So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.
Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants for the dispensing of dainty sc.r.a.ps to tickle the ears, to arm the tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank of Ophelia"s ditch. Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the blush, by a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks. High-nosed dames will surpa.s.s eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where Ahem sounds the warning note to curtained decency. The courtly M. de St. Ombre had to stand confused. He, however, gave another version of Captain Abrane"s "fiddler," and precipitated the great ladies into the reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French Revolution, have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Cla.s.s.
Homme d"esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than vagabond, was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further example of the French deficiency in humour.
Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is. Lady Cowry has it from Sir Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table; fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving oranges at a small fruit-shop. With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her there; and she can"t be got to leave the place unless her husband drives his coach down to fetch her. That he declines to do; so she remains the Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a shilling of her husband"s money, if she "s not to bring him to his knees; and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments. One signal from the man he has hired, and he stops drinking--he will stop speaking as soon as the man"s mouth is open. He is under a complete fascination, attributable, some say, to pa.s.ses of the hands, which the man won"t wash lest he should weaken their influence.
For it cannot be simply his violin playing. They say he was a pupil of a master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious. Lord Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously. But the man"s influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists--if the man wishes it. Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.
Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man, formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at the most. He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German philosophy; otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and dress. It is my lord who has had the chief influence. And the Countess Livia now backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young man to be found. She may have her reasons.
As for the Whitechapel Countess... the whole story of the Old Buccaneer and Countess f.a.n.n.y was retold, and it formed a terrific halo, presage of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had incomprehensibly espoused to discard. Those two had a son and a daughter born aboard:--in wedlock, we trust. The girl may be as wild a one as the mother. She has a will as determined as her husband"s. She is offered Esslemont, the earl"s Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to entreat her. The injury was deep on one side or the other. It may be almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together. Will either of them deal the stroke for freedom? And which is the likelier?
Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh of London. Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from his shades at a call of the great world"s appet.i.te for more, and, rushing upon stationary Fact, supplied the required. Marvel upon marvel was recounted. The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined, where all was increasingly funny.
Always the shout for more produced it. She and her band of Whitechapel boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went. She stood knocking at his door through a whole night. He dared not lug her before a magistrate for fear of exposure. Once, riding in the park with a troop of friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was levelled, and she cried: "There is the English n.o.bleman who marries a girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!"
He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:--my lady the countess was on board! A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.
The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best. They let pa.s.s incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the n.o.bility and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript, Vive L"aristocratie! Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.
He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted n.o.bleman. But it was nothing worse than the parasite that he had. This was the parasite"s gentle treason. He found it an easy road to humour; it p.r.i.c.ked the slug fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his patron kindly. Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were personages during the town"s excitement, besought for having something to say. Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh wherever they alighted. Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his fellows. They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.
He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl"s fortunes to the cunning of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young n.o.bleman he was plotting to ruin. Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane"s latest effort to hit the dirty object"s name, by calling him "Fleetwood"s Mr. Woodlouse." And was the rascal a sorcerer? Sir Meeson spoke of him in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: "I begin to be of Russett"s opinion, that his fault is his honesty." The rascal had won or partly won the empress of her s.e.x! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of the tramp"s borrowed plumes! Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.
Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable. Thither one fair June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her beautiful cousin, the French n.o.bleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my lord"s pugilist, Christopher Ives.
Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.
The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for supposing they a.s.sumed airs of state in the style of a previous generation. Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, "that a dried fish is no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the incident." His exact meaning in "smoky flavour" we are not to know; but whether that M. de St. Ombre should witness the effect of English humour upon them, or that the ladies could permit themselves to laugh, their voices accompanied the gentlemen in silvery volleys. There had been "Mackrell" at Fleetwood"s dinner-table; which was then a way of saying that dry throats made no count of the quant.i.ty of champagne imbibed, owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused. However, there was loud laughter as they strolled, and it was noticed; and Fleetwood crying out, "Mackrell! Mackrell!" in delighted repudiation of the wag"s last sally, the cry of "Hooray, Mackrell!" was caught up by the crowd. They were not the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party is bad breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.
So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was good-humoured about it.
Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his dancing. He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine, sure of pleasing his patron; and the maid, pa.s.sing from surprise to merriment, entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without emulation, for she likewise had the pa.s.sion for the dance. Whereby it befell that the pair footed in a way to gather observant spectators; and if it had not been that the man from whom the maid was w.i.l.l.y-nilly s.n.a.t.c.hed, conceived resentment, things might have pa.s.sed comfortably; for Kit"s quips and cuts and high capers, and the Sunday gravity of the barge face while the legs were at their impish trickery, double motion to the music, won the crowd to cheer. They conjectured him to be a British sailor. But the dest.i.tuted man said, sailor or no sailor,--bos"en be hanged! he should pay for his whistle.
Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short loan of her.--The man had an itch to strike. Choosing rather to be struck first, he vented nasty remarks. My lord spoke to Kit and moved on. At the moment of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a waggery of some sort, heard to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous effect, that the prompt and immoderate laugh succeeding it might reasonably be taken for a fling of scorn at himself, by an injured man.
They were a party; he therefore proceeded to make one, appealing to English sentiment and right feeling. The blameless and repentant maid plucked at his coat to keep him from d.o.g.g.i.ng the heels of the gentlemen.
Fun was promised; consequently the crowd waxed.
"My lord," had been let fall by Kit Ines. Conjoined to "Mackrell,"
it rang finely, and a trumpeting of "Lord Mackrell" resounded. Lord Mackrell was asked for "more capers and not so much sauce." Various fish took part in his t.i.tle of n.o.bility. The wag Mackrell continuing to be discreetly silent, and Kit Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd fell in love with their display of English humour, disposed to the surly satisfaction of a big street dog that has been appeased by a smaller one"s total cessation of growls.
All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures of young women on the scene. They fronted the advance of the procession.
They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell. Not a bit of it--he won"t listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him. It"s regular imploring: "my lord! my lord!"
O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell! Listen to the young woman, you Mackrell, or you"ll get Billingsgate! Here"s Mr.
Jig-and-Reel behind here, says she"s done him! By Gosh! What"s up now?
One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell"s way. The crowd pressed to see.
Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off. They performed an envelopment of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women. Kit left his mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two. He rattled at her. But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him.
What did she say?
Merely to hear, for no other reason," a peace-loving crowd of clerks and tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions, night-larks of different cla.s.ses, both s.e.xes, there in that place for simple entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour, contracted, so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to the most orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir Meeson Corby.
He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.
"c.o.c.k Robin crowing" provoked a jolly round of barking chaff. The noise in a dense ring drew Fleetwood"s temper. He gave the word to Kit Ines, and immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit. The fists worked right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for sickle or scythe. And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed her venerable self in the style and the perfect sufficiency of the strokes. A bruiser delivered them. No shame to back away before a bruiser. There was rather an admiring envy of the party claiming the nimble champion on their side, until the very moderate lot of the Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path with sticks pointed.
If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to get through. An aggressive minority, and with c.o.c.k Robin squealing for constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to have a lesson. The sticks were fallen on; b.u.mp came the ma.s.s. Kit Ines had to fight his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish ring, but the gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to cheer the spirits of the ladies:--"All right, my friend, you"re a trifle mistaken, it "s my stick, not yours." Therewith the wrestle for the stick.
The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not a common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him. Her stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby"s ebony stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the sconces, then to dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl, perhaps a lady, her cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much as tightening her lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched for by Rose Mackrell, who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head, cried: "d.a.m.n it all, she"s clever, though!" She took her station beside Lord Fleetwood.
He had been as cool as she, or almost. Now he was maddened; she defended him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a touch; unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow"s public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule. Have you seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables that betrays the mishandling of him by his groom? Something so did Fleetwood plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul cried out on her sticking to him like a plaster!
Welcome were the constables. His guineas winked at their chief, as fair women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words of his: "Right, my lord," smelling my lord in the unerring manner of those days. My lord"s party were escorted to the gates, not a little jeered; though they by no means had the worst of the tussle. But the puffing indignation of Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and torn frill and b.u.t.tons plucked from his coat, and his threat of the magistrates, excited the crowd to derisive yells.
My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.
The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language. They, according to the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race. Both gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done such gallant service with Sir Meeson"s ebony wand. He was beginning to fuss vociferously about the loss of the stick--a family stick, goldheaded, the family crest on it, priceless to the family--when Mrs.
Kirby-Levellier handed it to him inside the coach.
"But where is she?" M. de St. Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia"s touch on his arm in the dark.
At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured, "Ah!"
He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.
They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on the subject. Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection with a boiling topic of current scandal,--glaringly ill.u.s.trative of it, moreover,--were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been sworn to secresy. Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself.
So he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give the last wink of reason to the wine-cup. Persecuted as he was, nothing remained for him but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.
That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at Sir Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its being the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young n.o.bleman to exhibit. She pitied him: she had done him some wrong. She read into him, too, as none else could. Seeing the solitary tortures behind the pleasant social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask seemed pathetic. She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her bosom of tears. Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly mentionable. Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this!
The incorrigible cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her pictured, at a word of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world acting audience. Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house and were alone. Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which is more eloquent than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads. My lord, it was thought by the ladies, had directed his man to convey her safely to her chosen home, whence she might be expected very soon to be issuing and striking the gong of London again.
CHAPTER XXIV. A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
Ladies who have the pride of delicate breeding are not more than rather violently hurled back on the fortress it is, when one or other of the gross mishaps of circ.u.mstance may subject them to a shock: and this happening in the presence of gentlemen, they are sustained by the within and the without to keep a smooth countenance, however severe their affliction. Men of heroic nerve decline similarly to let explosions shake them, though earth be shaken. Dragged into the monstrous grotesque of the scene at the Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal, masking any signs that they were stripped for a flagellation.
Only, the fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the world was an ign.o.ble beast. They did not discuss Carinthia"s latest craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they were in the interjectory state.
Henrietta was Livia"s guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna: "To get money! money!" her angry bluntness explained his absence, and dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had fallen. She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible economy:--"think of the smallest trifles!" so that her Chillon travelled unaccompanied, they were separated. Her iterations upon money were the vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and cla.s.sed herself with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings; and that miserly Lord Levellier"s indebtedness to Chillon--large sums!
and Chillon"s praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father"s estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance; but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had chosen; apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground against him: and though a single sign of submission would place the richest purse in England at her disposal. "She refuses Esslemont!
She insists on his meeting her! No child could be so witless. Let him be the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for her brother"s sake! She loves her brother? No: deaf to him, to me, to every consideration except her blind will."
Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.
It refreshed a phlegmatic lady"s disposition for prophecy. Lovers abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who tugs at them for subsistence or existence. The condition, if they are much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness, to be bitterly misanthropical.
Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta"s unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law"s misconduct, or the crude expression of it. She could not guess that Carinthia"s unhappiness in marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by the conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to bring it to pa.s.s. Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she blamed Carinthia in another"s hearing.