"She wishes to have you," Mr. Wythan came and said to her. "Almost her first word. The heart is quickening. She will live for me if she can."
He whispered it. His features shot the sparkle.
Rebecca Wythan had strength to press Carinthia"s hand faintly. She made herself heard: "No pain." Her husband sat upright, quite still, attentive for any sign. His look of quiet pleasure ready to show, sprightliness dwelt on her. She returned the look, unable to give it greeting. Past the sense of humour, she wanted to say: "See the poor simple fellow who will think it a wife that he has!" She did but look.
Carinthia spoke his name, "Mr. Wythan," by chance, and Rebecca breathed heavily until she formed the words: "Owain to me."
"To me," Owain added.
The three formed a chain of clasped hands.
It was in the mind of the sick lady to disburden herself of more than her weakness could utter, so far was she above earthly links. The desire in her was to be quit of the flesh, bearing a picture of her husband as having the dues of his merits.
Her recovered strength next day brought her nearer to our laws. "You will call him Owain, Carinthia?" she said. "He is not one to presume on familiarity. I must be going soon. I cannot leave him the wife I would choose. I can leave him the sister. He is a sure friend. He is the knightly man women dream of. I harp on it because I long for testimony that I leave him to have some reward. And this may be, between two so pure at heart as you two."
"Dear soul friend, yes, and Owain, yes, I can say it," Carinthia rejoined. "Brother? I have only my Chillon. My life is now for him. I am punished for separating myself from the son of my father. I have no heart for a second brother. What I can give to my friend I will. I shall love you in him, if I am to lose you."
"Not Owain--it was I was the wretch refused to call on the lonely lady at the castle until I heard she had done a romantic little bit of thing--hushed a lambkin"s bleating. My loss! my loss! And I could afford it so poorly. Since then Carinthia has filled my days. I shudder to leave you and think of your going back to the English. Their sneer withers. They sent you down among us as a young woman to be shunned."
"I did wildly, I was ungoverned, I had one idea," said Carinthia. "One idea is a bullet, good for the day of battle to beat the foe, father tells us. It was a madness in me. Now it has gone, I see all round. I see straight, too. With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself.
Whizz! we go. I did. I shall no longer offend in that way. Mr. Gower Woodseer is here from my lord."
"With him the child will be safe."
"I am not alarmed. It is to request--they would have me gone, to prepare the way for my lord."
"You have done, it; he has the castle to himself. I cannot-spare you.
A tyrant ordering you to go should be defied. My Lord Fleetwood puts lightning into my slow veins."
"We have talked: we shall be reproved by the husband and the doctor,"
said Carinthia.
Sullen days continued and rolled over to night at the mines. Gower"s mission was rendered absurd by the countess"s withdrawal from the castle. He spoke of it to Mr. Wythan once, and the latter took a big breath and blew such a lord to the winds. "Persuade our guest to leave us, that the air may not be tainted for her husband when he comes? He needn"t call; he"s not obliged to see her. She"s offered Esslemont to live in? I believe her instinct"s right--he has designs on the child.
A little more and we shall have a mad dog in the fellow. He doubles my work by keeping his men out. If she were away we should hear of black doings. Twenty dozen of his pugilists wouldn"t stop the burning."
They agreed that persuasions need not be addressed to the countess. She was and would remain Mr. Wythan"s guest. As for the earl, Gower inclined to plead hesitatingly, still to plead, on behalf of a n.o.bleman owning his influence and very susceptible to his wisdom, whose echo of a pointed saying nearly equalled the satisfaction bestowed by print. The t.i.tled man affected the philosopher in that manner; or rather, the crude philosopher"s relish of brilliant appreciation stripped him of his robe.
For he was with Owain Wythan at heart to scorn t.i.tles which did not distinguish practical offices. A nation bowing to them has gone to pith, for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he had to do it often. Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism for us unless we nerve the mind to wakeful repulsion. He protested he had reason to think the earl was humanizing, though he might be killing a woman in the process. "Could she wish for better?"
he asked, with at least the gravity of the undermining humourist; and he started Owain to course an idea when he remarked of Lord Fleetwood: "Imagine a devil on his back on a river, flying a cherub."
Owain sparkled from the vision of the thing to wrath with it.
"Ay, but while he"s floating, his people are edging on starvation. And I"ve a personal grievance. I keep, you know, open hall, bread and cheese and beer, for poor mates. His men are favouring us with a call. We have to cart treble from the town. If I straighten the sticks he dies to bend, it"ll be a grievance against me--and a fig for it! But I like to be at peace with my neighbours, and waft them "penillion" instead of dealing the "cleddyfal" of Llewellyn."
At last the tension ceased; they had intelligence of the earl"s arrival.
His countess was little moved by it; and the reason for that lay in her imagination being absorbed. Henrietta had posted her a journal telling of a deed of Chillon"s: no great feat, but precious for its "likeness to him," as they phrased it; that is, for the light it cast on their conception of the man. Heading a squadron in a riotous Midland town, he stopped a charge, after fire of a shot from the mob, and galloped up the street to catch a staggering urchin to his saddle-bow, and place the mite in safety. Then it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made for him.
Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world"s hot stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother"s thoughtful little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.
CHAPTER x.x.xI. WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her detestation of imagerial epigrams. Otherwise Gower Woodseer"s dash at the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a "devil on his back on a river" was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and teaser.
Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew the breath from him;--and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and gurgle of the nurses, he could swear. He kicked at the bondage to our common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.
But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard. They were, it seemed, external--no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace across wintry air. They were, as it chanced, Nature"s woman in him plucking at her separated partner, Custom"s man; something of an oriental voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life"s convict couple walk linked to one another, to their issue more.
There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother would have. The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,--he would be no mean one, no coward.
That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a mother:--Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy--that mother, a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the world. "It is my husband" sounded foolish, sounded freshish,--a new note. Would she repeat it? The bit of simplicity would bear repeating once. Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to perfect herself. She"s a good way off that, and may spoil herself in the process; but she has a certain power. Her donkey obstinacy in refusing compliance, and her pursuit of "my husband," and ability to drench him with ridicule, do not exhibit the ordinary young female. She stamps her impression on the people she meets. Her husband is shaken to confess it likewise, despite a disagreement between them.
He has owned he is her husband: he has not disavowed the consequence.
That fellow, Gower Woodseer, might accuse the husband of virtually lying, if he by his conduct implied her distastefulness or worse. By heaven! as felon a deed as could be done. Argue the case anyhow, it should be undone. Let her but cease to madden. For whatever the rawness of the woman, she has qualities; and experience of the facile loves of London very sharply defines her qualities. Think of her as raw, she has the gift of rareness: forget the donkey obstinacy, her character grasps.
In the grasp of her character, one inclines, and her husband inclines, to become her advocate. She has only to discontinue maddening.
The wealthy young n.o.ble prized any form of rareness wherever it was visible, having no thought of the purchase of it, except with worship.
He could listen pleased to the talk of a Methodist minister sewing bootleather. He picked up a roadside tramp and made a friend of him, and valued the fellow"s honesty, submitted to his lectures, pardoned his insolence. The sight of Carinthia"s narrow bedroom and strip of bed over Sarah Winch"s Whitechapel shop had gone a step to drown the bobbing Whitechapel Countess. At least, he had not been hunted by that gaunt chalk-quarry ghost since his peep into the room. Own it! she likewise has things to forgive. Women nurse their larvae of ideas about fair dealing. But observe the distinction: aid if women understood justice they would be the first to proclaim, that when two are tied together, the one who does the other serious injury is more naturally excused than the one who-tenfold abhorrent if a woman!--calls up the grotesque to extinguish both.
With this apology for himself, Lord Fleetwood grew tolerant of the person honourably avowed as his wife. So; therefore, the barrier between him and his thoughts of her was broken. The thoughts carrying red doses were selected. Finally, the taste to meet her sprouted. If agreeable, she could be wooed; if barely agreeable, tormented; if disagreeable, left as before.
Although it was the hazard of a die, he decided to follow his taste. Her stay at the castle had kept him long from the duties of his business; and he could imagine it a grievance if he pleased, but he put it aside.
Alighting at his chief manager"s office, he pa.s.sed through the heated atmosphere of black-browed, wiry little rebels, who withheld the salute as they lounged: a posture often preceding the spring in compulsorily idle workers. He was aware of instinct abroad, an antagonism to the proprietor"s rights. They roused him to stand by them, and were his own form of instinct, handsomely clothed. It behoved that he should examine them and the claims against them, to be sure of his ground. He and Mr.
Howell Edwards debated the dispute for an hour; agreeing, partially differing. There was a weakness on the principle in Edwards. These fellows fixed to the spot are for compromise too much. An owner of mines has no steady reckoning of income if the rate of wage is perpetually to shift according to current, mostly ignorant, versions of the prosperity of the times. Are we so prosperous? It is far from certain. And if the rate ascends, the question of easing it down to suit the discontinuance of prosperity agitating our exchequer--whose demand is for fixity--perplexes us further.
However, that was preliminary. He and Howell Edwards would dine and wrangle it out. The earl knew himself a hot disputant after dinner.
Incidentally he heard of Lady Fleetwood as a guest of Mrs. Wythan; and the circ.u.mstance was injurious to him because he stood against Mr.
Wythan"s pampering system with his men.
Ines up at the castle smelt of beer, and his eyelids were sottish.
Nothing to do tries the virtue of the best. He sought his excuse in a heavy lamentation over my lady"s unjust suspicion of him,--a known man of honour, though he did serve his paytron.
The cause of Lady Fleetwood"s absence was exposed to her outraged lord, who had sent the man purely to protect her at this castle, where she insisted on staying. The suspicion cast on the dreary lusher was the wife"s wild shot at her husband. One could understand a silly woman"s pa.s.sing terror. Her acting under the dictate of it struck the husband"s ribbed breast as a positive clap of hostilities between them across a chasm.
His previous placable mood was immediately conceived by him to have been one of his fits of generosity; a step to a frightful dutiful embrace of an almost repulsive object. He flung the thought of her back on her Whitechapel. She returned from that place with smiles, dressed in a laundry white with a sprinkle of s.m.u.ts, appearing to him as an adversary armed and able to strike. There was a blow, for he chewed resentments; and these were goaded by a remembered shyness of meeting her eyes when he rounded up the slope of the hill, in view of his castle, where he supposed she would be awaiting "my husband." The silence of her absence was lively mockery of that antic.i.p.ation.
Gower came on him sauntering about the grounds.
"You"re not very successful down here," Fleetwood said, without greeting.
"The countess likes the air of this country," said Gower, evasively, impertinently, and pointlessly; offensively to the despot employing him to be either subservient or smart.
"I wish her to leave it."
"She wishes to see you first."
"She takes queer measures. I start to-morrow for my yacht at Cardiff."
There the matter ended; for Fleetwood fell to talking of the mines. At dinner and after dinner it was the topic, and after Howell Edwards had departed.