Fleetwood was honestly unaware of ridicule in the condition of inventive mania at his heels. Scheming, and hesitating to do, one-half of his mind was absorbed with the problem of how now to treat the mother of his boy. Her behaviour in becoming a mother was acknowledged to be good: the production of a boy was good—considerate, he almost thought. He grew so far reconciled to her as to have intimations of a softness coming on; a wish to hear her speak of the trifling kindness done to the sister of Madge in reward of kindness done to her; wishes for looks he remembered, secret to him, more his own than any possessions. Dozens of men had wealth, some had beautiful wives; none could claim as his own that face of the look of sharp steel melting into the bridal flower, when she sprang from her bed to defend herself and recognized the intruder at her window; stood smitten:—‘It is my, husband.’ Moonlight gave the variation of her features.
And that did not appease the resentment tearing him from her, so justifiable then, as he forced himself to think, now hideous. Glimpses of the pictures his deeds painted of him since his first meeting with this woman had to be shunned. He threw them off; they were set down to the mystery men are. The degrading, utterly different, back view of them teaches that Life is an irony. If the teaching is not accepted, and we are to take the blame, can we bear to live? Therefore, either way the irony of Life is proved. Young men straining at thought, in the grip of their sensations, reach this logical conclusion. They will not begin by examining the ground they stand on, and questioning whether they have consciences at peace with the steps to rearward.
Having established Life as the coldly malignant element, which induces to what it chastises, a loathing of womanhood, the deputed Mother of Life, ensues, by natural sequence. And if there be one among women who disturbs the serenity we choose to think our due, she wears for us the sinister aspect of a confidential messenger between Nemesis and the Parcae. Fleetwood was thus compelled to regard Carinthia as both originally and successively the cause of his internal as well as his exterior discomfort; otherwise those glimpses would have burnt into perpetual stigmas. He had also to get his mind away from her. They pleaded against him volubly with the rising of her image into it.
His manager at the mines had sent word of ominous discontent down there. His presence might be required. Obviously, then, the threatened place was unfitting for the Countess of Fleetwood. He despatched a kind of order through Mr. Howell Edwards, that she should remove to Esslemont to escape annoyances. Esslemont was the preferable residence. She could there entertain her friends, could spend a pleasanter time there.
He waited for the reply; Edwards deferred it.
Were they to be in a struggle with her obstinate will once more?
Henrietta was preparing to leave London for her dismal, narrow, and, after an absence, desired love-nest. The earl called to say farewell, cool as a loyal wife could wish him to be, admiring perforce. Marriage and maternity withdrew nothing—added to the fair young woman’s bloom.
She had gone to her room to pack and dress. Livia received him. In the midst of the casual commonplaces her memory was enlightened.
‘Oh,’ said she, and idly drew a letter out of a blottingpad, ‘we have heard from Wales.’ She handed it to him.
Before he knew the thing he did, he was reading:
‘There is no rest foamy brother, and I cannot help; I am kept so poor I have not the smallest of sums. I do not wish to leave Wales—the people begin to love me; and can one be mistaken? I know if I am loved or hated. But if my lord will give me an allowance of money of some hundreds, I will do his bidding; I will leave England or I will go to Esslemont; I could say—to Mr. Woodseer, in that part of London. He would not permit. He thinks me blacked by it, like a sweepboy coming from a chimney; and that I have done injury to his title. No, Riette, to be a true sister, I must bargain with my lord before I submit. He has not cared to come and see his little son. His boy has not offended him. There may be some of me in this dear. I know whose features will soon show to defend the mother’s good name. He is early my champion. He is not christened yet, and I hear it accuse me, and I am not to blame,—I still wait my lord’s answer.’
‘Don’t be bothered to read the whole,’ Livia had said, with her hand out, when his eyes were halfway down the page.
Fleetwood turned it, to read the signature: ‘Janey.’
She seemed servile enough to some of her friends. ‘Carinthia’ would have had—a pleasanter sound. He folded the letter.
‘Why give me this? Take it,’—said he.
She laid it on the open pad.
Henrietta entered and had it restored to her, Livia remarking: ‘I found it in the blotter after all.’
She left them together, having to dress for the drive to the coach office with Henrietta.
‘Poor amusement for you this time.’ Fleetwood bowed, gently smiling.
‘Oh!’ cried Henrietta, ‘balls, routs, dinners, music—as much music as I could desire, even I! What more could be asked? I am eternally grateful.’
‘The world says, you are more beautiful than ever.’
‘Happiness does it, then,—happiness owing to you, Lord Fleetwood.’
‘Columelli pleases you?’
‘His voice is heavenly! He carries me away from earth.’
‘He is a gentleman, too-rare with those fellows.’
‘A pretty manner. He will speak his compliments in his English.’
‘You are seasoned to endure them in all languages. Pity another of your wounded: Brailstone has been hard hit at the tables.
‘I cannot pity gamblers.—May I venture?—half a word?’
‘Tomes! But just a little compassion for the devoted. He wouldn’t play so madly—if, well, say a tenth dilution of the rapt hearing Columelli gets.’
‘Signor Columelli sings divinely.’
‘You don’t dislike Brailstone?’
‘He is one of the agreeable.’
‘He must put his feelings into Italian song!’
‘To put them aside will do.’
‘We are not to have our feelings?’
‘Yes, on the proviso that ours are respected. But, one instant, Lord Fleetwood, pray. She is—I have to speak of her as my sister. I am sure she regrets… She writes very nicely.’
‘You have a letter from her?’
Henrietta sighed that it would not bear exposure to him: ‘Yes.’
‘Nicely worded?’
‘Well, yes, it is.’
He paused, not expecting that the letter would be shown, but silence fired shots, and he had stopped the petition. ‘We are to have you for a week’s yachting. You prescribe your company. Only be merciful. Exclusion will mean death to some. Columelli will be touring in Switzerland. You shall have him in the house when my new bit of ground Northwest of London is open: very handy, ten miles out. We’ll have the Opera troupe there, and you shall command the Opera.’
Her beauty sweetened to thank him.
If, as Livia said, his passion for her was unchanged, the generosity manifested in the considerate screen it wore over any physical betrayal of it, deserved the lustre of her eyes. It dwelt a moment, vivid with the heart close behind and remorseful for misreading of old his fine character. Here was a young man who could be the very kindest of friends to the woman rejecting him to wed another. Her smile wavered. How shall a loving wife express warmth of sentiment elsewhere, without the one beam too much, that plunges her on a tideway? His claim of nothing called for everything short of the proscribed. She gave him her beauty in fullest flower.
It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!
But he admired. That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to desire positive proof of her worthlessness. The past days writhed in him. The present were loveless, entirely cold. He had not even the wish to press her hand. The market held beautiful women of a like description. He wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her to be: and not proved as such by himself. He was unable to summon or imagine emotion enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women are wooed to their perdition. For all he cared, any man on earth might try, succeed or fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she coveted, a slave to the pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained by her. Till that time, he could not feel himself perfectly free.
Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate. Young men are mysteries! and bowl us onward. No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says: he was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure, a mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil, sometimes the humanest of creatures.
In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable infusion of Welsh blood in the composition of him. Now, to the Cymry and to the pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually. The past of their lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud; nor are the passions of the flesh, nor is the animate soul, wanting to it. Other races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood with their progression to the wisdom age may bestow. These have each stage always alive, quick at a word, a scent, a sound, to conjure up scenes, in spirit and in flame. Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn, with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch: individually, they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of the sons of Time. An old sea rises in them, rolling no phantom billows to break to spray against existing rocks of the shore. That is why, and even if they have a dose of the Teuton in them, they have often to feel themselves exiles when still in amicable community among the preponderating Saxon English.
Add to the single differentiation enormous wealth—we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus. Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman’s trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man’s legal possession of enormous wealth as well.
Wholly Cambrian Fleetwood was not. But he had to the full the Cambrian’s reverential esteem for high qualities. His good-bye with Henrietta, and estimate of her, left a dusky mental, void requiring an orb of some sort for contemplation; and an idea of the totally contrary Carinthia, the woman he had avowedly wedded, usurped her place. Qualities were admitted. She was thrust away because she had offended: still more because he had offended. She bore the blame for forcing him to an examination of his conduct at this point and that, where an ancestral savage in his lineaments cocked a strange eye. Yet at the moment of the act of the deed he had known himself the veritable Fleetwood. He had now to vindicate himself by extinguishing her under the load of her unwomanliness: she was like sun-dried linen matched beside oriental silk: she was rough, crisp, unyielding. That was now the capital charge. Henrietta could never be guilty of the unfeminine. Which did he prefer?
It is of all questions the one causing young men to screw wry faces when they are asked; they do so love the feminine, the ultra-feminine, whom they hate for her inclination to the frail. His depths were sounded, and he answered independently of his will, that he must be up to the heroical pitch to decide. Carinthia stood near him then. The confession was a step, and fraught with consequences. Her unacknowledged influence expedited him to Sarah Winch’s shop, for sight of one of earth’s honest souls; from whom he had the latest of the two others down in Wales, and of an infant there.
He dined the host of his Ixionides, leaving them early for a drive at night Eastward, and a chat with old Mr. Woodseer over his punching and sewing of his bootleather. Another honest soul. Mr. Woodseer thankfully consented to mount his coach-box next day, and astonish Gower with a drop on his head from the skies about the time of the mid-day meal.
There we have our peep into Dame Gossip’s young man mysterious.
CHAPTER XXIX. CARINTHIA IN WALES
An August of gales and rains drove Atlantic air over the Welsh highlands. Carinthia’s old father had impressed on her the rapture of ‘smelling salt’ when by chance he stood and threw up his nostrils to sniff largely over a bed of bracken, that reminded him of his element, and her fancy would be at strain to catch his once proud riding of the seas. She felt herself an elder daughter of the beloved old father, as she breathed it in full volume from the billowy West one morning early after sunrise and walked sisterly with the far-seen inexperienced little maid, whom she saw trotting beside him through the mountain forest, listening, storing his words, picturing the magnetic, veined great gloom of an untasted world.
This elder daughter had undergone a shipwreck; but clear proof that she had not been worsted was in the unclouded liveliness of the younger one gazing forward. Imaginative creatures who are courageous will never be lopped of the hopeful portion of their days by personal misfortune. Carinthia could animate both; it would have been a hurt done to a living human soul had she suffered the younger self to run overcast. Only, the gazing forward had become interdicted to her experienced self. Nor could she vision a future having any horizon for her child. She saw it in bleak squares, and snuggled him between dangers weathered and dangers apprehended.
The conviction that her husband hated her had sunk into her nature. Hating the mother, he would not love her boy. He was her boy, and strangely bestowed, not beautifully to be remembered rapturously or gratefully, and with deep love of the father. She felt the wound recollection dealt her. But the boy was her one treasure, and no treasure to her husband. They were burdens, and the heir of his House, child of a hated mother, was under perpetual menace from an unscrupulous tyrannical man. The dread and antagonism were first aroused by the birth of her child. She had not known while bearing him her present acute sensation of the hunted flying and at bay. Previously, she could say: I did wrong here; I did wrong there. Distrust had brought the state of war, which allows not of the wasting of our powers in confessions.
Her husband fed her and he clothed her; the limitation of his bounty was sharply outlined. Sure of her rectitude, a stranger to the world, she was not very sensible of dishonour done to her name. It happened at times that her father inquired of her how things were going with his little Carin; and then revolt sprang up and answered on his behalf rather fiercely. She was, however, prepared for any treaty including forgiveness, if she could be at peace in regard to her boy, and have an income of some help to her brother. Chillon was harassed on all sides; she stood incapable of aiding; so foolishly feeble in the shadow of her immense longing to strive for him, that she could think her husband had purposely lamed her with an infant. Her love of her brother, now the one man she loved, laid her insufficiency on the rack and tortured imbecile cries from it.
On the contrary, her strange husband had blest her with an infant. Everything was pardonable to him if he left her boy untouched in the mother’s charge. Much alone as she was, she raised the dead to pet and cherish her boy. Chillon had seen him and praised him. Mrs. Owain Wythan, her neighbour over a hill, praised him above all babes on earth, poor childless woman!
She was about to cross the hill and breakfast with Mrs. Wythan. The time for the weaning of the babe approached, and had as prospect beyond it her dull fear that her husband would say the mother’s work was done, and seize the pretext to separate them: and she could not claim a longer term to be giving milk, because her father had said: ‘Not a quarter of a month more than nine for the milk of the mother’—or else the child would draw an unsustaining nourishment from the strongest breast. She could have argued her exceptional robustness against another than he. But the dead father wanting to build a great race of men and women ruled.
Carinthia knelt at the cradle of a princeling gone from the rich repast to his alternative kingdom.
‘You will bring him over when he wakes,’ she said to Madge. ‘Mrs. Wythan would like to see him every day. Martha can walk now.’
‘She can walk and hold a child in her two arms, my lady,’ said Madge. ‘She expects miners popping up out of the bare ground when she sees no goblins.’
‘They!—they know him, they would not hurt him, they know my son,’ her mistress answered.
The population of the mines in revolt had no alarms for her. The works were empty down below. Men sat by the wayside brooding or strolled in groups, now and then loudly exercising their tongues; or they stood in circle to sing hymns: melancholy chants of a melancholy time for all.
How would her father have acted by these men? He would have been among them. Dissensions in his mine were vapours of a day. Lords behaved differently. Carinthia fancied the people must regard their master as a foreign wizard, whose power they felt, without the chance of making their cry to him heard. She, too, dealt with a lord. It was now his wish for her to leave the place where she had found some shreds of a home in the thought of being useful. She was gathering the people’s language; many of their songs she could sing, and please them by singing to them. They were not suspicious of her; at least, their women had open doors for her; the men, if shy, were civil. She had only to go below, she was greeted in the quick tones of their speech all along the street of the slate-roofs.
But none loved the castle, and she as little, saving the one room in it where her boy lay. The grey of Welsh history knew a real castle beside the roaring brook frequently a torrent. This was an eighteenth century castellated habitation on the verge of a small wood midway up the height, and it required a survey of numberless happy recollections to illumine its walls or drape its chambers. The permanently lighted hearth of a dear home, as in that forsaken unfavoured old white house of the wooded Austrian crags, it had not. Rather it seemed a place waiting for an ill deed to be done in it and stop all lighting of hearths thereafter.
Out on the turf of the shaven hills, her springy step dispersed any misty fancies. Her short-winged hive set to work in her head as usual, building scaffoldings of great things to be done by Chillon, present evils escaped. The rolling big bade hills with the riding clouds excited her as she mounted, and she was a figure of gladness on the ridge bending over to hospitable Plas Llwyn, where the Wythans lived, entertaining rich and poor alike.
They had led the neighbourhood to call on the discarded Countess of Fleetwood.
A warm strain of arms about her neck was Carinthia’s welcome from Mrs. Wythan lying along the couch in her boudoir; an established invalid, who yearned sanely to life, and caught a spark of it from the guest eyed tenderly by her as they conversed.
‘Our boy?—our Chillon Kirby till he has his baptism names; he is well? I am to see him?’
‘He follows me. He sleeps almost through the night now.’
‘Ah, my dear,’ Mrs. Wythan sighed, imagining: ‘It would disappoint me if he did not wake me.’
‘I wake at his old time and watch him.’
Carinthia put on the baby’s face in the soft mould of slumber.
‘I see him!’ Mrs. Wythan cried. ‘He is part mine. He has taught Owain to love babies.’
A tray of breakfast was placed before the countess. ‘Mr. Wythan is down among his men?’ she said.
‘Every morning, as long as this agitation lasts. I need not say good appetite to you after your walk. You have no fear of the men, I know. Owain’s men are undisturbed; he has them in hand. Absentee masters can’t expect continued harmony. Dear, he tells me Mr. Edwards awaits the earl.’
Drinking her tea, Carinthia’s eyelids shut; she set down her cup, ‘If he must come,’ she said. ‘He wishes me to leave. I am to go again where I have no friends, and no language to learn, and can be of no use. It is not for me that I dread his coming. He speaks to command. The men ask to be heard. He will have submission first. They do not trust him. His coming is a danger. For me, I should wish him to come. May I say…?’
‘Your Rebecca bids you say, my darling.’
‘It is, I am with the men because I am so like them. I beg to be heard. He commands obedience. He is a great nobleman, but I am the daughter of a greater man, and I have to say, that if those poor miners do harm, I will not stand by and see an anger against injustice punished. I wish his coming, for him to agree upon the Christian names of the boy. I feel his coming will do me, injury in making me offend him worse. I would avoid that. Oh, dear soul! I may say it to you:—he cannot hurt me any more. I am spared loving him when I forgive him; and I do. The loving is the pain. That is gone by.’
Mrs. Wythan fondled and kissed Carinthia’s hand.
‘Let me say in my turn; I may help you, dear. You know I have my husband’s love, as he mine. Am I, have I ever been a wife to him? Here I lie, a dead weight, to be carried up and down, all of a wife that Owain has had for years. I lie and pray to be taken, that my good man, my proved good man, may be free to choose a healthy young woman and be rewarded before his end by learning what a true marriage is. The big simpleton will otherwise be going to his grave, thinking he was married! I see him stepping about softly in my room, so contented if he does not disturb me, and he crushes me with a desire to laugh at him while I worship. I tricked him into marrying the prostrate invalid I am, and he can’t discover the trick, he will think it’s a wife he has, instead of a doctor’s doll. Oh! you have a strange husband, it has been a strange marriage for you, but you have your invincible health, you have not to lie and feel the horror of being a deception to a guileless man, whose love blindfolds him. The bitter ache to me is, that I can give nothing. You abound in power to give.’
Carinthia lifted her open hands for sign of their emptiness.
‘My brother would not want, if I could give. He may have to sell out of. the army, he thinks, fears; and I must look on. Our mother used to say she had done something for her country in giving a son like Chillon to the British army. Poor mother! Our bright opening days all seem to end in rain. We should turn to Mr. Wythan for a guide.’
‘He calls you Morgan le Fay christianized.’
‘What I am!’ Carinthia raised and let fall her head. ‘An example makes dwarfs of us. When Mr. Wythan does penance for temper by descending into his mine and working among his men for a day with the pick, seated, as he showed me down below, that is an example. If I did like that, I should have no firedamp in the breast, and not such a task to forgive, that when I succeed I kill my feelings.’
The entry of Madge and Martha, the nurse-girl, with the overflowing armful of baby, changed their converse into melodious exclamations.
‘Kit Ines has arrived, my lady,’ Madge said. ‘I saw him on the road and stopped a minute.’
Mrs. Wythan studied Carinthia. Her sharp invalid’s ears had caught the name. She beckoned. ‘The man who—the fighting man?’
‘It will be my child this time,’ said Carinthia; ‘I have no fear for myself.’ She was trembling, though her features were hard for the war her lord had declared, as it seemed. ‘Did he tell you his business here?’ she asked of Madge.
‘He says, to protect you, my lady, since you won’t leave.’
‘He stays at the castle?’
‘He is to stay there, he says, as long as the Welsh are out.’
‘The “Welsh” are misunderstood by Lord Fleetwood,’
Mrs. Wythan said to Carinthia. ‘He should live among them. They will not hurt their lady. Protecting may be his intention; but we will have our baby safe here. Not?’ she appealed. ‘And baby’s mother. How otherwise?’
‘You read my wishes,’ Carinthia rejoined. ‘The man I do not think a bad man. He has a master. While I am bound to my child I must be restful, and with the man at the castle Martha’s goblins would jump about me day and night. My boy makes a coward of his mother.’
‘We merely take a precaution, and I have the pleasure of it,’ said her hostess. ‘Give orders to your maid not less than a fortnight. It will rejoice my husband so much.’
As with the warmly hospitable, few were the words. Madge was promised by her mistress plenty of opportunities daily for seeing Kit Ines, and her mouth screwed to one of women’s dimples at a corner. She went off in a cart to fetch boxes, thinking: We are a hunted lot! So she was not mildly disposed for the company of Mr. Kit on her return to the castle.
England’s champion light-weight thought it hard that his, coming down to protect the castle against the gibbering heathen Welsh should cause a clearing out, and solitariness for his portion.
‘What’s the good of innocence if you ‘re always going to suspect a man!’ he put it, like a true son of the pirates turned traders. ‘I’ve got a paytron, and a man in my profession must have a paytron, or where is he? Where’s his money for a trial of skill? Say he saves and borrows and finds the lump to clap it down, and he’s knocked out o’ time. There he is, bankrup’, and a devil of a licking into the bargain. That ‘s the cream of our profession, if a man has got no paytron.
No prize-ring can live without one. The odds are too hard on us. My lady ought to take into account I behaved respectful when I was obliged to do my lord’s orders and remove her from our haunts, which wasn’t to his taste. Here I’m like a cannon for defending the house, needs be, and all inside flies off scarified.’
‘It strikes me, Kit Ines, a man with a paytron is no better than a tool of a man,’ said Madge.
‘And don’t you go to be sneering at honest tools,’ Ines retorted. ‘When will women learn a bit of the world before they’re made hags of by old Father Wear-and-Tear! A young woman in her prime, you Madge! be such a fool as not see I serve tool to stock our shop.’
‘Your paytron bid you steal off with my lady’s child, Kit Ines, you’d do it to stock your shop.’
Ines puffed. ‘If you ain’t a girl to wallop the wind! Fancy me at that game! Is that why my lady—but I can’t be suspected that far? You make me break out at my pores. My paytron’s a gentleman: he wouldn’t ask and I couldn’t act such a part. Dear Lord! it’d have to be stealing off, for my lady can use a stick; and put it to the choice between my lady and her child and any paytron living, paytron be damned, I’d say, rather’n go against my notions of honour. Have you forgot all our old talk about the prize-ring, the nursery of honour in Old England?’
‘That was before you sold yourself to a paytron, Kit Ines.’
‘Ah! Women wants mast-heading off and on, for ‘em to have a bit of a look-out over life as it is. They go stewing over books of adventure and drop into frights about awful man. Take me, now; you had a no small admiration for my manly valour once, and you trusted yourself to me, and did you ever repent it?—owning you’re not the young woman to tempt to t’ other way.’
‘You wouldn’t have found me talking to you here if I had.’
‘And here I’m left to defend an empty castle, am I?’
‘Don’t drink or you’ll have your paytron on you. He’s good use there.’
‘I ask it, can I see my lady?’
‘Drunk nor sober you won’t. Serve a paytron, be a leper, you’ll find, with all honest folk.’
Ines shook out an execrating leg at the foul word. ‘Leper, you say? You say that? You say leper to me?’
‘Strut your tallest, Kit Ines. It’s the money rattles in your pocket says it.’
‘It’s my reputation for decent treatment of a woman lets you say it, Madge Winch.’
‘Stick to that as long as your paytron consents. It’s the one thing you’ve got left.’
‘Benefit, you hussy, and mind you don’t pull too stiff.’
‘Be the woman and have the last word!’
His tongue was checked. He swallowed the exceeding sourness of a retort undelivered, together with the feeling that she beat him in the wrangle by dint of her being an unreasonable wench.
Madge huffed away to fill her boxes.
He stood by the cart, hands deep down his pockets, when she descended. She could have laughed at the spectacle of a champion prize-fighter out of employ, hulking idle, because he was dog to a paytron; but her contempt of him declined passing in small change.
‘So you’re off. What am I to tell my lord when he comes?’ Kit growled. ‘His yacht’s fetching for a Welsh seaport.’
She counted it a piece of information gained, and jumped to her seat, bidding the driver start. To have pretty well lost her character for a hero changed into a patron’s dog, was a thought that outweighed the show of incivility. Some little distance away, she reproached herself for not having been so civil as to inquire what day my lord was expected, by his appointment. The girl reflected on the strangeness of a body of discontented miners bringing my lord and my lady close, perhaps to meet.