← catalogue

The Amazing Marriage — Complete

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #4488 · 901,401 chars · public domain (US)

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: December 28, 2020

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 ***



Produced by David Widger





THE AMAZING MARRIAGE


By George Meredith


1895




CONTENTS:

  BOOK 1.
  I.        ENTER DAME GOSSIP AS CHORUS
  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
  III.      CONTINUATION OF THE INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME GOSSIP,
            TOGETHER WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION
  IV.       MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME
  V.        A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE
  VI.       THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER
  VII.      THE LADY’S LETTER
  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
  IX.       CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER,
            TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES

  BOOK 2.
  X.        SMALL CAUSES
  XI.       THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD
  XII.      HENRIETTA’S LETTER TREATING OF THE GREAT EVENT
  XIII.     AN IRRUPTION OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION
  XIV.      A PENDANT OF THE FOREGOING
  XV.       OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON
  XVI.      IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD
            ENGLAND
  XVII.     RECORDS A SHADOW CONTEST CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING
  XVIII.    DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY
  XIX.      THE GIRL MADGE

  BOOK 3.
  XX.       STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE
            MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
  XXI.      IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF
            OUR YOUNGER MAN
  XXII.     A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
  XXIII.    IN DAME GOSSIP’S VEIN
  XXIV.     A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
  XXV.      THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
  XXVI.     AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
  XXVII.    WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER’S ENGINE-ROOM
  XXVIII.   BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS
            AVERTED

  BOOK 4.
  XXIX.     CARINTHIA IN WALES
  XXX.      REBECCA WYTHAN
  XXXI.     WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
  XXXII.    IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD
            FATHER’S LESSONS
  XXXIII.   A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE
  XXXIV.    A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE
            COUNTESS OF FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
  XXXV.     IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED
  XXXVI.    BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE
  XXXVII.   BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER LORD
  XXXVIII.  A DIP INTO THE SPRING’S WATERS

  BOOK 5.
  XXXIX.    THE RED WARNING FROM A SON OF VAPOUR
  XL.       A RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS
  XLI.      IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM
            THEM
  XLII.     THE RETARDED COURTSHIP
  XLIII.    ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE
  XLIV.     BETWEEN THE EARL; THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER
            CROSS
  XLV.      CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT
            HAPPENED
  XLVI.     A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES
  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

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/4488