"Not while I live, till he must go to school!"
The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled mother.
A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.
For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that he leaned on pride. To think that he did, became a theme for pride. The mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the richer mine. And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring bone, muscle, stout heart.
Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the earldom.
Henrietta was a.n.a.lyzed in a glimpse. Courage, animal healthfulness, she, too, might--her husband not obstructing--transmit; and good looks, eyes of the sapphire AEgean. And therewith such pliability as the Mother of Love requires of her servants.
Could that woman resist seductions?
Fleetwood"s wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, p.r.i.c.ked a curiosity to know whether the woman could be--and easily! easily! he wagered--led to make her conduct warrant for his contempt of her. Led,--that is, misled, you might say, if you were pleading for a doll. But it was necessary to bait the pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious fine fate one has escaped. Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in the blood, which the woman"s beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely desirous for the stain of it to be washed out. As this is not the desire to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it. When we know that the weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the female heap: subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a pa.s.sion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable pa.s.sion.
The plot--formless plot--to get release by the sacrifice or at least a crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology offered no improvement of its aspect. She might come out of the trial triumphant. And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he loathed the thought. He was too delicate over the idea of the married woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood. Others might press her hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release. She had set him on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and erasing stain and scars; that was all. Henrietta rejected her wealthy suitor: she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth, glad of a drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught.
An injured pride could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a spectacle.
Devilish, if you like. He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian seclusion. His wife now drove him to sin again.
She had given him a son. That fluted of home and honourable life. She had her charm, known to him alone.
But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations, how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne?
Consideration was due to her until she stumbled. Enough if she wavered.
Almost enough is she stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page of her was a false introduction. The surprising apparition of a beautiful woman with character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman devoted to her husband or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would loosen him creditably. It had to be witnessed, for faith in it. He reverenced our legendary good women, and he bowed to n.o.ble deeds; and he ascribed the former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a scourging to his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates. Nothing of the kind was doing at present.
Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer"s letter enriched a little incident. Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he had read deliberately and caught the scene.
Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge, trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water, they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to it, one or both. It must have been the mountain-footed one. A man would hesitate, spying below. Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb up, and carrying the lamb! Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it between them. We who stand aloof admire stupidly. To defend himself from admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are woven. Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and sentimental female compa.s.sion swamp thought of a mother"s duties. If both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.
Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader whose memory was to be impregnated. His reader would have flown away from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to the winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next thought about it. He knew his Fleetwood so far.
His letter concluded: "I am in a small Surrey village over a baker"s shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame"s infant school opposite my window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or the nested fancies. Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless, off any ten square feet of common earth. I go through my illusions and come always back on that good truth. It says, beware of the world"s pa.s.sion for flavours and spices. Much tasted, they turn and bite the biter. My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day. I learn more from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant Ixionides."
Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.
"My Ixionides!" he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he rejoiced to be enlightened by the t.i.tle. He craved the presence of the magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think of than the whole body of those Ixionides--not bad fellows, here and there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish fun. Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely parted at one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the better comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it be composed of Ixionides: that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut that way.
Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree anxious for a communication from Wales. There was none. Why none?
She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly interesting. The mother"s wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested in a furnace. He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three formal words. She sulked? "I am not a fallen lamb!" he said. Evidently one had to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.
Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him, the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging young shoots of sweeter feelings. She sulked! If that woman could not get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After bes.m.u.tting the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that there was no intention to repent. Possibly she meant war. In which case a man must fly, or stand a.s.sailed by the most intolerable of vulgar farces;--to be compared to a pelting of one on the stage.
The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.
CHAPTER XXVIII. BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS AVERTED
Livia welcomed him, with commiserating inquiry behind her languid eyelids. "You have all the latest?" it said.
He struck on the burning matter.
"You wish to know the part you have to play, ma"am." "Tell me, Russett."
"You will contradict nothing."
Her eyebrows asked, "It means?"
"You have authority from me to admit the facts."
"They are facts?" she remarked.
"Women love teasing round certain facts, apparently; like the Law courts over their pet cases."
"But, Russett, will you listen?"
"Has the luck been civil of late?"
"I think of something else at present. No, it has not."
"Abrane?"
"Pray, attend to me. No, not Abrane."
"I believe you"ve all been cleared out in my absence. St. Ombre?"
Her complexion varied. "Mr. Ambrose Mallard has once or twice... But let me beg you--the town is rageing with it. My dear Russett, a bold front now; there "s the chance of your release in view."
"A rascal in view! Name the sum."
"I must reckon. My head is--can you intend to submit?"
"So it"s Brosey Mallard now. You choose your deputy queerly. He"s as bad as Abrane, with steam to it. Chummy Potts would have done better."
"He wins one night; loses every pound-note he has the next; and comes vaunting--the "dry still Sillery" of the establishment,--a perpetual chorus to his losses!"
"His consolation to you for yours. That is the gentleman. Chummy doesn"t change. Say, why not St. Ombre? He"s cool."
"There are reasons."
"Let them rest. And I have my reasons. Do the same for them."
"Yours concern the honour of the family."
"Deeply: respect them."