Please fetch pen and paper: it"s a letter."
The letter began, "Dear Lady Arpington."
The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life"s ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky brevity. It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at furthest. He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have the young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.
Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.
"Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil"s abroad"--done it!"
he said, sinking back. "Now seal, you"ll find wax--the ring at my watch-chain."
He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.
Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address of Lady Arpington"s town house.
"You have a letter for her?" said Livia, and held her hand for it in a way not to be withstood.
"There"s no superscription," he remarked.
"I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer."
"I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood."
"By no means." She touched his arm. "You are Lord Fleetwood"s friend."
A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral"s shirt-collar at his ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had wits alive enough, just to perceive a duty.
"The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood."
"You are afraid to entrust it to the post?"
"I was thinking of delivering it myself in town."
"You will entrust it to me."
"Anything on earth of my own."
"The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care."
"It is important."
"No."
"Indeed it is."
"Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important that it should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood"s friend?
Lady Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and me. Besides, I don"t think she has come to town yet. She generally sees out the end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go.
You, with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle has not his whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case.
Lord Fleetwood"s friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up to his enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I drive back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my carriage."
He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.
They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him.
He spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby"s reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him again would not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the head testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.
Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the admiral"s chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it. Admiral Baldwin"s condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest"s departure until they two could make the journey together next day. The tortured and blissful young man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher"s cloak, hung conscience-ridden in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of the vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and mixed with his cup of amorous worship.
CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one of Gower"s crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge, besides the pa.s.sion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to him. For Nature is the Truth.
He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the pet.i.tion, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour; and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the right to a sense of honour. "We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
Woodseer," she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it manifested. There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common grounds between them, accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it.
A face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he, so clever a man, resumed his very silly pet.i.tion.
She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed to London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison; enamoured of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the journey"s end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a flowing river.
The best help to health for him was a day in his father"s house. We are perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too, reproached him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration of a woman takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to say sheer donkey, he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say worse in this case; for the words are, liar and traitor.
Carinthia"s att.i.tude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight of her lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke of the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having only the wish to a.s.sist in ministering. Probably the great wretchedness bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of Admiral Baldwin"s end; her bosom sprang up: "He was next to father," was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the lodgings of poverty. She had descended on the world. There was of course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her; the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an urchin who had amused her.
As to the place itself, she had no judgement to p.r.o.nounce, except that: "They have no mornings here"; and the childish remark set her quivering on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower"s memory. Scarce anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her brother"s return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and its uses had impressed her; the quant.i.ty possessed by some, the utter need of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not of so halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was planted.
Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father similarly at work: "A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her on the day of their nuptials.
She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?"
Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:
"Yes, I can imagine it, I"m doing it myself. I shall be doing it till I"ve written a letter and paid a visit."
He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because of the insensibility to beauty. Out of which he pa.s.sed to the writing of the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood.
A duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a n.o.bleman"s recollection, ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man suspecting them of the bite of rabies.
An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.
She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance with the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand beside her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.
"Really, really, that young man"s freaks appear designed for the express purpose of heightening our amazement!" she exclaimed. "He won"t easily get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there"s no knowing. Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham"s I hold sacred. At least I can see for myself. You can"t tell me more of the facts? If Lord Fleetwood"s in town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to this address you give me. She is a civil person?"
"Her breeding is perfect," said Gower.
"Perfect breeding, you say?" Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.
She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She was of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to his clothing. Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the humblest who bear the main elements of it must be.
Certain humorous turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.
One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer"s brief words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great lady"s plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the paternal side.