‘Such animals these women are!’ Good Lord!’ Fleetwood ejaculated. ‘I marry one, and I ‘m to take to reading medical books!’ He yawned.
‘You speak that of women and pretend to love Nature,’ said Gower. ‘You hate Nature unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook. That’s the way to the madhouse or the monastery. There we expiate the sin of sins. A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in the soil, and trim and point him to grow, and she’s an animal for her pains! The secret of your malady is, you’ve not yet, though you’re on a healthy leap for the practices of Nature, hopped to the primary conception of what Nature means. Women are in and of Nature. I’ve studied them here—had nothing to do but study them. That most noble of ladies’ whole mind was knotted to preserve her child during her time of endurance up to her moment of trial. Think it over. It’s your one chance of keeping sane.
And expect to hear flat stuff from me while you go on playing tyrant.’
‘You certainly take liberties,’ Fleetwood’s mildest voice remarked.
‘I told you I should try you, when you plucked me out of my Surrey nest.’
Fleetwood, passed from a meditative look to a malicious half-laugh. ‘You seem to have studied the “most noble of ladies” latterly rather like a barrister with a brief for the defendant—plaintiff, if you like!’
‘As to that, I’ll help you to an insight of a particular weakness of mine,’ said Gower. ‘I require to have persons of even the highest value presented to me on a stage, or else I don’t grasp them at all—they ‘re simply pictures. I saw the lady; admired, esteemed, sufficiently, I supposed, until her image appeared to me in the feelings of another. Then I saw fathoms. No doubt, it was from feeling warmer. I went through the blood of the other for my impression.’
‘Name the other,’ said the earl, and his features were sharp.
You can have the name,’ Gower answered. ‘It was the girl, Madge Winch.’
Fleetwood’s hard stare melted to surprise and contemptuous amusement. ‘You see the lady to be the “most noble of ladies” through the warming you get by passing into the feelings of Madge Winch?’
Sarcasm was in the tone, and beneath it a thrill of compassionateness traversed him and shot a remorseful sting with the vision of those two young women on the coach at the scene of the fight. He had sentience of their voices, nigh to hearing them. The forlorn bride’s hand given to the anxious girl behind her gushed an image of the sisterhood binding women under the pangs they suffer from men. He craved a scourging that he might not be cursing himself; and he provoked it, for Gower was very sensitive to a cold breath on the weakness he had laid bare; and when Fleetwood said: ‘You recommend a bath in the feelings of Madge Winch?’ the retort came:—‘It might stop you on the road to a cowl.’
Fleetwood put on the mask of cogitation to cover a shudder, ‘How?’
‘A question of the man or the monk with you, as I fancy I’ve told you more than once!’
‘You may fancy committing any impertinence and be not much out.’
‘The saving of you is that you digest it when you’ve stewed it down.’
‘You try me!’
‘I don’t impose the connection.’
‘No, I take the blame for that.’
They sat in dumbness, fidgeted, sprang to their feet, and lighted bedroom candles.
Mounting the stairs, Gower was moved to let fall a benevolent look on the worried son of fortune. ‘I warned you I should try you. It ought to be done politely. If I have to speak a truth I ‘m boorish. The divinely damnable naked truth won’t wear ornaments. It’s about the same as pitching a handful of earth.’
‘You dirt your hands, hit or miss. Out of this corridor! Into my room, and spout your worst,’ cried the earl.
Gower entered his dressing-room and was bidden to smoke there.
‘You’re a milder boor when you smoke. That day down in Surrey with the grand old bootmaker was one of our days, Gower Woodseer! There’s no smell of the boor in him. Perhaps his religion helps him, more than Nature-worship: not the best for manners. You won’t smoke your pipe?—a cigar? Lay on, then, as hard as you like.’
‘You’re asking for the debauchee’s last luxury—not a correction,’ said Gower, grimly thinking of how his whip might prove effective and punish the man who kept him fruitlessly out of his bed.
‘I want stuff for a place in the memory,’ said Fleetwood; and the late hour, with the profitless talk, made it a stinging taunt.
‘You want me to flick your indecision.’
‘That’s half a hit.’
‘I ‘m to talk italics, for you to store a smart word or so.’
‘True, I swear! And, please, begin.’
‘You hang for the Fates to settle which is to be smothered in you, the man or the lord—and it ends in the monk, if you hang much longer.’
‘A bit of a scorpion in his intention,’ Fleetwood muttered on a stride. ‘I’ll tell you this, Gower Woodseer; when you lay on in earnest, your diction is not so choice. Do any of your remarks apply to Lady Fleetwood?’
‘All should. I don’t presume to allude to Lady Fleetwood.’
‘She has not charged you to complain?’
‘Lady Fleetwood is not the person to complain or condescend to speak of injuries.’
‘She insults me with her insane suspicion.’
A swollen vein on the young nobleman’s forehead went to confirm the idea at the Wythans’ that he was capable of mischief. They were right; he was as capable of villany as of nobility. But he happened to be thanking Gower Woodseer’s whip for the comfortable numbness he felt at Carinthia’s behaviour, while detesting her for causing him to desire it and endure it, and exonerate his prosy castigator.
He was ignorant of the revenge he had on Gower, whose diction had not been particularly estimable. In the feebleness of a man vainly courting sleep, the disarmed philosopher tossed from one side to the other through the remaining hours of darkness, polishing sentences that were natural spouts of choicest diction; and still the earl’s virulent small sneer rankled. He understood why, after a time. The fervour of advocacy, which inspires high diction, had been wanting. He had sought more to lash the earl with his personal disgust and partly to parade his contempt of a lucrative dependency—than he had felt for the countess. No wonder his diction was poor. It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort of tongue of a Master Slender:—flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering its object: measured to be condemned by its poor achievement. He had nevertheless a heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading for her, especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the sun-rays, from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.
He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans’, in the front of an autumnal sunrise—grand where the country is shorn of surface decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human creature, whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.
CHAPTER XXXII. IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER’S LESSONS
Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow’s morning walk. It concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an hour. She might choose to come or choose to keep away. The whims of animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers. Petty domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners. On the topic of wages, too, he was Gower’s master, and could hold forth: by which he taught himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men, women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry, consequently, sheer nonsense.
‘I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,’ he said. ‘The countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases. Drive with me to Cardiff—I miss you if you ‘re absent a week. Or is it legs? Drop me a line of your stages on the road, and don’t loiter much.’
Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey alone: and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.
‘Yes,’ the earl acquiesced jealously; ‘we ought to have seen—tramped every foot of our own country. That yacht of mine, there she is, and I said I would board her and have a fly with half a dozen fellows round the Scottish isles. We’re never free to do as we like.’
‘Legs are the only things that have a taste of freedom,’ said Gower.
They strolled down to Howell Edwards’ office at nine, Kit Ines beside the luggage cart to the rear.
Around the office and along to the street of the cottages crowds were chattering, gesticulating; Ines fancied the foreign jabberers inclined to threaten. Howell Edwards at the door of his office watched them calculatingly. The lord of their destinies passed in with him, leaving Gower to study the features of the men, and Ines to reckon the chance of a fray.
Fleetwood came out presently, saying to Edwards:
‘That concession goes far enough. Because I have a neighbour who yields at every step? No, stick to the principle. I’ve said my final word. And here’s the carriage. If the mines are closed, more’s the pity: but I’m not responsible. You can let them know if you like, before I drive off; it doesn’t matter to me.’
The carriage was ready. Gower cast a glance up the hill. Three female figures and a pannier-donkey were visible on the descent. He nodded to Edwards, who took the words out of his mouth. ‘Her ladyship, my lord.’
She was distinctly seen, and looked formidable in definition against the cloud. Madge and the nurse-maid Martha were the two other young women. On they came, and the angry man seated in the carriage could not give the order to start. Nor could he quite shape an idea of annoyance, though he hung to it and faced at Gower a battery of the promise to pay him for this. Tattling observers were estimated at their small importance there, as everywhere, by one so high above them. But the appearance of the woman of the burlesque name and burlesque actions, and odd ascension out of the ludicrous into a form to cast a spell, so that she commanded serious recollections of her, disturbed him. He stepped from his carriage. Again he had his incomprehensible fit of shyness; and a vision of the complacent, jowled, redundant, blue-coated monarch aswing in imbecile merriment on the signboard of the Royal Sovereign inn; constitutionally his total opposite, yet instigating the sensation.
In that respect his countess and he had shifted characters. Carinthia came on at her bold mountain stride to within hail of him. Met by Gower, she talked, smiled, patted her donkey, clutched his ear, lifted a silken covering to show the child asleep; entirely at her ease and unhurried. These women get aid from their pride of maternity. And when they can boast a parson behind them, they are indecorous up to insolent in their ostentation of it.
She resumed her advance, with a slight abatement of her challengeing match, sedately; very collectedly erect; changed in the fulness of her figure and her poised calm bearing.
He heard her voice addressing Gower: ‘Yes, they do; we noticed the slate-roofs, looking down on them. They do look like a council of rooks in the hollow; a parliament, you said. They look exceedingly like, when a peep of sunshine falls. Oh, no; not clergymen!’
She laughed at the suggestion.
She might be one of the actresses by nature.
Is the man unsympathetic with women a hater of Nature deductively? Most women are actresses. As to worshipping Nature, we go back to the state of heathen beast, Mr. Philosopher Gower could be answered....
Fleetwood drew in his argument. She stood before him. There was on his part an insular representation of old French court salute to the lady, and she replied to it in the exactest measure, as if an instructed proficient.
She stood unshadowed. ‘We have come to bid you adieu, my lord,’ she said, and no trouble of the bosom shook her mellow tones. Her face was not the chalk-quarry or the rosed rock; it was oddly individual, and, in a way, alluring, with some gentle contraction of her eyelids. But evidently she stood in full repose, mistress of herself.
Upon him, it appeared, the whole sensibility of the situation was to be thrown. He hardened.
‘We have had to settle business here,’ he said, speaking resonantly, to cover his gazing discomposedly, all but furtively.
The child was shown, still asleep. A cunning infant not a cry in him to excuse a father for preferring concord or silence or the bachelor’s exemption.
‘He is a strong boy,’ the mother said. ‘Our doctor promises he will ride over all the illnesses.’
Fleetwood’s answer set off with an alarum of the throat, and dwindled to ‘We ‘ll hope so. Seems to sleep well.’
She had her rocky brows. They were not barren crags, and her shape was Nature’s ripeness, it was acknowledged: She stood like a lance in air-rather like an Amazon schooled by Athene, one might imagine. Hues of some going or coming flush hinted the magical trick of her visage. She spoke in modest manner, or it might be indifferently, without a flaunting of either.
‘I wish to consult you, my lord. He is not baptized. His Christian names?’
‘I have no choice.’
‘I should wish him to bear one of my brother’s names.’
‘I have no knowledge of your brother’s names.’
‘Chillon is one.’
‘Ah! Is it, should you think, suitable to our climate?’
‘Another name of my brother’s is John.’
‘Bull.’ The loutish derision passed her and rebounded on him. ‘That would be quite at home.’
‘You will allow one of your own names, my lord?’
‘Oh, certainly, if you desire it, choose. There are four names you will find in a book of the Peerage or Directory or so. Up at the castle—or you might have written:—better than these questions on the public road. I don’t demur. Let it be as you like.’
‘I write empty letters to tell what I much want,’ Carinthia said.
‘You have only to write your plain request.’
‘If, now I see you, I may speak another request, my lord.’
‘Pray,’ he said, with courteous patience, and stepped forward down to the street of the miners’ cottages. She could there speak out-bawl the request, if it suited her to do so.
On the point of speaking, she gazed round.
‘Perfectly safe! no harm possible,’ said he, fretful under the burden of this her maniacal maternal anxiety.
‘The men are all right, they would not hurt a child. What can rationally be suspected!’
‘I know the men; they love their children,’ she replied. ‘I think my child would be precious to them. Mr. Woodseer and Mr. Edwards and Madge are there.’
‘Is the one more request—I mean, a mother’s anxiety does not run to the extent of suspecting everybody?’
‘Some of the children are very pretty,’ said Carinthia, and eyed the bands of them at their games in the roadway and at the cottage doors. ‘Children of the poor have happy mothers.’
Her eyes were homely, morning over her face. They were open now to what that fellow Woodseer (who could speak to the point when he was not aiming at it) called the parlour, or social sitting-room; where we may have converse with the tame woman’s mind, seeing the door to the clawing recesses temporarily shut.
‘Forgive me if I say you talk like the bigger child,’ Fleetwood said lightly, not ungenially; for the features he looked on were museful, a picture in their one expression.
Her answer chilled him. ‘It is true, my lord. I will not detain you. I would beg to be supplied with money.’
He was like the leaves of a frosted plant, in his crisp curling inward:—he had been so genial.
‘You have come to say good-bye, that an opportunity to—as you put it—beg for money. I am not sure of your having learnt yet the right disposal of money.’
‘I beg, my lord, to have two thousand pounds a year allowed me.’
‘Ten—and it’s a task to spend the sum on a single household—shall be alloted to your expenditure at Esslemont;—stables, bills, et caetera. You can entertain. My steward Leddings will undertake the management. You will not be troubled with payings.’
Her head acknowledged the graciousness.—‘I would have two thousand pounds and live where I please.’
‘Pardon me: the two, for a lady living where she pleases, exceeds the required amount.’
‘I will accept a smaller sum, my lord.’
‘Money!-it seems a singular demand when all supplies are furnished.’
‘I would have control of some money.’
‘You are thinking of charities.’
‘Not charities.’
‘Edwards here has a provision for the hospital needs of the people. Mr. Woodseer applies to me in cases he can certify. Leddings will do the same at Esslemont.’
‘I am glad, I am thankful. The money I would have is for my own use. It is for me.’
‘Ah. Scarcely that, I fancy.’
The remark should have struck home. He had a thirst for the sign of her confessing to it. He looked. Something like a petrifaction of her wildest face was shown.
Carinthia’s eyes were hard out on a scattered knot of children down the street.
She gathered up her skirts. Without a word to him, she ran, and running shouted to the little ones around and ahead: ‘In! in! indoors, children! “Blant, i’r ty!” Mothers, mothers, ho! get them in. See the dog! “Ci! Ci!” In with them! “Blant, i’r ty! Vr ty!”’
A big black mongrel appeared worrying at one of two petticoated urchins on the ground.
She scurried her swiftest, with such warning Welsh as she had on the top of her mountain cry; and doors flew wide, there was a bang of doors when she darted by: first gust of terrible heavens that she seemed to the cottagers.
Other shouts behind her rent the air, gathering to a roar, from the breasts of men and women. ‘Mad dog about’ had been for days the rumour, crossing the hills over the line of village, hamlet, farm, from Cardiff port.
Dead hush succeeded the burst. Men and women stood off. The brute was at the lady.
Her arms were straight above her head; her figure overhanging, on a bend of the knees. Right and left, the fury of the slavering fangs shook her loose droop of gown; and a dull, prolonged growl, like the clamour of a far body of insurrectionary marching men, told of the rage.
Fleetwood hovered helpless as a leaf on a bough.
‘Back—‘, I pray,’ she said to him, and motioned it, her arms at high stretch.
He held no weapon. The sweat of his forehead half blinded him. And she waved him behind her, beckoned to the crowd to keep wide way, used her lifted hands as flappers; she had all her wits. There was not a wrinkle of a grimace. Nothing but her locked lips betrayed her vision of imminent doom. The shaking of her gown and the snarl in the undergrowl sounded insatiate.
The brute dropped hold. With a weariful jog of the head, it pursued its course at an awful even swinging pace: Death’s own, Death’s doer, his reaper,—he, the very Death of the Terrors.
Carinthia’s cry rang for clear way to be kept on either side, and that accursed went the path through a sharp-edged mob, as it poured pell-mell and shrank back, closing for the chase to rear of it.
‘Father taught me,’ she said to the earl, not more discomposed than if she had taken a jump.
‘It’s over!’ he groaned, savagely white, and bellowed for guns, any weapons. ‘Your father? pray?’ She was entreated to speak.
‘Yes, it must be shot; it will be merciful to kill it,’ she said. ‘They have carried the child indoors. The others are safe. Mr. Woodseer, run to my nurse-girl, Martha. He goes,’ she murmured, and resumed to the earl: ‘Father told me women have a better chance than men with a biting dog. He put me before him and drilled me. He thought of everything. Usually the poor beast snaps—one angry bite, not more. My dress teased it.’
Fleetwood grinned civilly in his excitement; intending to yield patient hearing, to be interested by any mortal thing she might choose to say.
She was advised by recollection to let her father rest.
‘No, dear girl, not hurt, no scratch,—only my gown torn,’ she said to Madge; and Madge heaved and whimpered, and stooped to pin the frayed strips. ‘Quite safe; you see it is easy for women to escape, Mr. Edwards.’
Carinthia’s voice hummed over the girl’s head
‘Father made me practise it, in case. He forethought. Madge, you heard of this dog. I told you how to act. I was not feverish. Our babe will not feel it.’
She bade Madge open her hands. ‘A scratch would kill. Never mind the tearings; I will hold my dress. Oh! there is that one child bitten. Mr. Edwards, mount a man for the doctor. I will go in to the child. He was bitten. Lose not one minute, Mr. Edwards. I see you go.’
He bowed and hastened.
The child’s mother was red eyes at her door for ease of her heart to the lady. Carinthia stepped into the room, where the little creature was fetching sobs after the spout of screams.
‘God in heaven! she can’t be going to suck the bite?’ Fleetwood cried to Madge, whose answer was disquieting ‘If it’s to save life, my mistress won’t stop at anything.’
His heart sprang with a lighted comprehension of Gower Woodseer’s meaning. This girl’s fervour opened portals to new views of her mistress, or opened eyes.