He cast his bitter cud aside. "My man should have arrived. Lady Fleetwood at home?"
Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.
"Has she taken the child?"
"She has, yes. For the air of the heights."
"For greater security. Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother. I rather expected to see the child."
"They can"t be much later," Gower supposed.
"You don"t feel your long separation from "the object"?"
Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said "It needs all my philosophy:
He was p.r.i.c.ked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying, the earl could be smart when he smarted. Then they descended the terrace to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap. She gave a brief single nod to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady"s manner, surprisingly.
CHAPTER XLI. IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM
The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went, like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the back turned to his wife"s along the corridor, that our ordinary comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between them. A removal of either of them from life--or from "the act of breathing," as Gower Woodseer"s contempt of the talk about death would call it--was an imaginable way of making it a wider division. Ambrose Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now--farther than the Poles asunder. Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace..
But the road and the means he chose were a madman"s.
The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof of our being "sons of vapour," according to Gower Woodseer"s heartless term for poor Ambrose and the lot. They have their souls; and above philosophy, "natural" or unnatural, they may find a shelter. They can show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers rather fail of doing. An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpa.s.sing any philosopher"s.
Information of her ladyship"s having inspected the apartments, to see to the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round. His valet had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant a liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an icy wind; he was frozen where he was warmed. Here was evidence of her intending the division to be a fixed gap. She had entered this room and looked about her. He was here to feel her presence in her absence.
Some one or something had schooled her, too. Her large-eyed directness of gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy sedateness was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world: he gathered it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.
His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate. He could kill illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight of her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought of what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that was a more seductive illusion. Strange to think, this woman once loved the man who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved. He took a shot at cynicism, but hit no mark. This woman protected her whole s.e.x.
They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench"s attractions for a philosopher. Married, and parents of a l.u.s.ty son, this was their first sitting at table together. The mouth that said "I guard my rooms" was not obtruded; she talked pa.s.singly of her brother, much of Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a smile, there was no look of a lock on her face. She seemed pleased to be treated very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in exactest measure; very simply, as well. Her face had now an air of homeliness, well suited to an English household interior. She could chat. Any pauses occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not allow them to be barrier chasms, or "strids" for the leap with effort; she crossed them like the mountain maid over a gorge"s plank--kept her tones perfectly. Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic. She was inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.
They pa.s.sed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor child in Wales, she said, without a comment.
"I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal," he confessed, and was near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.
Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it. She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada.
Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the Pyrenees.
"Hardly the place for you; there"s a perpetual heaving of Carlism in those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers," he remarked; and for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a flowing thought.
He remarked the come and go of it.
He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish Pyrenees.
Books helped her at present, she said.
Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her uninviting civility, he spoke of the a.s.sault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower Woodseer"s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal Ines.
To which her unreproachful answer, "You made use of those men, my lord,"
sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre"s words, as to the grip men progressively are held in by their deeds done.
"Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life," he said, thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his character. But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by virtue of their being known. For the young man embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and pa.s.ses into it, to see the creature he is with the other"s eyes, and feel for the other as a very self. Such is the privilege and the chastis.e.m.e.nt of the young.
Gower Woodseer"s engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher practically philosophizing.
"The girl shall have a dowry from me," he said; and the sum named was large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.
He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She had a well-bred mother.
Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend, and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded.
Two intimate a.s.sociates of the dead man swore to that habit of his.
They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed outright at Chummy Potts"s nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it, and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard"s family. So much is owing to our friend.
Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men of the world?
A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.
These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle worked in Fleetwood"s head. He defended the men of the world. Lord Feltre oiled them, d.a.m.ned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence of them. Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness of sins, if sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said she knew more of him than they knew.
He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to propitiate--and his lips pecked the baby"s cheek. Its mother held arms for it immediately.
Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with little of a mind to see.
The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he said once: "If you mean to marry, you"ll be wanting to marry soon, of course," and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us. Honest though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the philosopher"s day had come to an end. How can Philosophy minister to raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered to right and left! Religion has a nourishing breast: Philosophy is breastless. Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness, is an untenanted confessional: "wide air to a cry in anguish," Feltre says.
All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk when he would.
He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the ointment brought comfort.
It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard"s grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts"s hearing was not addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.
Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere or other--when felon spectres were abroad over earth--been conceived.
He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!
Whatever the earl"s inferiors did, their inferior station was not suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism to Woodseer"s philosophy--which the fellow carried through with perpetual scorings of satisfaction--caused him to set a hard eye on the damsel under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom, after once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and he chose to consider the winning of the prize-fighter"s la.s.s the final triumph or flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy. Vain to ask how he had come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly conceited, pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him!
We sow and we reap; "plant for sugar and taste the cane," some one says--this Woodseer, probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the ears of the worldlings. And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff to nourish: Feltre"s "wisdom of our fathers," rightly named Religion.
More in the country, when he traversed sweep and rise of open land, Carinthia"s image began to shine, and she threw some of her light on Madge, who made Woodseer appear tolerable, sagacious, absurdly enviable, as when we have the fit to wish we were some four-foot. The fellow"s philosophy wore a look of practical craft.
He was going to the girl he liked, and she was, one could swear, an honest girl; and she was a comely girl, a girl to stick to a man. Her throwing over a sot was creditable. Her mistress loved her. That said much for any mortal creature. Man or woman loved by Carinthia could not be cowardly, could not be vile, must have high qualities. Next to Religion, she stood for a test of us. Had she any strong sense of Religion, in addition to the formal trooping to one of their pallid Protestant churches? Lord Feltre might prove useful to her. For merely the comprehension of the signification of Religion steadies us. It had done that for him, the earl owned.
He broke a prolonged silence by remarking to Gower "You haven"t much to say to-day"; and the answer was "Very little. When I"m walking, I"m picking up; and when I"m driving, I"m putting together."
Gower was rallied on the pursuit of the personal object in both cases.