Would it be the same thing if he had it in hand again? Did he wish it to be the same? Was not he another man? By the leap of his heart to the woman standing down there, he was a better man.
But recent spiritual exercises brought him to see superst.i.tiously how by that sign she was lost to him; for everlastingly in this life the better pays for the worse; thus is the better a proved thing.
Both Chillon and Carinthia, it is probable, might have been stirred to deeper than compa.s.sion, had the proud young n.o.bleman taken them into his breast to the scouring of it; exposing the grounds of his former brutality, his gradual enlightenment, his ultimate acknowledgement of the pricelessness of the woman he had won to lose her. An imploring of forgiveness would not have been necessary with those two, however great their--or the woman"s--astonishment at the revelation of an abysmal male humanity. A complete exposure of past meanness is the deed of present courage certain of its reward without as well as within; for then we show our fellows that the slough is cast. But life is a continuous fight; and members of the social world display its degree of civilization by fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and their armour is more sensitive than their skins. It was Fleetwood"s instinct of his inability to fling it off utterly which warned him of his loss of the wife, whose enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger might have subsided into the channel of duty, even tenderness, had he been able resolutely to strip himself bare. This was the further impossible to him, because of a belief he now imposed upon himself, to cover the cowardly shrinking from so extreme a penitential act, that such confessions are due from men to the priest only, and that he could confess wholly and absolutely to the priest--to heaven, therefore, under seal, and in safety, but with perfect repentance.
So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon; courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta"s sheer womanly choice of him; Carinthia"s idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken. The man was in his voice.
Chillon said: "It concerns my sister, I have to think. In that case, her wish is to be present. Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes for the interview by permitting it."
Fleetwood encountered Carinthia"s eyes. They did not entreat or defy.
They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her husband. He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.
She replied to the look: "My brother and I have a single mind. We save time by speaking three together, my lord."
He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied the middle place, on a block.
Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness at the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers.
Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though his country"s journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful current to whelm opposition. But the appearance of the woman, his wife, here, her head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy, and the knowledge that this woman bearing his name designed to be out at the heels of a foreign army or tag-rag of uniformed rascals, inspired him to reprobate men"s bad old game as heartily as good sense does in the abstract, and as derisively as it is the way with comfortable islanders before the midnight trumpet-notes of panic have tumbled them to their legs. He took his chair; sickened.
He was the next moment taking Carinthia"s impression of Chillon, compelled to it by an admiration that men and women have alike for shapes of strength in the mould of grace, over whose firm build a flicker of agility seems to run. For the young soldier"s figure was visibly in its repose prompt to action as the mind"s movement. This was her brother; her enthusiasm for her brother was explained to him.
No sooner did he have the conception of it than it plucked at him painfully; and, feeling himself physically eclipsed by the object of Carinthia"s enthusiasm, his pride of the rival counselled him to preserve the mask on what was going on within, lest it should be seen that he was also morally beaten at the outset. A trained observation told him, moreover, that her Chillon"s correctly handsome features, despite their conventional urbanity, could knit to smite, and held less of the reserves of mercy behind them than Carinthia"s glorious barbaric ruggedness. Her eyes, each time she looked at her brother, had, without doating, the light as of the rise of happy tears to the underlids as they had on a certain day at the altar, when "my lord" was "my husband,"--more shyly then. He would have said, as beautifully, but for envy of the frank, pellucid worship in that look on her proved hero. It was the jewel of all the earth to win back to himself; and it subjected him, through his desire for it, to a measurement with her idol, in character, quality, strength, hardness. He heard the couple p.r.o.nouncing sentence of his loss by antic.i.p.ation.
Why had she primed her brother to propose the council of three?
Addressing them separately, he could have been his better or truer self.
The sensation of the check imposed on him was instructive as to her craft and the direction of her wishes. She preferred the braving of hazards and horrors beside her brother, in scorn of the advantages he could offer; and he yearned to her for despising by comparison the bribe he proposed in the hope that he might win her to him. She was with religion to let him know the meanness of wealth.
Thus, at the edge of the debate, or contest, the young lord"s essential n.o.bility disarmed him; and the revealing of it, which would have appealed to Carinthia and Chillon both, was forbidden by its const.i.tuent pride, which helped him to live and stood obstructing explanatory speech.
CHAPTER XLIV. BETWEEN THE EARL, THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER CROSS
Carinthia was pleased by hearing Lord Fleetwood say to her: "Your Madge and my Gower are waiting to have the day named for them."
She said: "I respect him so much for his choice of Madge. They shall not wait, if I am to decide."
"Old Mr. Woodseer has undertaken to join them."
"It is in Whitechapel they will be married."
The blow that struck was not intended, and Fleetwood pa.s.sed it, under her brother"s judicial eye. Any small chance word may carry a sting for the neophyte in penitence.
"My lawyers will send down the settlement on her, to be read to them to-day or to-morrow. With the interest on that and the sum he tells me he has in the Funds, they keep the wolf from the door--a cottage door.
They have their cottage. There"s an old song of love in a cottage. His liking for it makes him seem wiser than his clever sayings. He"ll work in that cottage."
"They have a good friend to them in you, my lord. It will not be poverty for their simple wants. I hear of the little cottage in Surrey where they are to lodge at first, before they take one of their own."
"We will visit them."
"When I am in England I shall visit them often."
He submitted.
"The man up here wounded is recovering?"
"Yes, my lord. I am learning to nurse the wounded, with the surgeon to direct me."
"Matters are sobering down?--The workmen?"
"They listen to reason so willingly when we speak personally, we find."
The earl addressed Chillon. "Your project of a Spanish expedition reminds me of favourable reports of your chief."
"Thoroughly able and up to the work," Chillon answered.
"Queer people to meddle with."
"We "re on the right side on the dispute."
"It counts, Napoleon says. A Spanish civil war promises b.l.o.o.d.y doings."
"Any war does that."
"In the Peninsula it"s war to the knife, a merciless business."
"Good schooling for the profession."
Fleetwood glanced: she was collected and attentive. "I hear from Mrs.
Levellier that Carinthia would like to be your companion."
"My sister has the making of a serviceable hospital nurse."
"You hear the chatter of London!"
"I have heard it."
"You encourage her, Mr. Levellier?"
"She will be useful--better there than here, my lord."
"I claim a part in the consultation."
"There "s no consultation; she determines to go."
"We can advise her of all the risks."
"She has weighed them, every one."