"In the event of accidents, the responsibility for having persuaded her would rest on you."
"My brother has not persuaded me," Carinthia"s belltones intervened. "I proposed it. The persuasion was mine. It is my happiness to be near him, helping, if I can."
"Lady Fleetwood, I am ent.i.tled to think that your brother yielded to a request urged in ignorance of the nature of the risks a woman runs."
"My brother does not yield to a request without examining it all round, my lord, and I do not. I know the risks. An evil that we should not endure,--life may go. There can be no fear for me."
She spoke plain truth. The soul of this woman came out in its radiance to subdue him, as her visage sometimes did; and her voice enlarged her words. She was a warrior woman, Life her sword, Death her target, never to be put to shame, unconquerable. No such symbolical image smote him, but he had an impression, the prose of it. As in the scene of the miners" cottares, her lord could have knelt to her: and for an unprotesting longer s.p.a.ce now. He choked a sigh, shrugged, and said, in the world"s patient manner with mad people: "You have set your mind on it; you see it rose-coloured. You would not fear, no, but your friends would have good reason to fear. It"s a menagerie in revolt over there.
It is not really the place for you. Abandon the thought, I beg."
"I shall, if my brother does not go," said Carinthia.
Laughter of spite at a remark either silly or slyly defiant was checked in Fleetwood by the horror of the feeling that she had gone, was ankle-deep in b.l.o.o.d.y mire, captive, prey of a rabble soldiery, meditating the shot or stab of the blessed end out of woman"s half of our human muddle.
He said to Chillon: "Pardon me, war is a detestable game. Women in the thick of it add a touch to the brutal hideousness of the whole thing."
Chillon said: "We are all of that opinion. Men have to play the game; women serving in hospital make it humaner."
"Their hospitals are not safe."
"Well! Safety!"
For safety is nowhere to be had. But the earl pleaded: "At least in our country."
"In our country women are safe?"
"They are, we may say, protected."
"Laws and constables are poor protection for them."
"The women we name ladies are pretty safe, as a rule."
"My sister, then, was the exception."
After a burning half minute the earl said: "I have to hear it from you, Mr. Levellier. You see me here."
That was handsomely spoken. But Lord Fleetwood had been judged and put aside. His opening of an old case to hint at repentance for brutality annoyed the man who had let him go scathless for a sister"s sake.
"The grounds of your coming, my lord, are not seen; my time is short."
"I must, I repeat, be consulted with regard to Lady Fleetwood"s movements."
"My sister does not acknowledge your claim."
"The Countess of Fleetwood"s acts involve her husband."
"One has to listen at times to what old sailors call Caribbee!" Chillon exclaimed impatiently, half aloud. "My sister received your t.i.tle; she has to support it. She did not receive the treatment of a wife:--or lady, or woman, or domestic animal. The bond is broken, as far as it bears on her subjection. She holds to the rite, thinks it sacred. You can be at rest as to her behaviour. In other respects, your lordship does not exist for her."
"The father of her child must exist for her."
"You raise that curtain, my lord!"
In the presence of three it would not bear a shaking.
Carinthia said, in pity of his torture:--
"I have my freedom, and am thankful for it, to follow my brother, to share his dangers with him. That is more to me than luxury and the married state. I take only my freedom."
"Our boy? You take the boy?"
"My child is with my sister Henrietta!
"Where?"
"We none know yet."
"You still mistrust me?"
Her eyes were on a man that she had put from her peaceably; and she replied, with sweetness in his ears, with shocks to a sinking heart, "My lord, you may learn to be a gentle father to the child. I pray you may.
My brother and I will go. If it is death for us, I pray my child may have his father, and G.o.d directing his father."
Her speech had the clang of the final.
"Yes, I hope--if it be the worst happening, I pray, too," said he, and drooped and brightened desperately: "But you, too, Carinthia, you could aid by staying, by being with the boy and me. Carinthia!" he clasped her name, the vapour left to him of her: "I have learnt learnt what I am, what you are; I have to climb a height to win back the wife I threw away. She was unknown to me; I to myself nearly as much. I sent a warning of the kind of husband for you--a poor kind; I just knew myself well enough for that. You claimed my word--the blessing of my life, if I had known it! We were married; I played--I see the beast I played.
Money is power, they say. I see the means it is to d.a.m.n the soul, unless we--unless a man does what I do now."
Fleetwood stopped. He had never spoken such words--arterial words, as they were, though the commonest, and with moist brows, dry lips, he could have resumed, have said more, have taken this woman, this dream of the former bride, the present stranger, into his chamber of the brave aims and sentenced deeds. Her brother in the room was the barrier; and she sat mute, large-eyed, expressionless. He had plunged low in the man"s hearing; the air of his lungs was thick, hard to breathe, for shame of a degradation so extreme.
Chillon imagined him to be sighing. He had to listen further. "Soul" had been an uttered word. When the dishonouring and mishandling brute of a young n.o.bleman stuttered a compliment to Carinthia on her "faith in G.o.d"s a.s.sistance and the efficacy of prayer," he jumped to his legs, not to be shouting "Hound!" at him. He said, under control: "G.o.d"s name shall be left to the Church. My sister need not be further troubled. She has shown she is not persuaded by me. Matters arranged here quickly,--we start. If I am asked whether I think she does wisely to run the risks in an insurrectionary country rather than remain at home exposed to the honours and amus.e.m.e.nts your lordship offers, I think so; she is acting in her best interests. She has the choice of being abroad with me or staying here unguarded by me. She has had her experience. She chooses rightly. Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she escapes." She thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to choose. I am responsible for nothing but the not having stood against her most wretched marriage. It might have been foreseen. Out there in the war she is protected. Here she is with--I spare your lordship the name."
Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia"s husband.
He withheld his reply. The language moved him to proud hostility: but the speaker was Carinthia"s brother.
He said to her: "You won"t forget Gower and Madge?"
She gave him a smile in saying: "It shall be settled for a day after next week."
The forms of courtesy were exchanged.
At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: "He did send a message: I gathered it--without the words--from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him in honour bound to you--and it suited me that I should."
"I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,"
said Carinthia. "That was my treachery to the love of my brother.. I dream of father and mother reproaching me."
The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind"s picture of the early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for having abandoned a sister"s duties in the quest of personal happiness.
But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind"s intelligence, wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant"s nature some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These, combined with his a.s.sured high style, had woven him the magical coat, threadbare to quiet scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The dwarfed object was then observed; and it was not for a woman to measure herself beside him. She came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was pressing her back on her resources: without the measurement or a thought of it, she did that which is the most ordinary and the least noticed of our daily acts in civilized intercourse, she subjected him to the trial of the elements composing him, by collision with what she felt of her own; and it was because she felt them strongly, aware of her feeling them, but unaware of any conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung him, pitied him, and pa.s.sed on along her path elsewhere. This can be done when love is gone. It is done more or less at any meeting of men and men; and men and women who love not are perpetually doing it, unconsciously or sensibly. Even in their love, a time for the trial arrives among certain of them; and the leadership is a.s.sumed, and submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the contention being spoken, perhaps, nothing definitely known.
In Carinthia"s case, her revived enthusiasm for her brother drove to the penetration of the husband pleading to thwart its course. His offer was wealth: that is, luxury, amus.e.m.e.nt, ease. The sub-audible "himself" into the bargain was disregarded, not counting with one who was an upward rush of fire at the thought that she was called to share her brother"s dangers.