"She has repeated them to me here in my bedroom. There is no variation.
She remembers every syllable. He went so far as to urge her to say whether she would as willingly utter consent if they were in a church and a clergyman at the altar-rails.
"That was like him.
"She made answer: "Wherever it may be, I am bound, if I say yes."
"She then adds: "He told me he joined hands with me."
""Did he repeat the word "wife"?"
""He said it twice."
"I transcribe verbatim scrupulously. There cannot be an error, Chillon.
It seems to show, that he has embraced the serious meaning of the word--or seriously embraced the meaning, reads" better. I have seen his lips form "wife."
"But why wonder so staringly? They both love the mountains. Both are wildish. She was looking superb. And he had seen her do a daring thing on the rocks on the heights in the early morning, when she was out by herself, unaware of a spectator, he not knowing who she was;--the Fates had arranged it so. That was why he took to her so rapidly. So he told her. She likes being admired. The preparation for the meeting does really seem "under direction." She likes him too, I do think. Between her repet.i.tions of his compliments, she praised his tone of voice, his features. She is ready to have the fullest faith in the sincerity of his offer; speaks without any impatience for the fulfilment. If it should happen, what a change in the fortunes of a girl--of more than one, possibly.
"Now I must rest "eyelids fall." It will be with a heart galloping. No rest for me till this letter flies. Good morning is my good night to you, in a world that has turned over."
Henrietta resumes:
"Livia will not hear of it, calls up all her pretty languor to put it aside. It is the same to-day as last night. "Why mention Russett"s nonsense to me?" Carinthia is as quietly circ.u.mstantial as at first. She and the Tyrant talked of her native home. Very desirous to see it! means to build a mansion there! "He said it must be the most romantic place on earth."
"I suppose I slept. I woke with my last line to you on my lips, and the great news thundering. He named Esslemont and his favourite--always uninhabited--Cader Argau. She speaks them correctly. She has an unfailing memory. The point is, that it is a memory.
"Do not forget also--Livia is affected by her distaste--that he is a gentleman. He plays with his n.o.bility. With his reputation of gentleman, he has never been known to play. You will understand the slightly hypocritical air--it is not of sufficient importance for it to be alluded to in papa"s presence--I put on with her.
"Yes, I danced nearly all the dances. One, a princeling in scarlet uniform, appearing fresh from under earth; Prussian: a weighty young Graf in green, between sage and bottle, who seemed to have run off a tree in the forest, and was trimmed with silver like dew-drops: one in your Austrian white, dragon de Boheme, if I caught his French rightly.
Others as well, a list. They have the accomplishment. They are drilled in it young, as girls are, and so few Englishmen--even English officers.
How it may be for campaigning, you can p.r.o.nounce; but for dancing, the pantalon collant is the perfect uniform. Your critical Henrietta had not to complain of her partners, in the absence of the one.
"I shall be haunted by visions of Chillon"s amazement until I hear or we meet. I serve for Carinthia"s mouthpiece, she cannot write it, she says.
It would be related in two copybook lines, if at all.
"The amazement over London! The jewel hand of the kingdom gone in a flash, to "a raw mountain girl," as will be said. I can hear Lady Endor, Lady Eldritch, Lady Cowry. The reasonable woman should be Lady Arpington. I have heard her speak of your mother, seen by her when she was in frocks.
"Enter the "plighted." Poor Livia! to be made a dowager of by any but a damsel of the family. She may well ridicule "that nonsense of Russett"s last night"! Carinthia kisses, embraces, her brother. I am to say: "What Henrietta tells you is true, Chillon." She is contented though she has not seen him again and has not the look of expecting to see him. She still wears the kind of afterglow.
"Chillon"s Viennese waltz was played by the band: played a second time, special request, conveyed to the leader by Prince Ferdinand. True, most true, she longs to be home across the water. But be it admitted, that to any one loving colour, music, chivalry, the Island of Drab is an exile.
Imagine, then, the strange magnetism drawing her there! Could warmer proof be given?
"Adieu. Livia"s "arch-plotter" will weigh the letter he reads to the smallest fraction of a fraction before he moves a step.
"I could leave it and come to it again and add and add. I foresee in Livia"s mind a dread of the aforesaid "arch," and an interdict. So the letter must be closed, sealed and into the box, with the hand I still call mine, though I should doubt my right if it were contested fervently. I am singing the waltz.
"Adieu, "Ever and beyond it, "Your obedient Queen, "HENRIETTA.
"P.S.-My Lord Tyrant has departed--as on other occasions. The prisoner of his word is sure to take his airing before he presents himself to redeem it. His valet is left to pay bills, fortunately for Livia. She entrusted her purse yesterday to a man picked up on the road by my lord, that he might play for her. Captain Abrane a.s.sured her he had a star, and Mr. Potts thought him a rush compere, an adept of those dreadful gambling tables. Why will she continue to play! The purse was returned to her, without so much as a piece of silver in it; the man has flown.
Sir M. Corby says, he is a man whose hands betray him--or did to Sir M.; expects to see him one day on the wrong side of the criminal bar. He struck me as not being worse than absurd. He was, in any case, an unfit companion, and our C. would help to rescue the Eccentric from such complicating a.s.sociates. I see worlds of good she may do. Happily, he is no slave of the vice of gambling; so she would not suffer that anxiety.
I wish it could be subjoined, that he has no malicious pleasure in misleading others. Livia is inconsolable over her pet, young Lord Cressett, whom he yesterday induced to "try his luck"--with the result.
We leave, if bills are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr. Potts left this afternoon; just enough to carry them home. Papa and your blissful sister out driving. Riette within her four walls and signing herself,
"THE PRISONER OF CHILLON."
CHAPTER XIII. AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION
"It is a dark land," Carinthia said, on seeing our Island"s lowered clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer white cliffs. --She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane, when first she beheld Old England"s sh.o.r.es, tossing in the packet-boat on a wild Channel sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family that she did; and no wonder that she should, the day being showery from the bed of the sun, after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn.
We used to have an eye of our own for English weather before printed Meteorological Observations and Forecasts undertook to supplant the shepherd and the poacher, and the pilot with his worn brown leather telescope tucked beneath his arm. All three would have told you, that the end of a three days" frost in the late season of the year and the early, is likely to draw the warm winds from the Atlantic over Cornish Land"s End and Lizard.
Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her father and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can be no harm in quoting her remark. Only--I have to say it--experience causes apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions, and an exposition of feelings; taken for granted,--of course, in a serious narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed for a frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a great painter--and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, with exterior occurrences or impatience for them to come to pa.s.s. Every explanation is sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do, in mercy, I say, let us bide for them.
She thought our Island all the darker because Henrietta had induced her to talk on the boat of her mountain home and her last morning there for the walk away with Chillon John. Soon it was to appear supernaturally bright, a very magician"s cave for brilliancy.
Now, this had happened--and comment on it to yourselves, remembering always, that Chillon John was a lover, and a lover has his excuses, though they will not obviate the penalties he may incur; and dreadful they were. After reading Henrietta"s letter to him, he rode out of his Canterbury quarters across the country to the borders of Suss.e.x, where his uncle Lord Levellier lived, on the ridge of ironstone, near the wild land of a forest, Croridge the name of the place. Now, Chillon John knew his uncle was miserly, and dreaded the prospect of having to support a niece in the wretched establishment at Lekkatts, or, as it was popularly called, Leancats; you can understand why. But he managed to a.s.sure himself he must in duty consult with the senior and chief member of his family on a subject of such importance as the proposal of marriage to his lordship"s niece.
The consultation was short: "You will leave it to me," his uncle said: and we hear of business affairs between them, involving payment of moneys due to the young man; and how, whenever he touched on them, his uncle immediately fell back on the honour of the family and Carinthia Jane"s reputation, her good name to be vindicated, and especially that there must be no delays, together with as close a reckoning as he could make of the value of Lord Fleetwood"s estates in Kent and in Staffordshire and South Wales, and his house property in London.
"He will have means to support her," said the old lord, shrugging as if at his own incapacity for that burden.
The two then went to the workshops beside a large pond, where there was an island bordered with birch trees and workmen"s cottages near the main building; and that was an a.r.s.enal containing every kind of sword and lance and musket, rifle and fowling-piece and pistol, and more gunpowder than was, I believe, allowed by law. For they were engaged in inventing a new powder for howitzer sh.e.l.ls, of tremendous explosive power.
Nothing further did either of them say, concerning the marriage. Nor did Carinthia Jane hear any mention of Lord Fleetwood from her brother on the landing-place at Dover. She was taken to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham"s house in Hampshire; and there she remained, the delight of his life, during two months, patiently expecting and rebuking the unmaidenliness of her expectations, as honest young women in her position used to do. So did they sometimes wait for years; they have waited until they withered into their graves, like the vapours of a brief winter"s day: a moving picture of a s.e.x restrained by modesty in those purer times from the taking of one step forward unless inquired for.
Two months she waited in our "dark land." January arrived, and her brother. Henrietta communicated the news:
"My Janey, you are asked by Lord Fleetwood whether it is your wish that he should marry you."
Now, usually a well-born young woman"s answer, if a willing one, is an example of weak translation. Here it was the heart"s native tongue, without any roundabout, simple but direct.
"Oh, I will, I am ready, tell him."
Remember, she was not speaking publicly.
Henrietta knew the man enough to be glad he did not hear. She herself would have felt a little shock on his behalf: only, that answer suited the scheme of the pair of lovers.
How far those two were innocent in not delivering the whole of Lord Fleetwood"s message to Carinthia Jane through Lord Levellier, we are unable to learn. We may suspect the miserly n.o.bleman of curtailing it for his purposes; and such is my idea. But the answer would have been the same, I am sure.
In consequence and straight away, Chillon John betakes him to Admiral Baldwin and informs him of Lord Fleetwood"s proposal on the night at Baden, and renewal of it through the mouth of Lord Levellier, not communicating, however (he may really not have known), the story of how it had been wrung from the earl by a surprise movement on the part of the one-armed old lord, who burst out on him in the street from the ambush of a Club-window, where he had been stationed every day for a fortnight, indefatigably to watch for the pa.s.sing of the earl, as there seemed no other way to find him. They say, indeed, there was a scene, judging by the result, and it would have been an excellent scene for the stage; though the two n.o.blemen were to all appearance politely exchanging their remarks. But the audience hearing what pa.s.ses, appreciates the courteous restraint of an att.i.tude so contrasting with their tempers. Behind the ostentation of civility, their words were daggers.
For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his Welsh castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of the proposal of his hand and t.i.tle to the strange girl in a quadrille at a foreign castle had been forgotten by her, and the risks of annoyance on the subject had quite blown over, returned to town, happy in having done the penance for his impulsiveness, and got clean again--that is to say, struck off his fetters and escaped from importunities--the very morning of the day when Lord Levellier sprang upon him! It shows the old campaigner"s shrewdness in guessing where his prey would come, and not putting him on his guard by a call at his house. Out of the window he looked for all the hours of light during an entire fortnight. "In the service of my sister"s child," he said. "To save him from the cost of maintaining her," say his enemies. At any rate he did it.
He was likely to have done the worse which I suspect.
Now, the imparting of the wonderful news to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham was, we read, the whiff of a tropical squall to lay him on his beam ends. He could not but doubt; and his talk was like the sails of a big ship rattling to the first puff of wind. He had to believe; and then, we read, he was for hours like a vessel rolling in the trough of the sea.
Of course he was a disappointed father. Naturally his glance at the loss to Henrietta of the greatest prize of the matrimonial market of all Europe and America was vexing and saddening. Then he woke up to think of the fortunes of his "other girl," as he named her, and cried: "Crinny catches him!"