"You consider it holy?"
"My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie. I read the service before I stood at the altar. It is holy. It is dreadful. I will be true to it."
"To your husband?"
"To his name, to his honour."
"To the vow to live with him?"
"My husband broke that for me."
"Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it? G.o.d knows what you may save me from!"
"Pray to G.o.d. Do not beg of me, my lord. I have my brother and my little son. No more of husband for me! G.o.d has given me a friend, too,--a man of humble heart, my brother"s friend, my dear Rebecca"s husband. He can take them from me: no one but G.o.d. See the splendid sky we have."
With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of anguish swell an ecstasy. So he felt it, for his mood was now the lover"s. A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.
"I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia," he said. "The name of his house?"
"My brother is not now any more in the English army," she replied. "He has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge."
"He will receive me, I presume?"
"My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord."
"Here is the church, and here we have to part for today. Do we?"
"Good-bye to you, my lord," she said.
He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.
"Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?"
"For the present," was her strange answer.
She bowed, she stepped on. On she sped, leaving him at the stammered beginning of his appeal to her.
Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was what the world would cla.s.s as curious. To him it was a further and a well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.
There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family had given him at his request. He felt the lump. It had an answer for all perplexities. It had been charged and emptied since it was in his possession; and it could be charged again. The thing was a volume as big as the world to study. For the touch of a finger, one could have its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.
He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes bent inward. They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre"s Madonna. But whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain for having inflicted it. Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether of anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until priestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She is a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make him feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him from her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is, here are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanct.i.ty, even the heathen.
Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot, Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement of a desire for the warm smell of incense.
CHAPTER XLIII. ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE
His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great Nourisher"s teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his dejection by a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont underneath had no such air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness. Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of the running beast. Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of incense all about him. Breathing this air of the young sun"s kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Oriental gums.
Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage--the bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight ma.s.s. Asceticism, though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But before we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; "No living happiness can be for the unclean," as the holy father preached to his flock of the monastery dispersing at matins.
Ay, but penance? penance? Is there not such a thing as the doing of penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion? So to regain the right to be numbered among the captains of the world"s fighting men, incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a cataract leap at the gates of life. Boldly to say we did a wrong will clear our sky for a few shattering peals.
The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course ahead. But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the walks of the world must be steadied. Say it plainly-mated. There is the humiliating point of our human condition. We must have beside us and close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves lucky enough to have found her; "that required other scale of the human balance," as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord Feltre in reference to men and women. We get no balance without her. That is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men"s wretched enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable union with women. Feltre"s view of women sees the devilish or the angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies. Hence do we behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.
He embraced the respected woman"s character, with the usual effect:--to see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes--corrupt and cause their d.a.m.nation, they retort, with curses, in their pangs.
She was expected to pardon the husband, who had not abstained from his revenge on her for keeping him to the pledge of his word. And what a revenge!--he had flung the world at her. She is consequently to be the young bride she was on the memorable morning of the drive off these heights of Croridge down to thirty-acre meadow! It must be a saint to forgive such offences; and she is not one, she is deliciously not one, neither a Genevieve nor a Griselda. He handed her the rod to chastise him. Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it; she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in fact, respected. Any whipping from her was child"s play to him, on whom, if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal morning animates men of high blood in ice regions. She could but gently sting, even if vindictive.
Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand. The earl saluted with his whip, and waited for him.
"Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?"
"Nothing to fear, my lord."
"I get a trifle uneasy."
"The countess will not leave her brother."
A glow of his countess"s friendliness for this open-faced, prompt-speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly sheepish inclinations, melted Fleetwood. Our downright repentance of misconduct toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition of what poor sc.r.a.ps of consolement she may have picked up between then and now--when we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her being a woman of honour.
The earl alighted and said: "Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the position."
"He"s worth it--she loves her brother," said Mr. Wythan, betraying a feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance.
Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood interpreted the Welshman"s. "I have to see the brother worthy of her love. Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?".....
Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the sufficient a.s.surance of audience granted.
"You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?"
"Know him as if I had known him for years. They both come to the mind as faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them."
Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do the same by him.
Mr. Wythan"s quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on his way to breakfast. The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at Lekkatts. It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut. A miserly old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a critical moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon crippled resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are ruining his interests. They made one night a demonstration of the terrorizing sort round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord fired at them out of window and wounded a man. For that they vowed vengeance. All the new gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose of his own, stored by Lord Levellier on the alder island of the pond near his workshops, a quarter of a mile below the house. They refused, whatever their object, to let a pound of it be moved, at a time when at last the Government had undertaken to submit it to experiments. And there they stood on ground too strong for "the Captain," as they called him, to force, because of the quant.i.ty stored at Lekkatts being largely beyond the amount under cover of Lord Levellier"s licence. The old lord was very ill, and he declined to see a doctor, but obstinately kept from dying. His nephew had to guard him and at the same time support an enemy having just cause of complaint. This, however, his narrow means would not much longer permit him to do. The alternative was then offered him of either siding arbitrarily against the men and his conscience or of taking a course "imprudent on the part of a presumptive heir," Mr.
Wythan said hurriedly at the little inn"s doorsteps.
"You make one of his lordship"s guard?" said Fleetwood.
"The countess, her brother, and I, yes"
"Danger at all?"
"Not so much to fear while the countess is with us."
"Fear is not a word for Carinthia."