He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the Marriage, turning over doc.u.ments, here say. He went to Lady Arpington disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension; equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum of the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way.
When very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had plunged for a short s.p.a.ce into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic life--"the clean soul for the macerated flesh," as that fellow Woodseer said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre, moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a lifelong bondage to the "beautiful Gorgon," under cover of a white flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains of a woman, to redeem his word.
But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did, nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could, he now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil inhabiting him had at least been easier, "up in a corner."
He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual feminine, an unantic.i.p.ated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name, wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our heart"s holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for compensation the exorcising of a devil.
Oh, but no mere devil by t.i.tle!--a very devil. It was alert and frisky, flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in the thought it made Carinthia"s intimate charm appear as no better than a thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command the charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta"s incomparable beauty and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--"It is my husband." The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at the hint of her loving the man she had married. Did she? It might be tried.
She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a ship that will not sail a sea.
Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his tasting Carinthia"s charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not "money of the country" beside that golden Henrietta"s.
Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest, apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that s.n.a.t.c.hed them to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock! Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature"s products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she--"Red Hair and Rugged Brows," as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with "Mountain Face to Sun"--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpa.s.singly; graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and was rather better than not withered by it.
On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue, ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of her character, startled to show itself:--"It is my husband":--it must have been love.
The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the veritable pa.s.sion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of very favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she had not Henrietta"s golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of the currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter"s heart with pity.
Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor"s patient entering the chemist"s shop, with a prescription for a drug of healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken the intonation of good words.
CHAPTER XXII. A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks pa.s.sed rapidly as the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens courtliness to hard attention.
After the names of Admiral Baldwin and "the Mr. Woodseer," the name of Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the name of any other place.
"Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you," she said, observing the young earl. "I drove down there yesterday. I saw the lady calling herself Countess of Fleetwood. By right? She was a Miss Kirby."
"She has the right," Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge of musketry.
"Marriage not contested. You knew of her being in that place?--I can"t describe it."
"Your ladyship will pardon me?"
London"s frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to penetrate.
He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.
As iron as he looked, he said: "She stays there by choice."
The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.
"You are not acquainted with the district."
"One of my men comes out of it."
"The coming out of it!... However, I understand her story, that she travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without resources.
She waited weeks; I forget how many. She has a description of maid in attendance on her. She came to London to find her husband. You were at the mines, we heard. Her one desire is to meet her husband. But, goodness! Fleetwood, why do you frown? You acknowledge the marriage, she has the name of the church; she was married out of that old Lord Levellier"s house. You drove her--I won"t repeat the flighty business.
You left her, and she did her best to follow you. Will the young men of our time not learn that life is no longer a game when they have a woman for partner in the match!
You don"t complain of her flavour of a foreign manner? She can"t be so very... Admiral Baldwin"s daughter has married her brother; and he is a military officer. She has germs of breeding, wants only a little rub of the world to smooth her. Speak to the point:--do you meet her here? Do you refuse?"
"At present? I do."
"Something has to be done."
"She was bound to stay where I left her."
"You are bound to provide for her becomingly."
"Provision shall be made, of course."
"The story will... unless--and quickly, too."
I know, I know!"
Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel at him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree fire and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.
The black flash flew.
"It "s a thing to mend as well as one can," Lady Arpington said. "I am not inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any. Get her away from that place. She won"t come to me unless it "s to meet her husband. Ah, well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are, if you married her. We"ll leave the husband undiscussed: with this reserve, that it seems to me men are now beginning to play the misunderstood."
"I hope they know themselves better," said Fleetwood; and he begged for the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her dwelling.
Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an a.s.sault on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old Buccaneer; it compelled to urgent measures. He, as he felt horribly in pencilling her address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the goad. Her mask of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft, which could be power; and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed to hatred.
"A shop," Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: "potatoes, vegetable stuff. Honest people, I am to believe. She is indifferent to her food, she says. She works, helping one of their ministers--one of their denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves! Anything to escape from the Church! She"s likely to become a Methodist. With Lord Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time. Well, she may claim to belong to it now. She would not be persuaded against visitations to pestiferous hovels. What else is there to do in such a place? She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in the dark back room of a small greengrocer"s shop in Whitechapel.
There--you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood"s present address."
It drenched him with ridicule.
"I am indebted to your ladyship for the information," he said, and maintained his rigidity.
The great lady stiffened.
"I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once. The admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I warn you--very well, very well. In your own interests, it will be. If she is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will stick to her."
"She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine," said Fleetwood.
"She will have Esslemont to live in."
"There will be more than one to speak as to that. You should know her."
"I do not know her."