up your quarters with her a day or two. She can hold
her position a month. Longer is past possibility.’
A shudder of the repulsion from men crept over the younger lady. But she
was a warrior’s daughter, and observed: ‘My husband, her brother, will be
back before the month ends.’
‘No need for hostilities to lighten our darkness,’ Lady Arpington rejoined.
‘You know her? trust her?’

‘One cannot doubt her face. She is my husband’s sister. Yes, I do trust
her. I nail my flag to her cause.’
The flag was crimson, as it appeared on her cheeks; and that intimated a
further tale, though not of so dramatic an import as the cognizant short
survey of Carinthia had been.
These young women, with the new complications obtruded by them,
irritated a benevolent great governing lady, who had married off her
daughters and embraced her grandchildren, comfortably finishing that
chapter; and beheld now the apparition of the sex’s ancient tripping foe,
when circumstances in themselves were quite enough to contend against on
their behalf. It seemed to say, that nature’s most burdened weaker must
always be beaten. Despite Henrietta’s advocacy and Carinthia’s clear face,
it raised a spectral form of a suspicion, the more effective by reason of the
much required justification it fetched from the shades to plead apologies for
Lord Fleetwood’s erratic, if not mad, and in any case ugly, conduct. What
otherwise could be his excuse? Such was his need of one, that the wife he
crushed had to be proposed for sacrifice, in the mind of a lady tending
strongly to side with her and condemn her husband.
Lady Arpington had counselled Carinthia to stay where she was, the
Fates having brought her there. Henrietta was too generous to hesitate in her
choice between her husband’s sister and the earl. She removed from Livia’s
house to Lord Fleetwood’s. My lord was at Esslemont two days; then
established his quarters at Scrope’s hotel, five minutes’ walk from the
wedded lady to whom the right to bear his title was granted, an interview
with him refused. Such a squaring for the battle of spouses had never—or
not in mighty London—been seen since that old fight began.

CHAPTER XXVI. AFTER SOME FENCING
THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
Dame Gossip at this present pass bursts to give us a review of the social
world siding for the earl or for his countess; and her parrot cry of ‘John
Rose Mackrell!’ with her head’s loose shake over the smack of her lap, to
convey the contemporaneous tipsy relish of the rich good things he said on
the subject of the contest, indicates the kind of intervention it would be.
To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder,
that he was the countess’s voluble advocate at a period when her friends
were shy to speak of her. After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in
burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell’s
enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in. He tracked her to her
parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some
Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny: and, a turn of great good luck
helping him to a copy of the book of the MAXIMS FOR MEN, he would
quote certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby’s
personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to prove
that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations. They had the
repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and truncehons that have
tasted brains. They wove no mild sort of halo for the head of a shillelagh-
flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from the writer and doer.
People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a
suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her
lord’s town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope’s
hotel. He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might have
heightened a rageing scandal. The nobleman forbore. A woman’s blow
gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it may: we
win the world’s after-thoughts. Rose Mackrell sketched the earl;—always
alert, smart, quick to meet a combination and protect a dignity never
obtruded, and in spite of himself the laugh of the town. His humour
flickered wildly round the ridiculous position of a prominent young

nobleman, whose bearing and character were foreign to a position of
ridicule.
Nevertheless, the earl’s figure continuing to be classic sculpture, it allied
him with the aristocracy of martyrs, that burn and do not wince. He
propitiated none, and as he could not but suffer shrewdly, he gained esteem
enough to shine through the woman’s pitiless drenching of him. During his
term at Scrope’s hotel, the carousals there were quite old-century and matter
of discourse. He had proved his return to sound sense in the dismissal of
‘the fiddler,’ notoriously the woman’s lieutenant, or more; and nightly the
revelry closed at the great gaming tables of St. James’s Street, while
Whitechapel held the coroneted square, well on her way to the Law courts,
as Abrane and Potts reported; and positively so, ‘clear case.’ That was the
coming development and finale of the Marriage. London waited for it.
A rich man’s easy smile over losses at play, merely taught his emulous
troop to feel themselves poor devils in the pocket. But Fleetwood’s
contempt of Sleep was a marvel, superhuman, and accused them of an
inferior vigour, hard for young men to admit by the example. He never went
to bed. Issuing from Fortune’s hall-doors in the bright, lively, summer
morning, he mounted horse and was away to the hills. Or he took the arm of
a Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Feltre, and walked with him from the
green tables and the establishment’s renowned dry still Sillery to a Papist
chapel. As it was not known that he had given his word to abjure his
religion, the pious gamblers did no worse than spread an alarm and quiet it,
by the citation of his character for having a try at everything.
Henrietta despatched at this period the following letter to Chillon:
‘I am with Livia to-morrow. Janey starts for Wales to-morrow morning, a
voluntary exile. She pleaded to go back to that place where you had to leave
her, promising she would not come Westward; but was persuaded. Lady
Arpington approves. The situation was getting too terribly strained. We met
and passed my lord in the park.
‘He was walking his horse-elegant cavalier that he is: would not look on
his wife. A woman pulled by her collar should be passive; if she pulls her
way, she is treated as a dog. I see nothing else in the intention of poor
Janey’s last offence to him. There is an opposite counsel, and he can be
eloquent, and he will be heard on her side. How could she manage the most
wayward when she has not an idea of ordinary men! But, my husband, they

have our tie between them; it may move him. It subdues her—and nothing
else would have done that. If she had been in England a year before the
marriage, she would, I think, have understood better how to guide her steps
and her tongue for his good pleasure. She learns daily, very quickly:
observes, assimilates; she reads and has her comments—would have shot
far ahead of your Riette, with my advantages.
‘Your uncle—but he will bear any charge on his conscience as long as he
can get the burden off his shoulders. Do not fret, my own! Reperuse the
above—you will see we have grounds for hope.
‘He should have looked down on her! No tears from her eyes, but her
eyes were tears. She does not rank among beautiful women. She has her
moments for outshining them—the loveliest of spectres! She caught at my
heart. I cannot forget her face looking up for him to look down. A great
painter would have reproduced it, a great poet have rendered the
impression. Nothing short of the greatest. That is odd to say of one so
simple as she. But when accidents call up her reserves, you see mountain
heights where mists were—she is actually glorified. Her friend—I do
believe a friend—the Mr. Woodseer you are to remember meeting
somewhere—a sprained ankle—has a dozen similes ready for what she is
when pain or happiness vivify her. Or, it may be, tender charity. She says,
that if she feels for suffering people, it is because she is the child of
Chillon’s mother. In like manner Chillon is the son of Janey’s father.
‘Mr. Woodseer came every other evening. Our only enlivenment. Livia
followed her policy, in refusing to call. We lived luxuriously; no money, not
enough for a box at the opera, though we yearned—you can imagine.
Chapters of philosophy read out and expounded instead. Janey likes them.
He sets lessons to her queer maid—reading, writing, pronunciation of
English. An inferior language to Welsh, for poetical purposes, we are
informed. So Janey—determining to apply herself to Welsh, and a
chameleon Riette dreading that she will be taking a contrary view of the
honest souls—as she feels them to be—when again under Livia’s shadow.
‘The message from Janey to Scrope’s hotel was despatched half-an-hour
after we had driven in from the park; fruit of a brown meditation. I wrote it
—third person—a single sentence. Arrangements are made for her to travel
comfortably. It is funny—the shops for her purchases of clothes,
necessaries, etc., are specified; she may order to any extent. Not a shilling

of money for her poor purse. What can be the secret of that? He does
nothing without an object. To me, uniformly civil, no irony, few
compliments. Livia writes, that I am commended for keeping Janey
company. What can be the secret of a man scrupulously just with one hand,
and at the same time cruel with the other? Mr. Woodseer says, his wealth:
—“More money than is required for their needs, men go into harness to
Plutus,”—if that is clever.
‘I have written my husband—as Janey ceases to call her own; and it was
pretty and touching to hear her “my husband.”—Oh! a dull letter. But he is
my husband though he keeps absent—to be longed for—he is my husband
still, my husband always. Chillon is Henrietta’s husband, the world cries
out, and when she is flattered she does the like, for then it is not too
presumptuous that she should name Henrietta Chillon’s wife. In my ears,
husband has the sweeter sound. It brings an angel from overhead. Will it
bring him one-half hour sooner? My love! My dear! If it did, I should be
lisping “husband, husband, husband” from cock-crow to owl’s cry. Livia
thinks the word foolish, if not detestable. She and I have our different
opinions. She is for luxury. I choose poverty and my husband. Poverty has
its beauty, if my husband is the sun of it. Elle radote. She would not have
written so dull a letter to her husband if she had been at the opera last night,
or listened to a distant street-band. No more—the next line would be
bleeding. He should have her blood too, if that were her husband’s—it
would never be; but if it were for his good in the smallest way. Chillon’s
wish is to give his blood for them he loves. Never did woman try more to
write worthily to her absent lord and fall so miserably into the state of
dripping babe from bath on nurse’s knee. Cover me, my lord; and love, my
cause for—no, my excuse, my refuge from myself. We are one? Oh! we are
one!—and we have been separated eight and twenty days.

‘HENRIETTA KIRBY-LEVELLIER.’

That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land
and be warmed.
The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where his
waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;—resembling
craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young
Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she was

now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest as well;
his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest. Chillon had a
wife. Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his knowledge of his
wife’s nature. Carinthia might bear it and harden to flint; Henrietta was a
butterfly for the golden rays. His thoughts, all his energies, were bent on the
making of money to supply her need for the pleasure she flew in—a
butterfly’s grub without it. Accurately so did the husband and lover read his
wife—adoring her the more.
Her letter’s embracing close was costly to them. It hurried him to the
compromise of a debateable business, and he fell into the Austrian
Government’s terms for the payment of the inheritance from his father;
calculating that—his sister’s share deducted-money would be in hand to pay
pressing debts and enable Henrietta to live unworried by cares until he
should have squeezed debts, long due and increasing, out of the miserly old
lord, his uncle. A prospect of supplies for twelve months, counting the hack
and carriage Henrietta had always been used to, seemed about as far as it
was required to look by the husband hastening homeward to his wife’s call.
Her letter was a call in the night. Besides, there were his yet untried
Inventions. The new gunpowder testing at Croridge promised to provide
Henrietta with many of the luxuries she could have had, and had abandoned
for his sake. The new blasting powder and a destructive shell might build
her the palace she deserved. His uncle was, no doubt, his partner. If,
however, the profits were divided, sufficient wealth was assured. But his
uncle remained a dubious image. The husband and lover could enfold no
positive prospect to suit his wife’s tastes beyond the twelve months.
We have Dame Gossip upon us. —One minute let mention be of the
excitement over Protestant England when that rumour disseminated, telling
of her wealthiest nobleman’s visit to a monastery, up in the peaks and
snows; and of his dwelling among the monks, and assisting in all their
services day and night, hymning and chanting, uttering not one word for
one whole week: his Papistical friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course,
after Jesuit arts had allured him to that place of torrents and lightnings and
canticles and demon echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the
horrifying of sinners into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl
up to life’s end, not to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and
donation of them into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they
would have settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would

have impoverished—is not too strong a word—the country by taking the
money’s worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares
of our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the
Protestant faith. Underrate it now—then it was a truly justifiable anxiety:
insomuch that you heard people of station, eminent titled persons, asking,
like the commonest low Radicals, whether it was prudent legislation to
permit of the inheritance of such vast wealth by a young man, little more
than a boy, and noted for freaks. And some declared it could not be allowed
for foreign monks to have a claim to inherit English property. There was a
general consent, that if the Earl of Fleetwood went to the extreme of
making over his property to those monks, he should be pronounced insane
and incapable. Ultimately the world was a little pacified by hearing that a
portion of it was entailed, Esslemont and the Welsh mines.
So it might be; but what if he had no child! The marriage amazing
everybody scarcely promised fruit, it was thought. Countess Livia, much
besought for her opinion, scouted the possibility. And Carinthia Jane was
proclaimed by John Rose Mackrell (to his dying day the poor gentleman
tried vainly to get the second syllable of his name accentuated) a young
woman who would outlive twice over the husband she had. He said of his
name, it was destined to pass him down a dead fish in the nose of posterity,
and would affect his best jokes; which something has done, or the present
generation has lost the sense of genuine humour.
Thanks to him, the talk of the Whitechapel Countess again sprang up,
merrily as ever; and after her having become, as he said, ‘a desiccated
celebrity,’ she outdid cabinet ministers and naughty wives for a living
morsel in the world’s mouth. She was denounced by the patriotic party as
the cause of the earl’s dalliance with Rome.
The earl, you are to know, was then coasting along the Mediterranean, on
board his beautiful schooner yacht, with his Lord Feltre, bound to make an
inspection of Syrian monasteries, and forget, if he could, the face of all
faces, another’s possession by the law.
Those two lords, shut up together in a yacht, were advised by their
situation to be bosom friends, and they quarrelled violently, and were
reconciled, and they quarrelled again; they were explosive chemicals; until
the touch of dry land relieved them of what they really fancied the spell of
the Fiend. For their argumentative topic during confinement was Woman,

when it was not Theology; and even off a yacht, those are subjects to kindle
the utmost hatred of dissension, if men are not perfectly concordant. They
agreed upon land to banish any talk of Women or Theology, where it would
have been comparatively innocent; so they both desiring to be doing the
thing they had sworn they would not do, the thoughts of both were fastened
on one or the other interdicted subject. They hardly spoke; they perceived in
their longing minds, that the imagined spell of, the Fiend was indeed the
bile of the sea, secreted thickly for want of exercise, and they both regretted
the days and nights of their angry controversies; unfit pilgrims of the Holy
Land, they owned.
To such effect, Lord Fleetwood wrote to Gower Woodseer, as though
there had been no breach between them, from Jerusalem, expressing the
wish to hear his cool wood-notes of the philosophy of Life, fresh drawn
from Nature’s breast; and urgent for an answer, to be addressed to his hotel
at Southampton, that he might be greeted on his return home first by his
‘friend Gower.’
He wrote in the month of January. His arrival at Southampton was on the
thirteenth day of March; and there he opened a letter some weeks old, the
bearer of news which ought by rights to make husbands proudly happy.

CHAPTER XXVII. WE DESCEND INTO A
STEAMER’S ENGINE-ROOM
Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good
fortune was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
reading of Gower’s lines. Other letters were opened: from the Countess
Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier. There was one
from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication dated
South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the effect, that
the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered on the day of the
date, with a copy of the document forwarded.
Livia scornfully stated the tattling world’s ‘latest.’ The captain was as
brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be taken for a
challenge of the eye. It stamped the adversary’s frown on Fleetwood
reading. Lady Arpington was more politic; she wrote of ‘a healthy boy,’ and
‘the healthy mother giving him breast,’ this being ‘the way for the rearing of
strong men.’ She condescended to the particulars, that she might touch him.
The earl had not been so reared: his mother was not the healthy mother.
One of his multitudinous, shifty, but ineradicable ambitions was to exhibit
an excellingly vigorous, tireless constitution. He remembered the needed
refreshment of the sea-breezes aboard his yacht during the week following
the sleep-discarded nights at Scrope’s and the green tables. For a week he
hung to the smell of brine, in rapturous amity with Feltre, until they
yellowed, differed, wrangled, hated.
A powerful leaven was put into him by the tidings out of Wales. Gower,
good fellow, had gone down to see the young mother three weeks after the
birth of her child. She was already renewing her bloom. She had produced
the boy in the world’s early manner, lightly, without any of the tragic
modern hovering over death to give the life. Gower compared it to a ‘flush
of the vernal orchard after a day’s drink of sunlight.’ That was well: that
was how it should be. One loathes the idea of tortured women.
The good fellow was perhaps absurdly poetical. Still we must have
poetry to hallow this and other forms of energy: or say, if you like, the right

view of them impels to poetry. Otherwise we are in the breeding yards,
among the litters and the farrows. It is a question of looking down or
looking up. If we are poor creatures—as we are if we do but feast and
gamble and beget—we shall run for a time with the dogs and come to the
finish of swine. Better say, life is holy! Why, then have we to thank her who
teaches it.
He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband,
making him a father: the imagined Carinthia—beautiful Gorgon, haggard
Venus; the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal
dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she alternately
softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons. A mate for the caress, an electrical
heroine, fronted him.
Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood’s wife, cracking sconces,—a
demoiselle Moll Flanders,—the world’s Whitechapel Countess out for an
airing, infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his
word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now
persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to
stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head
from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of men to
behave as an actor. He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the eyeholes.
But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the
mother of the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her
boy was his boy. They met inseparably in that new life.
Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the
beatific image of Feltre’s worshipped Madonna!
The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood’s mind, as a star
passing into cloud. For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at
all allied with her; at her husband most, of course:—the punctilious noodle!
the golden jackass, tethered and goaded! He had choice among the pick of
women: the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre
Coelebs. She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow in
producing her male infant.
By the way, was she actually born in wedlock? Lord Levellier’s
assurances regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser’s shuffles
to clinch his bargain. Assuming the representative of holy motherhood to be
a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House to which the spotted

woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching on her. And
altogether the history fumed rank vapours. Imagine her boy in his father’s
name a young collegian! No commonly sensitive lad could bear the gibes of
the fellows raking at antecedents: Fleetwood would be the name to start
roars. Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the boy’s mother. Her
production of a man-child was the further and grosser offence.
The world sat on him. His confession to some degree of weakness, even
to folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain by
tearing himself from a thought of his folly’s partner, shutting himself up and
away from her. Then there was a cessation of annoyance, flatteringly
agreeable: which can come to us only of our having done the right thing,
young men will think. He felt at once warmly with the world, enjoyed the
world’s kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of his unprecedented
attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an understanding of its
laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in the person of the
Whitechapel Countess. The world sat on him heavily.
He recurred to Gower Woodseer’s letter.
The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,—the
impression had been deep. A plain transcription of the young mother’s acts
and words did more to portray her: the reader could supply reflections.
Would her boy’s father be very pleased to see him? she had asked.
And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from her.
‘Never that—you have my word!’ Fleetwood said; and he nodded
consentingly over her next remark—
‘Not while I live, till he must go to school!’
The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled
mother.
A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient
in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.
For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that
he leaned on pride. To think that he did, became a theme for pride. The
mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the richer
mine. And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual he; she
was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring bone,
muscle, stout heart.

Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the
earldom.
Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse. Courage, animal healthfulness, she,
too, might—her husband not obstructing—transmit; and good looks, eyes of
the sapphire AEgean. And therewith such pliability as the Mother of Love
requires of her servants.
Could that woman resist seductions?
Fleetwood’s wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to
pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether
the woman could be—and easily! easily! he wagered—led to make her
conduct warrant for his contempt of her. Led,—that is, misled, you might
say, if you were pleading for a doll. But it was necessary to bait the
pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious fine fate
one has escaped. Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in the blood, which
the woman’s beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a fever-sign, where the
fever has become quite emotionless and is merely desirous for the stain of it
to be washed out. As this is not the desire to possess or even to taste,
contempt will do it. When we know that the weaver of the fascinations is
purchasable, we toss her to the market where men buy; and we walk
released from vile subjection to one of the female heap: subjection no
longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past flush, often colouring our
reveries, creating active phantasms of a passion absolutely extinct, if it ever
was the veritable passion.
The plot—formless plot—to get release by the sacrifice or at least a
crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her
image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology
offered no improvement of its aspect. She might come out of the trial
triumphant. And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the
pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he
loathed the thought. He was too delicate over the idea of the married
woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood. Others might press
her hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release. She had set him
on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and
erasing stain and scars; that was all. Henrietta rejected her wealthy suitor:
she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth, glad of a

drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught. An injured pride
could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a spectacle.
Devilish, if you like. He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian
seclusion. His wife now drove him to sin again.
She had given him a son. That fluted of home and honourable life. She
had her charm, known to him alone.
But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations,
how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne? Consideration was due
to her until she stumbled. Enough if she wavered. Almost enough is she
stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page of her was
a false introduction. The surprising apparition of a beautiful woman with
character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman devoted to her husband
or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would loosen him creditably. It had
to be witnessed, for faith in it. He reverenced our legendary good women,
and he bowed to noble deeds; and he ascribed the former to poetical
creativeness, the latter operated as a scourging to his flesh to yield its
demoniacal inmates. Nothing of the kind was doing at present.
Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer’s letter enriched a little
incident. Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he had read
deliberately and caught the scene.
Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge,
trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the edge
in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water, they espied a
lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to it, one or both. It
must have been the mountain-footed one. A man would hesitate, spying
below. Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb up, and
carrying the lamb! Down pitches Madge Winch to help—they did it
between them. We who stand aloof admire stupidly. To defend himself from
admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are woven.
Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and sentimental
female compassion swamp thought of a mother’s duties. If both those
women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself into fits for
the mother, there she would have remained.

Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
whose memory was to be impregnated. His reader would have flown away
from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then
envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to the
winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next thought
about it. He knew his Fleetwood so far.
His letter concluded: ‘I am in a small Surrey village over a baker’s shop,
rent eight shillings per week, a dame’s infant school opposite my window,
miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or the nested
fancies. Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless, off any ten
square feet of common earth. I go through my illusions and come always
back on that good truth. It says, beware of the world’s passion for flavours
and spices. Much tasted, they turn and bite the biter. My exemplars are the
lately breeched youngsters with two pence in their pockets for the
gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day. I learn more from one of them than you
can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant Ixionides.’
Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had
the new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.
‘My Ixionides!’ he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he
rejoiced to be enlightened by the title. He craved the presence of the
magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to
think of than the whole body of those Ixionides—not bad fellows, here and
there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish fun.
Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely parted at
one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of the,
genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the better
comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the heights; and free,
not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that the world
has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it be composed of Ixionides:
that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut that way.
Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree
anxious for a communication from Wales. There was none. Why none?
She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing
to her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly
interesting. The mother’s wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested in
a furnace. He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three formal

words. She sulked? ‘I am not a fallen lamb!’ he said. Evidently one had to
be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.
Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him, the
crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging young
shoots of sweeter feelings. She sulked! If that woman could not get the
command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After besmutting
the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that there was no
intention to repent. Possibly she meant war. In which case a man must fly,
or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar farces;—to be compared
to a pelting of one on the stage.
The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.

CHAPTER XXVIII. BY CONCESSIONS TO
MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION
IS AVERTED
Livia welcomed him, with commiserating inquiry behind her
languid eyelids. ‘You have all the latest?’ it said.

He struck on the burning matter.
‘You wish to know the part you have to play, ma’am.’ ‘Tell me, Russett.’
‘You will contradict nothing.’
Her eyebrows asked, ‘It means?’
‘You have authority from me to admit the facts.’
‘They are facts?’ she remarked.
‘Women love teasing round certain facts, apparently; like the Law courts
over their pet cases.’
‘But, Russett, will you listen?’
‘Has the luck been civil of late?’
‘I think of something else at present. No, it has not.’
‘Abrane?’
‘Pray, attend to me. No, not Abrane.’
‘I believe you’ve all been cleared out in my absence. St. Ombre?’
Her complexion varied. ‘Mr. Ambrose Mallard has once or twice... But
let me beg you—the town is rageing with it. My dear Russett, a bold front
now; there ‘s the chance of your release in view.’
‘A rascal in view! Name the sum.’
‘I must reckon. My head is—can you intend to submit?’
‘So it’s Brosey Mallard now. You choose your deputy queerly. He’s as
bad as Abrane, with steam to it. Chummy Potts would have done better.’

‘He wins one night; loses every pound-note he has the next; and comes
vaunting—the “dry still Sillery” of the establishment,—a perpetual chorus
to his losses!’
‘His consolation to you for yours. That is the gentleman. Chummy
doesn’t change. Say, why not St. Ombre? He’s cool.’
‘There are reasons.’
‘Let them rest. And I have my reasons. Do the same for them.’
‘Yours concern the honour of the family.’
‘Deeply: respect them.’
‘Your relatives have to be thought of, though they are few and not too
pleasant.’
‘If I had thought much of them, what would our relations be? They object
to dicing, and I to leading strings.’
She turned to a brighter subject, of no visible connection with the
preceding.
‘Henrietta comes in May.’
‘The month of her colours.’
‘Her money troubles are terrible.’
‘Both of you appear unlucky in your partners,—if winning was the
object. She shall have all the distractions we can offer.’
‘Your visit to the Chartreuse alarmed her.’
‘She has rejoiced her husband.’
‘A girl. She feared the Jesuit in your friend.’
‘Feltre and she are about equally affected by music. They shall meet.’
‘Russett, this once: I do entreat you to take counsel with your good sense,
and remember that you stand where you are by going against my advice. It
is a perfect storm over London. The world has not to be informed of your
generosity; but a chivalry that invites the most horrible of sneers at a man!
And what can I say? I have said it was impossible.’
‘Add the postscript: you find it was perfectly possible.’
‘I have to learn more than I care to hear.’
‘Your knowledge is not in request: you will speak in my name.’
‘Will you consult your lawyers, Russett, before you commit yourself?’

‘I am on my way to Lady Arpington.’
‘You cannot be thinking how serious it is.’
‘I rather value the opinion of a hard-headed woman of the world.’
‘Why not listen to me?’
‘You have your points, ma’am.’
‘She’s a torch.’
‘She serves my purpose.’
Livia shrugged sadly. ‘I suppose it serves your purpose to be
unintelligible to me.’
He rendered himself intelligible immediately by saying, ‘Before I go—a
thousand?’
‘Oh, my dear Russett!’ she sighed.
‘State the amount.’
She seemed to be casting unwieldly figures and he helped her with, ‘Mr.
Isaacs?’
‘Not less than three, I fear.’
‘Has he been pressing?’
‘You are always good to us, Russett.’
‘You are always considerate for the honour of the family, ma’am. Order
for the money with you here to-morrow. And I thank you for your advice.
Do me the favour to follow mine.
‘Commands should be the word.’
‘Phrase it as you please.’
‘You know I hate responsibility.’
‘The chorus in classical dramas had generally that sentiment, but the
singing was the sweeter for it.’
‘Whom do you not win when you condescend to the mood, you dear
boy?’
He restrained a bitter reply, touching the kind of persons he had won: a
girl from the mountains, a philosophical tramp of the roads, troops of the
bought.