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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4485 ***
+
+THE AMAZING MARRIAGE
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1895
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XX.       STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE
+          MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
+XXI.      IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF
+          OUR YOUNGER MAN
+XXII.     A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
+XXIII.    IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN
+XXIV.     A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
+XXV.      THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
+XXVI.     AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
+XXVII.    WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
+XXVIII.   BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS
+          AVERTED
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE MORAL
+EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
+
+Money of his father's enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in
+fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,
+were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature's face did not
+arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank
+sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his
+father's hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold.  Without it, he would have
+been useless in this case of need.  The philosopher could starve with
+equanimity, and be the stronger.  But one had, it seemed here clearly, to
+put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one's
+help.  Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were
+teaching an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised
+were doctorial giants beside it.
+
+The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold.  Admiral Fakenham's butler
+refused at first to take a name to his master.  Gower persisted, stating
+the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib
+good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was
+induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.
+
+She sprang up alarmed.  After having seen the young lady happily married
+and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from
+the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the
+scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable
+stood forth appallingly.  The messenger, the butler said, was no
+gentleman.  She inspected Gower and heard him speak.  An anomaly had come
+to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a
+nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was
+frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing.  In return for the
+compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room.  The story of the young
+countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church in
+a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends, in
+the Whitechapel of London--the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts,
+bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who was
+the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach?  A previously
+disregarded horror of a man.  She went trembling to the admiral, though
+his health was delicate, his temper excitable.  It was, she considered,
+an occasion for braving the doctor's interdict.
+
+Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham
+reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair.  He told a plain
+tale.  Its effect was to straighten the admiral's back, and enlarge in
+grey glass a pair of sea-blue eyes.  And, 'What's that?  Whitechapel?'
+the admiral exclaimed,--at high pitch, far above his understanding.
+The particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with,
+'Greengrocer?' He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in
+his pet girl's honeymoon: 'A prizefight?'
+
+To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.
+Gower's habiliments were those of the 'queer fish,' the admiral saw.  But
+the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy
+effort to remember it.  'Prize-fight!--Greengrocer!  Whitechapel!' he
+rang the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he
+cried: 'Where's the husband?'
+
+That was the emissary's question likewise.
+
+'If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.'
+
+'Disappeared?  Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman!  Prize-
+fight the first day of her honeymoon?  Good Lord!  Leaves her at the
+inn?'
+
+'She was left.'
+
+'When was she left?'
+
+'As soon as the fight was over--as far as I understand.'
+
+The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.
+
+'Her brother's travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees--married my daughter.
+She has an uncle, a hermit.'  He became pale.  'I must do it.  The rascal
+insults us all.  Flings her off the day he married her!  It 's a slap in
+the face to all of us.  You are acquainted with the lady, sir.  Would you
+call her a red-haired girl?'
+
+'Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.'
+
+'She has the eyes for a man to swear by.  I feel the loss of her, I can
+tell you.  She was wine and no penalty to me.  Is she much broken under
+it?--if I 'm to credit .  .  .  I suppose I must.  It floors me.'
+
+Admiral Baldwin's frosty stare returned on him.  Gower caught an image of
+it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten by
+the beams.
+
+'Nothing breaks her courage,' he said.
+
+'To be sure, my poor dear!  Who could have guessed when she left my house
+she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer's in Whitechapel.
+But the dog's not mad, though his bite 's bad; he 's an eccentric
+mongrel.  He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from his
+first breeching.  He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will,
+mark me.  This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don't
+start to-night.  Oblige me, half a minute.'
+
+The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood, and
+dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word 'Head.'
+
+Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the
+admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an
+error of judgement.  The butler had argued it with her.  She belonged to
+the list of persons appointed to cut life's thread when it strains, their
+general kindness being so liable to misdirection.
+
+Gower left the room and went into the garden.  He had never seen a death;
+and the admiral's peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of cold
+mist and a dripping stillness.  How we go, was the question among his
+problems:--if we are to go!  his youthful frame insistingly added.
+
+The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of
+his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to
+believe in it.  Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously,
+and a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and
+paper, and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies,
+held ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable.  He got his
+wits to the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young
+countess and the friend she might be about to lose.  She could number her
+friends on her fingers.  Admiral Fakenham's exclamations of the name of
+the place where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had
+undergone.  Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and
+the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of
+her, that they and those two girls had become by the twist of
+circumstances the most serviceable of her friends.
+
+Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young lord,--
+burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the moment it
+was his own.  Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
+gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man.  He could be
+magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness.  He coveted beauty
+in women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower
+judged by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
+observations of him.  Why marry her to cast her off instantly?  The crude
+philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral.  And, further, what
+did the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
+endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door?  Older men
+might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
+had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.
+
+Dame Gossip boils.  Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
+persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that
+is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
+succession of collisions.  The fault of the method is, that they do not
+instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the
+uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like the
+tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
+seductive.  The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us
+more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal;
+and the Dame will have him only as an index-post.  Hence her endless
+ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of character,
+--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people!  To preserve
+Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we must be
+inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than shaking
+the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing activity of
+the head.
+
+Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
+sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to
+stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey
+with him to London, doctor or no doctor.  The doctor would not hear of
+it.  The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning
+for the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully
+affecting his linen.  Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a
+mere show of reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat
+the bed where he lay, a gouty volcano.  Gower's one shirt was passing
+through the various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way
+to negro.  His natural candour checked the downward course.  He mentioned
+to Mrs. Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that
+this article of his attire 'was beginning to resemble London snow.'  She
+was amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow.
+'It will save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her.
+She then remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a
+reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer
+speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on
+the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.
+
+In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess
+Livia, who had come down to see the admiral 'concerning an absurd but
+annoying rumour running over London.'  Gower was out for a walk.  He knew
+of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of
+his clothing.
+
+'But I know the man,' said Livia.  'Lord Fleetwood picked him up
+somewhere, and brought him to us.  Clever: Why, is he here?'
+
+'He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.'
+
+'Sent by whom?'
+
+Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew
+stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming
+herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the
+admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor's next visit; Mr.
+Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten
+minutes, to divert him with his talk.  She protected in this wretched
+manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of
+secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to
+Admiral Baldwin at once.  Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was
+unheeded.
+
+The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the
+knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood!  Henrietta had
+spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood's hatred of the title of Dowager.
+But when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear
+to excite him?  If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire 'one
+of his broadsides,'--as they said in the family, to assert its and that
+might exhaust him; and there was peril in that.  And who was guilty?
+Mrs. Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided.
+She made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.
+
+Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
+cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the
+choice of his thoughts as well.  He was in the house with his devoutly,
+simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work
+without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral's shirt-collar
+cutting his ears.  The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know
+whether it was for rapture or annoyance.  As a result he was but
+histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of
+the lady appeared in the room.
+
+She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
+summoned immediately.  The remorseful woman flew.
+
+'Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting news.
+Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed.  You are Lord Fleetwood's friend and
+will not allow him to be prejudged.  He will be in town shortly.  I know
+him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty--and to
+a woman?  He is the soul of chivalry.  So, in his way, is the admiral.
+If he were only more patient!  Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood's version.
+I am certain it will satisfy me.  The admiral wishes you to step up to
+him.  Be very quiet; you will be; consent to everything.  I was unaware
+of his condition: the things I heard were incredible.  I hope the doctor
+will not delay.  Now go.  Beg to retire soon.'
+
+Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.
+
+Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
+extreme exhaustion.  He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
+bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: 'Kill myself?  Not half so
+quick as they'd do it.  I can't rest for that Whitechapel of yours.
+Please fetch pen and paper: it's a letter.'
+
+The letter began, 'Dear Lady Arpington.'
+
+The dictation of it came in starts.  Atone moment it seemed as if life's
+ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift.  An old
+friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky
+brevity.  It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl
+of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at
+a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to
+stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at
+furthest.  He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have
+the young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.
+
+Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.
+
+'Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil's abroad"--done it !' he
+said, sinking back.  'Now seal, you'll find wax--the ring at my watch-
+chain.'
+
+He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
+twitched by a dream.  There had been a scene with Livia.  The dictating
+of the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.
+
+Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs.  He wanted the address of
+Lady Arpington's town house.
+
+'You have a letter for her?' said Livia, and held her hand for it in a
+way not to be withstood.
+
+'There's no superscription,' he remarked.
+
+'I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+'I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+'By no means.'  She touched his arm.  'You are Lord Fleetwood's friend.'
+
+A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral's shirt-collar at his
+ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in
+overlooking the spectacle he presented.  Still, he considered; he had
+wits alive enough, just to perceive a duty.
+
+'The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+'You are afraid to entrust it to the post?'
+
+'I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.'
+
+'You will entrust it to me.'
+
+'Anything on earth of my own.'
+
+'The treasure would be valued.  This you confide to my care.'
+
+'It is important.'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Indeed it is.'
+
+'Say that it is, then.  It is quite safe with me.  It may be important
+that it should not be delivered.  Are you not Lord Fleetwood's friend?
+Lady Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and
+me.  Besides, I don't think she has come to town yet.  She generally sees
+out the end of the hunting season.  Leave the letter to me: it shall go.
+You, with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle
+has not his whole judgement at present.  There are two sides to a case.
+Lord Fleetwood's friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up
+to his enemies while he is absent.  Things going favourably here, I drive
+back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my
+carriage.'
+
+He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.
+
+They talked of Baden.  His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was
+a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him.
+He spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby's
+reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and
+seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar.  The touching of him again would
+not be required to set him pacing to her steps.  His hang of the head
+testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
+with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to
+conceal the crack of a string.  The merit of being one of her army of
+admirers was accorded to him.  The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.
+
+Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
+admiral's chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.
+Admiral Baldwin's condition was becoming ominous.  He sent messages
+downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest's departure until they two
+could make the journey together next day.  The tortured and blissful
+young man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher's cloak, hung conscience-
+ridden in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of
+the vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and
+mixed with his cup of amorous worship.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR
+YOUNGER MAN
+
+The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
+stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual.  He yielded
+his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly
+after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one
+of Gower's crucial trials.  It condemned him, for the pacifying of a
+dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt
+him, contributed to the brand on his race.  He and his father upheld a
+solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their
+people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms.  His loathing of
+any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an
+English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without
+which was no comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to
+him.  For Nature is the Truth.
+
+He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the
+petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;
+and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the
+right to a sense of honour.  'We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
+Woodseer,' she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it
+manifested.  There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common
+grounds between them, accompanying the dead words.  Mistress of the
+letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to
+bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it.
+A face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he,
+so clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.
+
+She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme.  Gower journeyed to
+London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;
+enamoured of it, and straining for health.  He had to reflect at the
+journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing
+observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a
+flowing river.
+
+The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house.  We are
+perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
+mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
+darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart
+of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower
+with an envy to resemble him in practice.  His philosophy, too,
+reproached him for being outshone.  Apart from his philosophy, he stood
+confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction.  Adoration
+of a woman takes the breath out of philosophy.  And if one had only to
+say sheer donkey, he consenting to be driven by her!  One has to say
+worse in this case; for the words are, liar and traitor.
+
+Carinthia's attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect
+for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
+principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen.  The sight of
+her lashed him.  She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go
+the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people.  She spoke of
+the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having
+only the wish to assist in ministering.  Probably the great wretchedness
+bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of
+Admiral Baldwin's end; her bosom sprang up: 'He was next to father,'
+was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the
+lodgings of poverty.  She had descended on the world.  There was of
+course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her;
+the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an
+urchin who had amused her.
+
+As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
+'They have no mornings here'; and the childish remark set her quivering
+on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower's memory.  Scarce
+anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she
+had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
+brother's return, she could have added.  She mentioned the goodness of
+Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support.  Money and
+its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter
+need of it for the first of human purposes by others.  Her speech was not
+of so halting or foreign an English.  She grew rapidly wherever she was
+planted.
+
+Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
+necessitated in Gower.  He pursued it, and listened to his father
+similarly at work: 'A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of
+souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she
+--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her
+on the day of their nuptials.
+
+She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant.  Can you imagine the
+doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?'
+
+Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:
+
+'Yes, I can imagine it, I'm doing it myself.  I shall be doing it till
+I've written a letter and paid a visit.'
+
+He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
+revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the
+plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because
+of the insensibility to beauty.  Out of which he passed to the writing of
+the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended
+immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from
+Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood.  A
+duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of
+conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence
+to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman's recollection,
+ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man
+suspecting them of the bite of rabies.
+
+An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.
+
+She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat
+for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance
+with the admiral had quieted her suspicions.  The world had only to stand
+beside her, and it would hear what she had heard.  She rushed to the
+conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.
+
+'Really, really, that young man's freaks appear designed for the express
+purpose of heightening our amazement!' she exclaimed.  'He won't easily
+get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there's no
+knowing.  Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's I hold sacred.  At least
+I can see for myself.  You can't tell me more of the facts?  If Lord
+Fleetwood's in town, I will call him here at once.  I will drive down to
+this address you give me.  She is a civil person?'
+
+'Her breeding is perfect,' said Gower.
+
+'Perfect breeding, you say?' Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.
+She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-
+possession.  He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her.  She was
+of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of
+an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to
+his clothing.  Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the
+complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the
+humblest who bear the main elements of it must be.  Certain humorous
+turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to
+leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.
+
+One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer's brief
+words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great
+lady's plain imperative.  She was connected with his family on the
+paternal side.
+
+He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
+Marriage, turning over documents, here say.  He went to Lady Arpington
+disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
+equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum
+of the ear.  He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way.  When
+very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had
+spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him.  Another
+fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his
+latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word.  He had
+plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic
+life--'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer
+said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,
+moodily talked of getting in his intervals.  He had gone down to a young
+and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a
+Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a
+lifelong bondage to the 'beautiful Gorgon,' under cover of a white
+flannel frock.  The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains
+of a woman, to redeem his word.
+
+But there was a plea on behalf of this woman.  The life she offered
+might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
+nevertheless, exorcise a devil.  Carinthia promised, it might seem to
+chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could,
+he now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil
+inhabiting him had at least been easier, 'up in a corner.'
+
+He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
+both, that made them one, by subduing him.  For it was a charm; an actual
+feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
+wordless in thought.  There, among the folds of the incense vapours of
+our heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive
+of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for
+compensation the exorcising of a devil.
+
+Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil.  It was alert and frisky,
+flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in
+the thought it made Carinthia's intimate charm appear as no better than a
+thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command
+the charm.  Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta's incomparable beauty
+and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the
+world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman
+--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--'It is my
+husband.'  The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not
+love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at
+the hint of her loving the man she had married.  Did she?  It might be
+tried.
+
+She?  That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
+flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man.  Or the love is a
+ship that will not sail a sea.
+
+Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
+proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
+Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
+tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
+country' beside that golden Henrietta's.
+
+Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions.  Often their fairest,
+apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
+graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of
+the poetic.  Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
+unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
+discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion.  How
+they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
+to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
+round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
+Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
+in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
+products, not esteemed by him.  Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
+Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
+'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
+graceful in the furnace of the trial.  She wore through the critic ordeal
+his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
+was rather better than not withered by it.
+
+On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
+other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
+contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
+ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
+furnace.  And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
+her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
+have been love.
+
+The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
+end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
+season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
+in his mastery, snare him in her surrender.  It must have been the
+veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
+yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
+favourite maidens.  Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
+the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic.  Though, true, she
+had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty.  Henrietta, illumined
+with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of
+love.  Would she?  For credulous men she would be golden coin of the
+currency.  She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the
+running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter's
+heart with pity.
+
+Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
+fought and laid his wilder self.  He might be likened to the doctor's
+patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug of
+healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
+robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have
+rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken
+the intonation of good words.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
+
+The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the
+pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens
+courtliness to hard attention.
+
+After the names of Admiral Baldwin and 'the Mr. Woodseer,' the name of
+Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington.  It might have been the name
+of any other place.
+
+'Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,' she said, observing the young
+earl.  'I drove down there yesterday.  I saw the lady calling herself
+Countess of Fleetwood.  By right?  She was a Miss Kirby.'
+
+'She has the right,' Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge
+of musketry.
+
+'Marriage not contested.  You knew of her being in that place?--I can't
+describe it.'
+
+'Your ladyship will pardon me?'
+
+London's frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to
+penetrate.
+
+He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.
+
+As iron as he looked, he said: 'She stays there by choice.'
+
+The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.
+
+'You are not acquainted with the district.'
+
+'One of my men comes out of it.'
+
+'The coming out of it !  .  .  .  However, I understand her story, that
+she travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without
+resources.  She waited weeks; I forget how many.  She has a description
+of maid in attendance on her.  She came to London to find her husband.
+You were at the mines, we heard.  Her one desire is to meet her husband.
+But, goodness!  Fleetwood, why do you frown?  You acknowledge the
+marriage, she has the name of the church; she was married out of that old
+Lord Levellier's house.  You drove her--I won't repeat the flighty
+business.  You left her, and she did her best to follow you.  Will the
+young men of our time not learn that life is no longer a game when they
+have a woman for partner in the match!
+
+You don't complain of her flavour of a foreign manner?  She can't be so
+very .  .  .  Admiral Baldwin's daughter has married her brother; and he
+is a military officer.  She has germs of breeding, wants only a little
+rub of the world to smooth her.  Speak to the point:--do you meet her
+here?  Do you refuse?'
+
+'At present?  I do.'
+
+'Something has to be done.'
+
+'She was bound to stay where I left her.'
+
+'You are bound to provide for her becomingly.'
+
+'Provision shall be made, of course.'
+
+'The story will .  .  .  unless--and quickly, too.'
+
+I know, I know!'
+
+Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel at
+him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree
+fire and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.
+
+The black flash flew.
+
+'It 's a thing to mend as well as one can,' Lady Arpington said.  'I am
+not inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any.  Get
+her away from that place.  She won't come to me unless it 's to meet her
+husband.  Ah, well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are,
+if you married her.  We'll leave the husband undiscussed: with this
+reserve, that it seems to me men are now beginning to play the
+misunderstood.'
+
+'I hope they know themselves better,' said Fleetwood; and he begged for
+the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who
+was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her
+dwelling.
+
+Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an
+assault on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old
+Buccaneer; it compelled to urgent measures.  He, as he felt horribly in
+pencilling her address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the
+goad.  Her mask of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft,
+which could be power; and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed
+to hatred.
+
+'A shop,' Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: 'potatoes,
+vegetable stuff.  Honest people, I am to believe.  She is indifferent to
+her food, she says.  She works, helping one of their ministers--one of
+their denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves!  Anything to
+escape from the Church!  She's likely to become a Methodist.  With Lord
+Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared
+Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time.  Well,
+she may claim to belong to it now.  She would not be persuaded against
+visitations to pestiferous hovels.  What else is there to do in such a
+place?  She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in
+the dark back room of a small greengrocer's shop in Whitechapel.  There--
+you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood's present address.'
+
+It drenched him with ridicule.
+
+'I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,' he said, and
+maintained his rigidity.
+
+The great lady stiffened.
+
+'I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once.  The
+admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I
+warn you--very well, very well.  In your own interests, it will be.  If
+she is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will
+stick to her.'
+
+'She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,' said Fleetwood.
+'She will have Esslemont to live in.'
+
+'There will be more than one to speak as to that.  You should know her.'
+
+'I do not know her.'
+
+'You married her.'
+
+'The circumstances are admitted.'
+
+'If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a
+previous interview.  She is bent on meeting you.'
+
+'I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of
+the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it.  Those are the
+terms.'
+
+'She has a brother living, I remind you.'
+
+'State the deduction, if you please, my lady.'
+
+'She is not of 'a totally inferior family.'
+
+'She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a
+diligent reader of his book of MAXIMS FOR MEN.'
+
+'Dear me!  Then Kirby--Captain Kirby!  I remember.  That's her origin,
+is it?' the great lady cried, illumined.  'My mother used to talk of the
+Cressett scandal.  Old Lady Arpington, too.  At any rate, it ended in
+their union--the formalities were properly respected, as soon as they
+could be.'
+
+'I am unaware.'
+
+'I detest such a tone of speaking.  Speaking as you do now--married to
+the daughter?  You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.'
+
+'Quite, ma'am, let me assure you.  Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would be
+dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion's Maxims.
+They will learn that I am myself.'
+
+'You don't improve as you proceed.  I tell you this, you'll not have me
+for a friend.  You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal
+to a prophecy, you won't have London with you; and you'll hear of Lord
+Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.'
+
+The preluding box on them reddened him.
+
+'She will have the offer of Esslemont.'
+
+'Undertake to persuade her in person.'
+
+'I have spoken on that head.'
+
+'Well, I may be mistaken,--I fancied it before I knew of the pair she
+springs from: you won't get her consent to anything without your
+consenting to meet her.  Surely it's the manlier way.  It might be
+settled for to-morrow, here, in this room.  She prays to meet you.'
+
+With an indicated gesture of 'Save me from it,' Fleetwood bowed.
+
+He left no friend thinking over the riddle of his conduct.  She was a
+loud-voiced lady, given to strike out phrases.  The 'Whitechapel
+Countess' of the wealthiest nobleman of his day was heard by her on
+London's wagging tongue.  She considered also that he ought at least have
+propitiated her; he was in the position requiring of him to do something
+of the kind, and he had shown instead the dogged pride which calls for a
+whip.  Fool as he must have been to go and commit himself to marriage
+with a girl of whom he knew nothing or little, the assumption of pride
+belonged to the order of impudent disguises intolerable to behold and
+not, in a modern manner, castigate.
+
+Notwithstanding a dislike of the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood, Lady
+Arpington paid Livia an afternoon visit; and added thereby to the stock
+of her knowledge and the grounds of her disapprobation.
+
+Down in Whitechapel, it was known to the Winch girls and the Woodseers
+that Captain Kirby and his wife had spent the bitterest of hours in
+vainly striving to break their immoveable sister's will to remain there.
+
+At the tea-time of simple people, who make it a meal, Gower's appetite
+for the home-made bread of Mary Jones was checked by the bearer of a
+short note from Lord Fleetwood.  The half-dozen lines were cordial,
+breathing of their walk in the Austrian highlands, and naming a renowned
+city hotel for dinner that day, the hour seven, the reply yes or no by
+messenger.
+
+'But we are man to man, so there's no "No" between us two,' the note
+said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been
+philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important
+fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when
+for men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.
+
+Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him
+magnanimous.
+
+'It may be the solution,' his father remarked.
+
+Both had the desire; and Gower's reply was the yes, our brave male word,
+supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it as a
+form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN
+
+Right soon the London pot began to bubble.  There was a marriage.
+
+'There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not
+consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,' the Old
+Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a
+series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.
+
+This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black
+as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous
+eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon's
+descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world.  Asserted
+here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of
+vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible.  Contradiction
+retired into corners, only to be swept out of them.  For this marriage,
+abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled
+the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world's
+cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.
+
+For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last
+night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been
+enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches
+riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them!
+She caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him
+with the customary facility of a pecking pullet.
+
+But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so
+gobbled?
+
+There is the mystery of it.  On his coming of age, that young man gave
+sign of his having a city head.  He put his guardians deliberately aside,
+had his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control:
+managed a particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of her
+lovely cousin; and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he chose
+to go and no other.  He had a will.
+
+The world accounted him wildish?
+
+Always from his own offset, to his own ends.  Never for another's
+dictation or beguilement.  Never for a woman.  He was born with a
+suspicion of the sex.  Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and
+drag men in the foulest ruts of prose.
+
+We are to believe he has been effectively captured?
+
+It is positively a marriage; he admits it.
+
+Where celebrated?
+
+There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment.  Three counties claim the
+church; two ends of London.
+
+She is not a person of society, lineage?
+
+Nor of beauty.  She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking
+like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade
+witch.  The kind is famous.  Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of
+her; she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the
+mire to enthral our knightliest.  Is it a popular hero?  She has him,
+sooner or later.  A planet Croesus?  He falls to her.
+
+That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of a
+corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.
+
+Small is her need to be young--especially if it is the man who is very
+young.  She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for
+the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it.  Self-respecting
+women treat men as their tamed housemates.  She blows the horn of the
+wild old forest, irresistible to the animal.  O the droop of the eyelids,
+the curve of a lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle;
+and the sparkling agreement, the reserve--the motherly feminine petition
+that she may retain her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate
+or not, by permission of superior authority!--proof at once of her
+intelligence and her appreciativeness.  Her infinitesimal spells are
+seen; yet, despite experience, the magnetism in their repulsive display
+is barely apprehended by sedate observers until the astounding capture is
+proclaimed.  It is visible enough then:--and O men!  O morals!  If she
+can but trick the smallest bit in stooping, she has the pick of men.
+
+Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.
+Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it.  Speaks foreign English.  He thinks her
+more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off
+the highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye.
+Sir Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the horror of the
+hands of that tramp the young lord had her from.  They afflict him
+malariously still.  The man, he says, the man as well was an infatuation,
+because he talks like a Dictionary Cheap Jack, and may have had an
+education and dropped into vagrancy, owing to indiscretions.  Lord
+Fleetwood ran about in Germany repeating his remarks.  But the man is
+really an accomplished violinist, we hear.  She dances the tambourine
+business.  A sister of the man, perhaps, if we must be charitable.  They
+are, some say, a couple of Hungarian gypsies Lord F. found at a show and
+brought over to England, and soon had it on his conscience that he ought
+to marry her, like the Quixote of honour that he is; which is equal to
+saying crazy, as there is no doubt his mother was.
+
+The marriage is no longer disputable; poor Lady Fleetwood, whatever her
+faults as a step-mother, does no longer deny the celebration of a
+marriage; though she might reasonably discredit any such story if he,
+on the evening of the date of the wedding day, was at a Ball, seen by her
+at the supper-table; though it is admitted he left the Ball-room at
+night.  But the next day he certainly was in his place among the Peers
+and voted against the Government, and then went down to his estates in
+Wales, being an excellent holder of the reins, whether on the coach box
+or over the cash box.
+
+More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight from
+the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special
+delectation.  She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne.
+Young Mr. Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and
+cheered the victor for being her husband's man.  And after the shocking
+exhibition, good-bye; the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant of
+a wayside inn, and may have learnt in her solitude that she would have
+been wise to feign disgust; for men to the smallest degree cultivated are
+unable to pardon a want of delicacy in a woman who has chosen them, as
+they are taught to think by their having chosen her.
+
+So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the
+early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be
+called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.
+
+Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants
+for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the
+tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor,
+Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged
+both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when
+their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank
+of Ophelia's ditch.  Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir
+Meeson Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the
+blush, by a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks.  High-nosed dames
+will surpass eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where
+Ahem sounds the warning note to curtained decency.  The courtly M. de St.
+Ombre had to stand confused.  He, however, gave another version of
+Captain Abrane's 'fiddler,' and precipitated the great ladies into the
+reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French Revolution,
+have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Class.  Homme
+d'esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than vagabond,
+was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further example of the
+French deficiency in humour.
+
+Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is.  Lady Cowry has it from Sir
+Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has
+installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table;
+fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving
+oranges at a small fruit-shop.  With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her
+there; and she can't be got to leave the place unless her husband drives
+his coach down to fetch her.  That he declines to do; so she remains the
+Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a
+shilling of her husband's money, if she 's not to bring him to his knees;
+and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those
+dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments.
+One signal from the man he has hired, and he stops drinking--he will stop
+speaking as soon as the man's mouth is open.  He is under a complete
+fascination, attributable, some say, to passes of the hands, which the
+man won't wash lest he should weaken their influence.
+
+For it cannot be simply his violin playing.  They say he was a pupil of
+a master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us
+think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious.  Lord
+Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously.  But
+the man's influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and
+fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists--if the man
+wishes it.  Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.
+
+Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man,
+formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no
+connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at
+the most.  He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German philosophy;
+otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and dress.  It
+is my lord who has had the chief influence.  And the Countess Livia now
+backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young man to
+be found.  She may have her reasons.
+
+As for the Whitechapel Countess .  .  .  the whole story of the Old
+Buccaneer and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo,
+presage of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had
+incomprehensibly espoused to discard.  Those two had a son and a daughter
+born aboard:--in wedlock, we trust.  The girl may be as wild a one as the
+mother.  She has a will as determined as her husband's.  She is offered
+Esslemont, the earl's Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none
+of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to
+entreat her.  The injury was deep on one side or the other.  It may be
+almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together.  Will
+either of them deal the stroke for freedom?  And which is the likelier?
+
+Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh
+of London.  Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from
+his shades at a call of the great world's appetite for more, and, rushing
+upon stationary Fact, supplied the required.  Marvel upon marvel was
+recounted.  The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined,
+where all was increasingly funny.
+
+Always the shout for more produced it.  She and her band of Whitechapel
+boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went.  She stood
+knocking at his door through a whole night.  He dared not lug her before
+a magistrate for fear of exposure.  Once, riding in the park with a troop
+of friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was
+levelled, and she cried: 'There is the English nobleman who marries a
+girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!'
+
+He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:--
+my lady the countess was on board!  A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the
+square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a
+sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name
+of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.
+
+The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best.  They let pass
+incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the nobility
+and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of
+potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their
+residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript,
+Vive L'aristocratie!  Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of
+the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.
+
+He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman.  But it
+was nothing worse than the parasite that he had.  This was the parasite's
+gentle treason.  He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug
+fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his
+patron kindly.  Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were
+personages during the town's excitement, besought for having something to
+say.  Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they
+created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh
+wherever they alighted.  Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an
+eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his
+fellows.  They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.
+
+He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl's fortunes to the cunning
+of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a
+gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young
+nobleman he was plotting to ruin.  Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane's
+latest effort to hit the dirty object's name, by calling him 'Fleetwood's
+Mr. Woodlouse.'  And was the rascal a sorcerer?  Sir Meeson spoke of him
+in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his
+disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: 'I begin to be of Russett's
+opinion, that his fault is his honesty.'  The rascal had won or partly
+won the empress of her sex!  This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most
+fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of
+the tramp's borrowed plumes!  Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory
+word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.
+
+Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of
+Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long
+since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable.  Thither one fair
+June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her
+beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what
+were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to
+conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies
+veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of
+whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my
+lord's pugilist, Christopher Ives.
+
+Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.
+
+The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for
+supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous
+generation.  Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no
+less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing
+Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his
+anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, 'that a dried fish is
+no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often
+render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the
+incident.'  His exact meaning in 'smoky flavour' we are not to know; but
+whether that M. de St. Ombre should witness the effect of English humour
+upon them, or that the ladies could permit themselves to laugh, their
+voices accompanied the gentlemen in silvery volleys.  There had been
+'Mackrell' at Fleetwood's dinner-table; which was then a way of saying
+that dry throats made no count of the quantity of champagne imbibed,
+owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused.  However, there was loud laughter
+as they strolled, and it was noticed; and Fleetwood crying out,
+'Mackrell!  Mackrell!' in delighted repudiation of the wag's last sally,
+the cry of 'Hooray, Mackrell !' was caught up by the crowd.  They were
+not the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party is bad
+breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.
+
+So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was good-
+humoured about it.
+
+Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his
+dancing.  He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine, sure
+of pleasing his patron; and the maid, passing from surprise to merriment,
+entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without emulation, for
+she likewise had the passion for the dance.  Whereby it befell that the
+pair footed in a way to gather observant spectators; and if it had not
+been that the man from whom the maid was willy-nilly snatched, conceived
+resentment, things might have passed comfortably; for Kit's quips and
+cuts and high capers, and the Sunday gravity of the barge face while the
+legs were at their impish trickery, double motion to the music, won the
+crowd to cheer.  They conjectured him to be a British sailor.  But the
+destituted man said, sailor or no sailor,--bos'en be hanged!  he should
+pay for his whistle.
+
+Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the
+worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short
+loan of her.--The man had an itch to strike.  Choosing rather to be
+struck first, he vented nasty remarks.  My lord spoke to Kit and moved
+on.  At the moment of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a
+waggery of some sort, heard to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous
+effect, that the prompt and immoderate laugh succeeding it might
+reasonably be taken for a fling of scorn at himself, by an injured man.
+They were a party; he therefore proceeded to make one, appealing to
+English sentiment and right feeling.  The blameless and repentant maid
+plucked at his coat to keep him from dogging the heels of the gentlemen.
+Fun was promised; consequently the crowd waxed.
+
+'My lord,' had been let fall by Kit Ines.  Conjoined to 'Mackrell,' it
+rang finely, and a trumpeting of 'Lord Mackrell' resounded.  Lord
+Mackrell was asked for 'more capers and not so much sauce.'  Various fish
+took part in his title of nobility.  The wag Mackrell continuing to be
+discreetly silent, and Kit Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd
+fell in love with their display of English humour, disposed to the surly
+satisfaction of a big street dog that has been appeased by a smaller
+one's total cessation of growls.
+
+All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures of
+young women on the scene.  They fronted the advance of the procession.
+They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell.  Not a bit of it--he won't
+listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him.  It's regular
+imploring: 'my lord! my lord!'
+
+O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell!  Listen to the
+young woman, you Mackrell, or you'll get Billingsgate!  Here's Mr. Jig-
+and-Reel behind here, says she's done him!  By Gosh!  What's up now?
+
+One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young
+woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell's way.  The crowd pressed to see.
+Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off.  They performed an envelopment
+of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women.  Kit left his
+mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two.  He
+rattled at her.  But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him.
+What did she say?
+
+Merely to hear, for no other reason,' a peace-loving crowd of clerks and
+tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions,
+night-larks of different classes, both sexes, there in that place for
+simple entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour,
+contracted, so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to
+the most orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir
+Meeson Corby.
+
+He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.
+'Cock Robin crowing' provoked a jolly round of barking chaff.  The noise
+in a dense ring drew Fleetwood's temper.  He gave the word to Kit Ines,
+and immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit.  The fists
+worked right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for
+sickle or scythe.  And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed
+her venerable self in the style and the perfect sufficiency of the
+strokes.  A bruiser delivered them.  No shame to back away before a
+bruiser.  There was rather an admiring envy of the party claiming the
+nimble champion on their side, until the very moderate lot of the
+Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path with sticks
+pointed.
+
+If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to get
+through.  An aggressive minority, and with Cock Robin squealing for
+constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to
+have a lesson.  The sticks were fallen on; bump came the mass.  Kit Ines
+had to fight his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish
+ring, but the gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to cheer
+the spirits of the ladies:--'All right, my friend, you're a trifle
+mistaken, it 's my stick, not yours.'  Therewith the wrestle for the
+stick.
+
+The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson
+Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not a
+common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him.  Her
+stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby's
+ebony stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the
+sconces, then to dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl,
+perhaps a lady, her cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much
+as tightening her lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched
+for by Rose Mackrell, who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head,
+cried: 'Damn it all, she's clever, though!'  She took her station beside
+Lord Fleetwood.
+
+He had been as cool as she, or almost.  Now he was maddened; she defended
+him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a touch;
+unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow's
+public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule.  Have
+you seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables
+that betrays the mishandling of him by his groom?  Something so did
+Fleetwood plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul cried
+out on her sticking to him like a plaster!
+
+Welcome were the constables.  His guineas winked at their chief, as fair
+women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers
+of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words
+of his: 'Right, my lord,' smelling my lord in the unerring manner of
+those days.  My lord's party were escorted to the gates, not a little
+jeered; though they by no means had the worst of the tussle.  But the
+puffing indignation of Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and torn
+frill and buttons plucked from his coat, and his threat of the
+magistrates, excited the crowd to derisive yells.
+
+My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.
+
+The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language.  They, according to
+the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported
+themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race.  Both
+gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done such
+gallant service with Sir Meeson's ebony wand.  He was beginning to fuss
+vociferously about the loss of the stick--a family stick, goldheaded, the
+family crest on it, priceless to the family--when Mrs. Kirby-Levellier
+handed it to him inside the coach.
+
+'But where is she?' M. de St.  Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia's
+touch on his arm in the dark.
+
+At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured, 'Ah!'
+
+He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a
+manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.
+
+They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on
+the subject.  Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection
+with a boiling topic of current scandal,--glaringly illustrative of it,
+moreover,--were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been
+sworn to secresy.  Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an
+exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself.
+So he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give the
+last wink of reason to the wine-cup.  Persecuted as he was, nothing
+remained for him but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.
+
+That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at
+Sir Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its
+being the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young nobleman
+to exhibit.  She pitied him: she had done him some wrong.  She read into
+him, too, as none else could.  Seeing the solitary tortures behind the
+pleasant social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask
+seemed pathetic.  She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her
+bosom of tears.  Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly
+mentionable.  Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this!
+The incorrigible cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her
+pictured, at a word of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world
+acting audience.  Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house
+and were alone.  Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which
+is more eloquent than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads.  My
+lord, it was thought by the ladies, had directed his man to convey her
+safely to her chosen home, whence she might be expected very soon to be
+issuing and striking the gong of London again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
+
+Ladies who have the pride of delicate breeding are not more than rather
+violently hurled back on the fortress it is, when one or other of the
+gross mishaps of circumstance may subject them to a shock: and this
+happening in the presence of gentlemen, they are sustained by the within
+and the without to keep a smooth countenance, however severe their
+affliction.  Men of heroic nerve decline similarly to let explosions
+shake them, though earth be shaken.  Dragged into the monstrous grotesque
+of the scene at the Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal,
+masking any signs that they were stripped for a flagellation.  Only, the
+fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if
+the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the
+world was an ignoble beast.  They did not discuss Carinthia's latest
+craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they were in the
+interjectory state.
+
+Henrietta was Livia's guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
+'To get money!  money!' her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
+dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had
+fallen.  She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible
+economy:--'think of the smallest trifles!' so that her Chillon travelled
+unaccompanied, they were separated.  Her iterations upon money were the
+vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
+She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a
+line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself
+with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the
+enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings;
+and that miserly Lord Levellier's indebtedness to Chillon--large sums!
+and Chillon's praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father's
+estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the
+money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance;
+but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been
+for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite
+unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had chosen;
+apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground
+against him: and though a single sign of submission would place the
+richest purse in England at her disposal.  'She refuses Esslemont!  She
+insists on his meeting her!  No child could be so witless.  Let him be
+the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for
+her brother's sake!  She loves her brother?  No: deaf to him, to me, to
+every consideration except her blind will.'
+
+Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.
+
+It refreshed a phlegmatic lady's disposition for prophecy.  Lovers
+abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but
+they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who
+tugs at them for subsistence or existence.  The condition, if they are
+much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness,
+to be bitterly misanthropical.
+
+Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta's
+unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law's misconduct, or the crude
+expression of it.  She could not guess that Carinthia's unhappiness in
+marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by
+the conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to
+bring it to pass.  Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she
+blamed Carinthia in another's hearing.
+
+After some repose, the cousins treated their horrible misadventure as a
+piece of history.  Livia was cool; she had not a husband involved in it,
+as Henrietta had; and London's hoarse laugh surely coming on them, spared
+her the dread Henrietta suffered, that Chillon would hear; the most
+sensitive of men on any matter touching his family.
+
+'And now a sister added to the list!  Will there be names, Livia?'
+
+'The newspapers!' Livia's shoulders rose.
+
+'We ought to have sworn the gentlemen to silence.'
+
+'M. de St. Ombre is a tomb until he writes his Memoirs.  I hold Sir
+Meeson under lock.  But a spiced incident, a notorious couple,--an
+anecdotal witness to the scene,--could you expect Mr. Rose Mackrell to
+contain it?  The sacredest of oaths, my dear!'
+
+That relentless force impelling an anecdotist to slaughter families for
+the amusement of dinner-tables, was brought home to Henrietta by her
+prospect of being a victim; and Livia reminding her of the excessive
+laughter at Rose Mackrell's anecdotes overnight, she bemoaned her having
+consented to go to those Gardens in mourning.
+
+'How could Janey possibly have heard of the project to go?
+
+'You went to please Russett, he to please you, and that wild-cat to
+please herself,' said Livia.  'She haunts his door, I suppose, and
+follows him, like a running footman.  Every step she takes widens the
+breach.  He keeps his temper, yes, keeps his temper as he keeps his word,
+and one morning it breaks loose, and all that's done has to be undone.
+It will bemust.  That extravaganza, as she is called, is fatal, dogs him
+with burlesque--of all men!'
+
+'Why not consent to meet her once, Chillon asks.'
+
+'You are asking Russett to yield an inch on demand, and to a woman.'
+
+'My husband would yield to a woman what he would refuse to all the men in
+Europe and America,' said Henrietta; and she enjoyed her thrill of
+allegiance to her chivalrous lord and courtier.
+
+'No very extraordinary specimen of a newly married man, who has won the
+Beauty of England and America for his wife-at some cost to some people,'
+Livia rejoined.
+
+There came a moisture on the eyelashes of the emotional young woman, from
+a touch of compassion for the wealthy man who had wished to call her
+wife, and was condemned by her rejection of him to call another woman
+wife, to be wifeless in wedding her, despite his wealth.
+
+She thinks he loves her; it is pitiable, but she thinks it--after the
+treatment she has had.  She begs to see him once.'
+
+'And subdue him with a fit of weeping,' Livia was moved to say by sight
+of the tear she hated.  'It would harden Russett--on other eyes, too!
+Salt-water drops are like the forced agony scenes in a play: they bring
+down the curtain, they don't win the critics.  I heard her "my husband"
+and saw his face.'
+
+'You didn't hear a whimper with it,' Henrietta said.  'She's a mountain
+girl, not your city madam on the boards.  Chillon and I had her by each
+hand, implored her to leave that impossible Whitechapel, and she
+trembled, not a drop was shed by her.  I can almost fancy privation and
+squalor have no terrors for Janey.  She sings to the people down there,
+nurses them.  She might be occupying Esslemont--our dream of an English
+home!  She is the destruction of the idea of romantic in connection with
+the name of marriage.  I talk like a simpleton.  Janey upsets us all.
+My lord was only--a little queer before he knew her: His Mr. Woodseer may
+be encouraging her.  You tell me the creature has a salary from him equal
+to your jointure.'
+
+'Be civil to the man while it lasts,' Livia said, attentive to a
+degradation of tone--in her cousin, formerly of supreme self-containment.
+
+The beautiful young woman was reminded of her holiday in town.
+She brightened, and the little that it was, and the meanness of the
+satisfaction, darkened her.  Envy of the lucky adventurer Mr. Woodseer,
+on her husband's behalf, grew horridly conscious for being reproved.  So
+she plucked resolution to enjoy her holiday and forget the contrasts of
+life-palaces running profusion, lodgings hammered by duns; the pinch of
+poverty distracting every simple look inside or out.  There was no end to
+it; for her husband's chivalrous honour forced him to undertake the
+payment of her father's heavy debts.  He was right and admirable, it
+could not be contested; but the prospect for them was a grinding gloom,
+an unrelieved drag, as of a coach at night on an interminable uphill
+flinty road.
+
+These were her sensations, and she found it diverting to be admired;
+admired by many while she knew herself to be absorbed in the possession
+of her by one.  It bestowed the before and after of her marriage.  She
+felt she was really, had rapidly become, the young woman of the world,
+armed with a husband, to take the flatteries of men for the needed
+diversion they brought.  None moved her; none could come near to touching
+the happy insensibility of a wife who adored her husband, wrote to him
+daily, thought of him by the minute.  Her former worshippers were
+numerous at Livia's receptions; Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and the
+rest.  Odd to reflect on--they were the insubstantial but coveted wealth
+of the woman fallen upon poverty, ignoble poverty!  She could not
+discard her wealth.  She wrote amusingly of them, and fully, vivacious
+descriptions, to Chillon; hardly so much writing to him as entering her
+heart's barred citadel, where he resided at his ease, heard everything
+that befell about her.  If she dwelt on Lord Fleetwood's kindness in
+providing entertainments, her object was to mollify Chillon's anger in
+some degree.  She was doing her utmost to gratify him, 'for the purpose
+of paving a way to plead Janey's case.'  She was almost persuading
+herself she was enjoying the remarks of his friend, confidant, secretary,
+or what not, Livia's worshipper, Mr. Woodseer, 'who does as he wills with
+my lord; directs his charities, his pleasures, his opinions, all because
+he is believed to have wonderful ideas and be wonderfully honest.'
+Henrietta wrote: 'Situation unchanged.  Janey still At that place'; and
+before the letter was posted, she and Livia had heard from Gower Woodseer
+of the reported disappearance of the Countess of Fleetwood and her maid.
+Gower's father had walked up from Whitechapel, bearing news of it to the
+earl, she said.
+
+'And the earl is much disturbed?' was Livia's inquiry.
+
+'He has driven down with my father,' Gower said carelessly, ambiguously
+in the sound.
+
+Troubled enough to desire the show of a corresponding trouble, Henrietta
+read at their faces.
+
+'May it not be--down there--a real danger?'
+
+The drama, he could inform her, was only too naked down there for
+disappearances to be common.
+
+'Will it be published that she is missing?'
+
+'She has her maid with her, a stout-hearted girl.  Both have courage.
+I don't think we need take measures just yet.'
+
+'Not before it is public property?'
+
+Henrietta could have bitten her tongue for laying her open to the censure
+implied in his muteness.  Janey perverted her.
+
+Women were an illegible manuscript, and ladies a closed book of the
+binding, to this raw philosopher, or he would not so coldly have judged
+the young wife, anxious on her husband's account, that they might escape
+another scorching.  He carried away his impression.
+
+Livia listened to a remark on his want of manners.
+
+'Russett puts it to the credit of his honesty,' she said.  'Honesty is
+everything with us at present.  The man has made his honesty an excellent
+speculation.  He puts a piece on zero and the bank hands him a sackful.
+We may think we have won him to serve us, up comes his honesty.  That's
+how we have Lady Arpington mixed in it--too long a tale.  But be guided
+by me; condescend a little.'
+
+'My dear!  my whole mind is upon that unhappy girl.  It would break
+Chillon's heart.'
+
+Livia pished.  'There are letters we read before we crack the seal.  She
+is out of that ditch, and it suits Russett that she should be.  He's not
+often so patient.  A woman foot to foot against his will--I see him
+throwing high stakes.  Tyrants are brutal; and really she provokes him
+enough.  You needn't be alarmed about the treatment she 'll meet.  He
+won't let her beat him, be sure.'
+
+Neither Livia nor Gower wondered at the clearing of the mystery, before
+it went to swell the scandal.  A young nobleman of ready power, quick
+temper, few scruples, and a taxed forbearance, was not likely to stand
+thwarted and goaded-and by a woman.  Lord Fleetwood acted his part,
+inscrutable as the blank of a locked door.  He could not conceal that he
+was behind the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
+
+Gower's bedroom window looked over the shrubs of the square, and as his
+form of revolt from a city life was to be up and out with the sparrows in
+the early flutter of morning, for a stretch of the legs where grass was
+green and trees were not enclosed, he rarely saw a figure below when he
+stood dressing.  Now there appeared a petticoated one stationary against
+the rails, with her face lifted.  She fronted the house, and while he
+speculated abstractedly, recognition rushed on him.  He was down and
+across the roadway at leaps.
+
+'It's Madge here!'
+
+The girl panted for her voice.
+
+'Mr. Woodseer, I'm glad; I thought I should have to wait hours.  She's
+safe.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+'Will you come, sir?'
+
+'Step ahead.'
+
+Madge set forth to north of the square.
+
+He judged of the well-favoured girl that she could steer her way through
+cities: mouth and brows were a warning to challenger pirate craft of a
+vessel carrying guns; and the red lips kept their firm line when they
+yielded to the pressure for speech.
+
+'It's a distance.  She's quite safe, no harm; she's a prisoner; she's
+well fed; she's not ill treated.'
+
+'You 're out?'
+
+'That's as it happens.  I'm lucky in seeing you early.  He don't mean to
+hurt her; he won't be beaten.  All she asks is ten minutes with him.  If
+he would!--he won't.  She didn't mean to do him offence t' other night in
+that place--you've heard.  Kit Ines told me he was on duty there--going.
+She couldn't help speaking when she had eyes on her husband.  She kisses
+the ground of his footsoles, you may say, let him be ever so unkind.  She
+and I were crossing to the corner of Roper Street a rainy night, on way
+to Mile End, away down to one of your father's families, Mother Davis and
+her sick daughter and the little ones, and close under the public-house
+Goat and Beard we were seized on and hustled into a covered carriage that
+was there, and they drove sharp.  She 's not one to scream.  We weren't
+frightened.  We both made the same guess.  They drove us to the house she
+'s locked in, and me, too, up till three o'clock this morning.'
+
+'You've seen nobody, Madge?'
+
+'He 's fixed she 's to leave London, Mr. Woodseer.  I've seen Kit Ines.
+And she 's to have one of the big houses to her use.  I guessed Kit Ines
+was his broom.  He defends it because he has his money to make--and be a
+dirty broom for a fortune!  But any woman's sure of decent handling with
+Kit Ines--not to speak of lady.  He and a mate guard the house.  An old
+woman cooks.'
+
+'He guards the house, and he gave you a pass?'
+
+'Not he.  His pride's his obedience to his "paytron"--he calls his
+master, and won't hear that name abused.  We are on the first floor; all
+the lower doors are locked day and night.  New Street, not much
+neighbours; she wouldn't cry out of the window.  She 's to be let free if
+she'll leave London.'
+
+'You jumped it!'
+
+'If I'd broke a leg, Mr. Kit Ines would have had to go to his drams.  It
+wasn't very high; and a flower-bed underneath.  My mistress wanted to be
+the one.  She has to be careful.  She taught me how to jump down not to
+hurt.  She makes you feel you can do anything.  I had a bother to get her
+to let me and be quiet herself.  She's not one to put it upon others,
+you'll learn.  When I was down I felt like a stick in the ground and sat
+till I had my feet, she at the window waiting; and I started for you.
+She kissed her hand.  I was to come to you, and then your father, you
+nowhere seen.  I wasn't spoken to.  I know empty London.'
+
+'Kit Ines was left sleeping in the house?'
+
+'Snoring, I dare say: He don't drink on duty.'
+
+'He must be kept on duty.'
+
+'Drink or that kind of duty, it's a poor choice.'
+
+'You'll take him in charge, Madge.'
+
+'I've got a mistress to look after.'
+
+'You've warmed to her.'
+
+'That's not new; Mr. Woodseer.  I do trust you, and you his friend.  But
+you are the minister's son, and any man not a great nobleman must have
+some heart for her.  You'll learn.  He kills her so because she's fond of
+him--loves him, however he strikes.  No, not like a dog, as men say of
+us.  She'd die for him this night, need were.  Live with her, you won't
+find many men match her for brave; and she's good.  My Sally calls her a
+Bible saint.  I could tell you stories of her goodness, short the time
+though she's been down our way.  And better there for her than at that
+inn he left her at to pine and watch the Royal Sovereign come swing come
+smirk in sailor blue and star to meet the rain--would make anybody
+disrespect Royalty or else go mad!  He's a great nobleman, he can't buy
+what she's ready to give; and if he thinks he breaks her will now, it's
+because she thinks she's obeying a higher than him, or no lord alive and
+Kit Ines to back him 'd hold her.  Women want a priest to speak to men
+certain times.  I wish I dared; we have to bite our tongues.  He's master
+now, but, as I believe God's above, if he plays her false, he's the one
+to be brought to shame.  I talk.'
+
+'Talk on, Madge,' said Gower, to whom the girl's short-syllabled run of
+the lips was a mountain rill compared with London park waters.
+
+'You won't let him hurry her off where she'll eat her heart for never
+seeing him again?  She prays to be near him, if she's not to see him.'
+
+'She speaks in that way?'
+
+'I get it by bits.  I'm with her so, it's as good as if I was inside her.
+She can't obey when it goes the wrong way of her heart to him.'
+
+'Love and wisdom won't pull together, and they part company for good at
+the church door,' said Gower.  'This matrimony's a bad business.'
+
+Madge hummed a moan of assent.  'And my poor Sally 'll have to marry.
+I can't leave my mistress while she wants me, and Sally can't be alone.
+It seems we take a step and harm's done, though it's the right step we
+take.'
+
+'It seems to me you've engaged yourself to follow Sally's lead, Madge.'
+
+'Girls' minds turn corners, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+He passed the remark.  What it was that girls' minds occasionally or
+habitually did, or whether they had minds to turn, or whether they took
+their whims for minds, were untroubled questions with a young man
+studying abstract and adoring surface nature too exclusively to be aware
+of the manifestation of her spirit in the flesh, as it is not revealed so
+much by men.  However, she had a voice and a face that led him to be
+thoughtful over her devotedness to her mistress, after nearly losing her
+character for the prize-fighter, and he had to thank her for invigorating
+him.  His disposition was to muse and fall slack, helpless to a friend.
+Here walked a creature exactly the contrary.  He listened to the steps of
+the dissimilar pair on the detonating pavement, and eyed a church clock
+shining to the sun.
+
+She was sure of the direction: 'Out Camden way, where the murder was.'
+
+They walked at a brisk pace, conversing or not.
+
+'Tired?  You must be,' he said.
+
+'Not when I'm hot to do a thing.'
+
+'There's the word of the thoroughbred!'
+
+'You don't tire, sir,' said she.  'Sally and I see you stalking out for
+the open country in the still of the morning.  She thinks you look pale
+for want of food, and ought to have some one put a biscuit into your
+pocket overnight.'
+
+'Who'd have guessed I was under motherly observation!'
+
+'You shouldn't go so long empty, if you listen to trainers.'
+
+'Capital doctors, no doubt.  But I get a fine appetite.'
+
+'You may grind the edge too sharp.'
+
+He was about to be astonished, and reflected that she had grounds for her
+sagacity.  His next thought plunged him into contempt for Kit Ines, on
+account of the fellow's lapses to sottishness.  But there would be no
+contempt of Kit Ines in a tussle with him.  Nor could one funk the tussle
+and play cur, if Kit's engaged young woman were looking on.  We get to
+our courage or the show of it by queer screws.
+
+Contemplative over these matters, the philosopher transformed to man of
+action heard Madge say she read directions in London by churches, and
+presently exclaiming disdainfully, and yet relieved, 'Spooner Villas,'
+she turned down a row of small detached houses facing a brickfield, that
+had just contributed to the erection of them, and threatened the big city
+with further defacements.
+
+Madge pointed to the marks of her jump, deep in flower-bed earth under an
+open window.
+
+Gower measured the height with sensational shanks.
+
+She smote at the door.  Carinthia nodded from her window.  Close upon
+that, Kit Ines came bounding to the parlour window; he spied and stared.
+Gower was known to him as the earl's paymaster; so he went to the passage
+and flung the door open, blocking the way.
+
+'Any commands, your honour?'
+
+'You bring the countess to my lord immediately,' said Gower.
+
+Kit swallowed his mouthful of surprise in a second look at Madge and the
+ploughed garden-bed beneath the chamber window.
+
+'Are the orders written, sir?'
+
+'To me?--for me to deliver to you?--for you to do my lord's bidding?
+Where's your head?'
+
+Kit's finger-nails travelled up to it.  Madge pushed past him.
+She and her mistress, and Kit's mate, and the old woman receiving the
+word for a cup of tea, were soon in the passage.  Kit's mate had a ready
+obedience for his pay, nothing else,--no counsel at all, not a suggestion
+to a head knocked to a pudding by Madge's jump and my lord's paymaster
+here upon the scene.
+
+'My lady was to go down Wales way, sir.'
+
+'That may be ordered after.'
+
+'I 'm to take my lady to my lord?' and, 'Does it mean my lady wants a
+fly?' Kit asked, and harked back on whether Madge had seen my lord.
+
+'At five in the morning?--don't sham donkey with me,' said Gower.
+
+The business looked inclined to be leaky, but which the way for proving
+himself other than a donkey puzzled Kit: so much so, that a shove made
+him partly grateful.  Madge's clever countermove had stunned his
+judgement.  He was besides acting subordinate to his patron's paymaster;
+and by the luck of it, no voice of woman interposed.  The countess and
+her maid stood by like a disinterested couple.  Why be suspicious, if he
+was to keep the countess, in sight?  She was a nice lady, and he
+preferred her good opinion.  She was brave, and he did her homage.  It
+might be, my lord had got himself round to the idea of thanking her for
+saving his nob that night, and his way was to send and have her up, to
+tell her he forgave her, after the style of lords.  Gower pricked into
+him by saying aside: 'Mad, I suppose, in case of a noise?' And he could
+not answer quite manfully, lost his eyes and coloured.  Neighbours might
+have required an explanation of shrieks, he confessed.  Men have
+sometimes to do nasty work for their patrons.
+
+They were afoot, walking at Carinthia's pace before half-past seven.
+She would not hear of any conveyance.  She was cheerful, and, as it was
+pitiful to see, enjoyed her walk.  Hearing of her brother's departure for
+the Austrian capital, she sparkled.  Her snatches of speech were short
+flights out of the meditation possessing her.  Gower noticed her easier
+English, that came home to the perpetual student he was.  She made use of
+some of his father's words, and had assimilated them mentally besides
+appropriating them: the verbalizing of 'purpose,' then peculiar to his
+father, for example.  She said, in reply to a hint from him: 'If my lord
+will allow me an interview, I purpose to be obedient.'  No one could
+imagine of her that she spoke broken-spiritedly.  Her obedience was to a
+higher than a mortal lord: and Gower was touched to the quick through the
+use of the word.
+
+Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think
+her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the
+world; but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion,
+and she had at least natural grace, a deerlike step.  Although her
+picturesqueness did not swarm on him with images illuminating night,
+subduing day, like the Countess Livia's, it was marked, it could tower
+and intermittently eclipse; and it was of the uplifting and healing kind
+by comparison, not a delicious balefulness.
+
+The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences,
+were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.
+
+'My lord lives in a square,' she said.
+
+'We shall soon be there now,' he encouraged her, doubtful though the
+issue appeared.
+
+'It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the
+Venediger,--all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+'If we could fly!'
+
+'We love them.'
+
+'Why, then we beat a wing--yes.'
+
+'For I have them when I want them to sight.  It is the feet are so
+desirous.  I feel them so this morning, after prisonership.  I could not
+have been driven to my lord.'
+
+'I know the feeling,' said Gower; 'any movement of us not our own
+impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind.  And by the way, my dear
+lady, I spoke of the earl's commands to this man behind us walking with
+your Madge.  My father would accuse me of Jesuitry.  Ines mentioned
+commands, and I took advantage of it.'
+
+'I feared,' said Carinthia.  'I go for my chance.'
+
+Gower had a thought of the smaller creature, greater by position, to whom
+she was going for her chance.  He alluded to his experience of the earl's
+kindness in relation to himself, from a belief in his 'honesty'; dotted
+outlines of her husband's complex character, or unmixed and violently
+opposing elements.
+
+She remarked: 'I will try and learn.'
+
+The name of the street of beautiful shops woke a happy smile on her
+mouth.  'Father talked of it; my mother, too.  He has it written down in
+his Book of Maxims.  When I was a girl, I dreamed of one day walking up
+Bond Street.'
+
+They stepped from the pavement and crossed the roadway for a side-street
+leading to the square.  With the swift variation of her aspect at times,
+her tone changed.
+
+'We are near.  My lord will not be troubled by me.  He has only to meet
+me.  There has been misunderstanding.  I have vexed him; I could not help
+it.  I will go where he pleases after I have heard him give orders.  He
+thinks me a frightful woman.  I am peaceful.'
+
+Gower muttered her word 'misunderstanding.'  They were at the earl's
+house door.  One tap at it, and the two applicants for admission would
+probably be shot as far away from Lord Fleetwood as when they were on the
+Styrian heights last autumn.  He delivered the tap, amused by the idea.
+It was like a summons to a genie of doubtful service.
+
+My lord was out riding in the park.
+
+Only the footman appeared at that early hour, and his countenance was
+blank whitewash as he stood rigid against the wall for the lady to pass.
+Madge followed into the morning room; Ines remained in the hall, where he
+could have the opening speech with his patron, and where he soon had
+communication with the butler.
+
+This official entered presently to Gower, presenting a loaded forehead.
+A note addressed to Mrs. Kirby-Levellier at the Countess Livia's house
+hard by was handed to him for instant despatch.  He signified a
+deferential wish to speak.
+
+'You can speak in the presence of the Countess of Fleetwood, Mr. Waytes,'
+Gower said.
+
+Waytes checked a bend of his shoulders.  He had not a word, and he turned
+to send the note.  He was compelled to think that he saw a well-grown
+young woman in the Whitechapel Countess.
+
+Gower's note reached Henrietta on her descent to the breakfast-table.
+She was, alone, and thrown into a torture of perplexity: for she wanted
+advice as to the advice to be given to Janey, and Livia was an utterly
+unprofitable person to consult in the case.  She thought of Lady
+Arpington, not many doors distant.  Drinking one hasty cup of tea, she
+sent for her bonnet, and hastened away to the great lady, whom she found
+rising from breakfast with the marquis.
+
+Lady Arpington read Gower's note.  She unburdened herself: 'Oh!  So it 's
+no longer a bachelor's household!'
+
+Henrietta heaved the biggest of sighs.  'I fear the poor dear may have
+made matters worse.'
+
+To which Lady Arpington said: 'Worse or better, my child!' and shrugged;
+for the present situation strained to snapping.
+
+She proposed to go forthwith, and give what support she could to the
+Countess of Fleetwood.
+
+They descended the steps of the house to the garden and the Green Park's
+gravel walk up to Piccadilly.  There they had view of Lord Fleetwood on
+horseback leisurely turning out of the main way's tide.  They saw him
+alight at the mews.  As they entered the square, he was met some doors
+from the south corner by his good or evil genius, whose influence with
+him came next after the marriage in the amazement it caused, and was
+perhaps to be explained by it; for the wealthiest of young noblemen
+bestowing his name on an unknown girl, would be the one to make an absurd
+adventurer his intimate.  Lord Fleetwood bent a listening head while Mr.
+Gower Woodseer, apparently a good genius for the moment, spoke at his
+ear.
+
+How do we understand laughter at such a communication as he must be
+hearing from the man?  Signs of a sharp laugh indicated either his cruel
+levity or that his presumptuous favourite trifled--and the man's talk
+could be droll, Lady Arpington knew: it had, she recollected angrily,
+diverted her, and softened her to tolerate the intruder into regions from
+which her class and her periods excluded the lowly born, except at the
+dinner-tables of stale politics and tattered scandal.  Nevertheless, Lord
+Fleetwood mounted the steps to his house door, still listening.  His
+'Asmodeus,' on the tongue of the world, might be doing the part of Mentor
+really.  The house door stood open.
+
+Fleetwood said something to Gower; he swung round, beheld the ladies and
+advanced to them, saluting.  'My dear Lady Arpington!  quite so, you
+arrive opportunely.  When the enemy occupies the citadel, it's proper to
+surrender.  Say, I beg, she can have the house, if she prefers it.  I
+will fall back on Esslemont.  Arrangements for her convenience will be
+made.  I thank you, by anticipation.'
+
+His bow included Henrietta loosely.  Lady Arpington had exclaimed:
+'Enemy, Fleetwood?' and Gower, in his ignorance of the smoothness of
+aristocratic manners, expected a remonstrance; but Fleetwood was allowed
+to go on, with his air of steely geniality and a decision, that his
+friend imagined he could have broken down like an old partition board
+under the kick of a sarcasm sharpening an appeal.
+
+'Lord Fleetwood was on the point of going in,' he assured the great lady.
+
+'Lord Fleetwood may regret his change of mind,' said she.  'The Countess
+of Fleetwood will have my advice to keep her footing in this house.'
+
+She and Henrietta sat alone with Carinthia for an hour.  Coming forth,
+Lady Arpington ejaculated to herself: 'Villany somewhere!--You will do
+well, Henrietta, to take up your quarters with her a day or two.  She can
+hold her position a month.  Longer is past possibility.'
+
+A shudder of the repulsion from men crept over the younger lady.  But she
+was a warrior's daughter, and observed: 'My husband, her brother, will be
+back before the month ends.'
+
+'No need for hostilities to lighten our darkness,' Lady Arpington
+rejoined.  'You know her?  trust her?'
+
+'One cannot doubt her face.  She is my husband's sister.  Yes, I do trust
+her.  I nail my flag to her cause.'
+
+The flag was crimson, as it appeared on her cheeks; and that intimated a
+further tale, though not of so dramatic an import as the cognizant short
+survey of Carinthia had been.
+
+These young women, with the new complications obtruded by them, irritated
+a benevolent great governing lady, who had married off her daughters and
+embraced her grandchildren, comfortably finishing that chapter; and
+beheld now the apparition of the sex's ancient tripping foe, when
+circumstances in themselves were quite enough to contend against on their
+behalf.  It seemed to say, that nature's most burdened weaker must always
+be beaten.  Despite Henrietta's advocacy and Carinthia's clear face, it
+raised a spectral form of a suspicion, the more effective by reason of
+the much required justification it fetched from the shades to plead
+apologies for Lord Fleetwood's erratic, if not mad, and in any case ugly,
+conduct.  What otherwise could be his excuse?  Such was his need of one,
+that the wife he crushed had to be proposed for sacrifice, in the mind of
+a lady tending strongly to side with her and condemn her husband.
+
+Lady Arpington had counselled Carinthia to stay where she was, the Fates
+having brought her there.  Henrietta was too generous to hesitate in her
+choice between her husband's sister and the earl.  She removed from
+Livia's house to Lord Fleetwood's.  My lord was at Esslemont two days;
+then established his quarters at Scrope's hotel, five minutes' walk from
+the wedded lady to whom the right to bear his title was granted, an
+interview with him refused.  Such a squaring for the battle of spouses
+had never--or not in mighty London--been seen since that old fight began.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
+
+Dame Gossip at this present pass bursts to give us a review of the social
+world siding for the earl or for his countess; and her parrot cry of
+'John Rose Mackrell!' with her head's loose shake over the smack of her
+lap, to convey the contemporaneous tipsy relish of the rich good things
+he said on the subject of the contest, indicates the kind of intervention
+it would be.
+
+To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder,
+that he was the countess's voluble advocate at a period when her friends
+were shy to speak of her.  After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in
+burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell's
+enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in.  He tracked her to her
+parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some
+Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny: and, a turn of great good luck
+helping him to a copy of the book of the MAXIMS FOR MEN, he would quote
+certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby's
+personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to
+prove that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations.
+They had the repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and
+truncehons that have tasted brains.  They wove no mild sort of halo for
+the head of a shillelagh-flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from
+the writer and doer.
+
+People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a
+suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her
+lord's town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope's
+hotel.  He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might
+have heightened a rageing scandal.  The nobleman forbore.  A woman's blow
+gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it
+may: we win the world's after-thoughts.  Rose Mackrell sketched the
+earl;--always alert, smart, quick to meet a combination and protect a
+dignity never obtruded, and in spite of himself the laugh of the town.
+His humour flickered wildly round the ridiculous position of a prominent
+young nobleman, whose bearing and character were foreign to a position of
+ridicule.
+
+Nevertheless, the earl's figure continuing to be classic sculpture, it
+allied him with the aristocracy of martyrs, that burn and do not wince.
+He propitiated none, and as he could not but suffer shrewdly, he gained
+esteem enough to shine through the woman's pitiless drenching of him.
+During his term at Scrope's hotel, the carousals there were quite old-
+century and matter of discourse.  He had proved his return to sound sense
+in the dismissal of 'the fiddler,' notoriously the woman's lieutenant, or
+more; and nightly the revelry closed at the great gaming tables of St.
+James's Street, while Whitechapel held the coroneted square, well on her
+way to the Law courts, as Abrane and Potts reported; and positively so,
+'clear case.'  That was the coming development and finale of the
+Marriage.  London waited for it.
+
+A rich man's easy smile over losses at play, merely taught his emulous
+troop to feel themselves poor devils in the pocket.  But Fleetwood's
+contempt of Sleep was a marvel, superhuman, and accused them of an
+inferior vigour, hard for young men to admit by the example.  He never
+went to bed.  Issuing from Fortune's hall-doors in the bright, lively,
+summer morning, he mounted horse and was away to the hills.  Or he took
+the arm of a Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Feltre, and walked with him
+from the green tables and the establishment's renowned dry still Sillery
+to a Papist chapel.  As it was not known that he had given his word to
+abjure his religion, the pious gamblers did no worse than spread an alarm
+and quiet it, by the citation of his character for having a try at
+everything.
+
+Henrietta despatched at this period the following letter to Chillon:
+
+'I am with Livia to-morrow.  Janey starts for Wales to-morrow morning, a
+voluntary exile.  She pleaded to go back to that place where you had to
+leave her, promising she would not come Westward; but was persuaded.
+Lady Arpington approves.  The situation was getting too terribly
+strained.  We met and passed my lord in the park.
+
+'He was walking his horse-elegant cavalier that he is: would not look on
+his wife.  A woman pulled by her collar should be passive; if she pulls
+her way, she is treated as a dog.  I see nothing else in the intention of
+poor Janey's last offence to him.  There is an opposite counsel, and he
+can be eloquent, and he will be heard on her side.  How could she manage
+the most wayward when she has not an idea of ordinary men!  But, my
+husband, they have our tie between them; it may move him.  It subdues
+her--and nothing else would have done that.  If she had been in England a
+year before the marriage, she would, I think, have understood better how
+to guide her steps and her tongue for his good pleasure.  She learns
+daily, very quickly: observes, assimilates; she reads and has her
+comments--would have shot far ahead of your Riette, with my advantages.
+
+'Your uncle--but he will bear any charge on his conscience as long as he
+can get the burden off his shoulders.  Do not fret, my own!  Reperuse the
+above--you will see we have grounds for hope.
+
+'He should have looked down on her!  No tears from her eyes, but her eyes
+were tears.  She does not rank among beautiful women.  She has her
+moments for outshining them--the loveliest of spectres!  She caught at my
+heart.  I cannot forget her face looking up for him to look down.  A
+great painter would have reproduced it, a great poet have rendered the
+impression.  Nothing short of the greatest.  That is odd to say of one so
+simple as she.  But when accidents call up her reserves, you see mountain
+heights where mists were--she is actually glorified.  Her friend--I do
+believe a friend--the Mr. Woodseer you are to remember meeting somewhere
+--a sprained ankle--has a dozen similes ready for what she is when pain
+or happiness vivify her.  Or, it may be, tender charity.  She says, that
+if she feels for suffering people, it is because she is the child of
+Chillon's mother.  In like manner Chillon is the son of Janey's father.
+
+'Mr. Woodseer came every other evening.  Our only enlivenment.  Livia
+followed her policy, in refusing to call.  We lived luxuriously; no
+money, not enough for a box at the opera, though we yearned--you can
+imagine.  Chapters of philosophy read out and expounded instead.  Janey
+likes them.  He sets lessons to her queer maid--reading, writing,
+pronunciation of English.  An inferior language to Welsh, for poetical
+purposes, we are informed.  So Janey--determining to apply herself to
+Welsh, and a chameleon Riette dreading that she will be taking a contrary
+view of the honest souls--as she feels them to be--when again under
+Livia's shadow.
+
+'The message from Janey to Scrope's hotel was despatched half-an-hour
+after we had driven in from the park; fruit of a brown meditation.  I
+wrote it--third person--a single sentence.  Arrangements are made for her
+to travel comfortably.  It is funny--the shops for her purchases of
+clothes, necessaries, etc., are specified; she may order to any extent.
+Not a shilling of money for her poor purse.  What can be the secret of
+that?  He does nothing without an object.  To me, uniformly civil, no
+irony, few compliments.  Livia writes, that I am commended for keeping
+Janey company.  What can be the secret of a man scrupulously just with
+one hand, and at the same time cruel with the other?  Mr. Woodseer says,
+his wealth:--"More money than is required for their needs, men go into
+harness to Plutus,"--if that is clever.
+
+'I have written my husband--as Janey ceases to call her own; and it was
+pretty and touching to hear her "my husband."--Oh!  a dull letter.  But
+he is my husband though he keeps absent--to be longed for--he is my
+husband still, my husband always.  Chillon is Henrietta's husband, the
+world cries out, and when she is flattered she does the like, for then it
+is not too presumptuous that she should name Henrietta Chillon's wife.
+In my ears, husband has the sweeter sound.  It brings an angel from
+overhead.  Will it bring him one-half hour sooner?  My love!  My dear!
+If it did, I should be lisping "husband, husband, husband" from cock-crow
+to owl's cry.  Livia thinks the word foolish, if not detestable.  She and
+I have our different opinions.  She is for luxury.  I choose poverty and
+my husband.  Poverty has its beauty, if my husband is the sun of it.
+Elle radote.  She would not have written so dull a letter to her husband
+if she had been at the opera last night, or listened to a distant street-
+band.  No more--the next line would be bleeding.  He should have her
+blood too, if that were her husband's--it would never be; but if it were
+for his good in the smallest way.  Chillon's wish is to give his blood
+for them he loves.  Never did woman try more to write worthily to her
+absent lord and fall so miserably into the state of dripping babe from
+bath on nurse's knee.  Cover me, my lord; and love, my cause for--no, my
+excuse, my refuge from myself.  We are one?  Oh!  we are one!--and we
+have been separated eight and twenty days.
+
+                                   'HENRIETTA KIRBY-LEVELLIER.'
+
+That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land
+and be warmed.
+
+The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where
+his waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;--resembling
+craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young
+Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she
+was now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest
+as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest.
+Chillon had a wife.  Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his
+knowledge of his wife's nature.  Carinthia might bear it and harden to
+flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays.  His thoughts, all
+his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the
+pleasure she flew in--a butterfly's grub without it.  Accurately so did
+the husband and lover read his wife--adoring her the more.
+
+Her letter's embracing close was costly to them.  It hurried him to the
+compromise of a debateable business, and he fell into the Austrian
+Government's terms for the payment of the inheritance from his father;
+calculating that--his sister's share deducted-money would be in hand to
+pay pressing debts and enable Henrietta to live unworried by cares until
+he should have squeezed debts, long due and increasing, out of the
+miserly old lord, his uncle.  A prospect of supplies for twelve months,
+counting the hack and carriage Henrietta had always been used to, seemed
+about as far as it was required to look by the husband hastening homeward
+to his wife's call.  Her letter was a call in the night.  Besides, there
+were his yet untried Inventions.  The new gunpowder testing at Croridge
+promised to provide Henrietta with many of the luxuries she could have
+had, and had abandoned for his sake.  The new blasting powder and a
+destructive shell might build her the palace she deserved.  His uncle
+was, no doubt, his partner.  If, however, the profits were divided,
+sufficient wealth was assured.  But his uncle remained a dubious image.
+The husband and lover could enfold no positive prospect to suit his
+wife's tastes beyond the twelve months.
+
+We have Dame Gossip upon us.
+
+--One minute let mention be of the excitement over Protestant England
+when that rumour disseminated, telling of her wealthiest nobleman's visit
+to a monastery, up in the peaks and snows; and of his dwelling among the
+monks, and assisting in all their services day and night, hymning and
+chanting, uttering not one word for one whole week: his Papistical
+friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured
+him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon
+echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners
+into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life's end, not
+to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them
+into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they would have
+settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would have
+impoverished--is not too strong a word--the country by taking the money's
+worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares of
+our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the
+Protestant faith.  Underrate it now--then it was a truly justifiable
+anxiety: insomuch that you heard people of station, eminent titled
+persons, asking, like the commonest low Radicals, whether it was prudent
+legislation to permit of the inheritance of such vast wealth by a young
+man, little more than a boy, and noted for freaks.  And some declared it
+could not be allowed for foreign monks to have a claim to inherit English
+property.  There was a general consent, that if the Earl of Fleetwood
+went to the extreme of making over his property to those monks, he should
+be pronounced insane and incapable.  Ultimately the world was a little
+pacified by hearing that a portion of it was entailed, Esslemont and the
+Welsh mines.
+
+So it might be; but what if he had no child!  The marriage amazing
+everybody scarcely promised fruit, it was thought.  Countess Livia, much
+besought for her opinion, scouted the possibility.  And Carinthia Jane
+was proclaimed by John Rose Mackrell (to his dying day the poor gentleman
+tried vainly to get the second syllable of his name accentuated) a young
+woman who would outlive twice over the husband she had.  He said of his
+name, it was destined to pass him down a dead fish in the nose of
+posterity, and would affect his best jokes; which something has done, or
+the present generation has lost the sense of genuine humour.
+
+Thanks to him, the talk of the Whitechapel Countess again sprang up,
+merrily as ever; and after her having become, as he said, 'a desiccated
+celebrity,' she outdid cabinet ministers and naughty wives for a living
+morsel in the world's mouth.  She was denounced by the patriotic party as
+the cause of the earl's dalliance with Rome.
+
+The earl, you are to know, was then coasting along the Mediterranean, on
+board his beautiful schooner yacht, with his Lord Feltre, bound to make
+an inspection of Syrian monasteries, and forget, if he could, the face of
+all faces, another's possession by the law.
+
+Those two lords, shut up together in a yacht, were advised by their
+situation to be bosom friends, and they quarrelled violently, and were
+reconciled, and they quarrelled again; they were explosive chemicals;
+until the touch of dry land relieved them of what they really fancied the
+spell of the Fiend.  For their argumentative topic during confinement was
+Woman, when it was not Theology; and even off a yacht, those are subjects
+to kindle the utmost hatred of dissension, if men are not perfectly
+concordant.  They agreed upon land to banish any talk of Women or
+Theology, where it would have been comparatively innocent; so they both
+desiring to be doing the thing they had sworn they would not do, the
+thoughts of both were fastened on one or the other interdicted subject.
+They hardly spoke; they perceived in their longing minds, that the
+imagined spell of, the Fiend was indeed the bile of the sea, secreted
+thickly for want of exercise, and they both regretted the days and nights
+of their angry controversies; unfit pilgrims of the Holy Land, they
+owned.
+
+To such effect, Lord Fleetwood wrote to Gower Woodseer, as though there
+had been no breach between them, from Jerusalem, expressing the wish to
+hear his cool wood-notes of the philosophy of Life, fresh drawn from
+Nature's breast; and urgent for an answer, to be addressed to his hotel
+at Southampton, that he might be greeted on his return home first by his
+'friend Gower.'
+
+He wrote in the month of January.  His arrival at Southampton was on the
+thirteenth day of March; and there he opened a letter some weeks old, the
+bearer of news which ought by rights to make husbands proudly happy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
+
+Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good fortune
+was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
+reading of Gower's lines.  Other letters were opened: from the Countess
+Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier.  There was one
+from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication dated
+South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the effect, that
+the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered on the day of
+the date, with a copy of the document forwarded.
+
+Livia scornfully stated the tattling world's 'latest.'  The captain was
+as brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be taken
+for a challenge of the eye.  It stamped the adversary's frown on
+Fleetwood reading.  Lady Arpington was more politic; she wrote of
+'a healthy boy,' and 'the healthy mother giving him breast,' this being
+'the way for the rearing of strong men.'  She condescended to the
+particulars, that she might touch him.
+
+The earl had not been so reared: his mother was not the healthy mother.
+One of his multitudinous, shifty, but ineradicable ambitions was to
+exhibit an excellingly vigorous, tireless constitution.  He remembered
+the needed refreshment of the sea-breezes aboard his yacht during the
+week following the sleep-discarded nights at Scrope's and the green
+tables.  For a week he hung to the smell of brine, in rapturous amity
+with Feltre, until they yellowed, differed, wrangled, hated.
+
+A powerful leaven was put into him by the tidings out of Wales.  Gower,
+good fellow, had gone down to see the young mother three weeks after the
+birth of her child.  She was already renewing her bloom.  She had
+produced the boy in the world's early manner, lightly, without any of the
+tragic modern hovering over death to give the life.  Gower compared it to
+a 'flush of the vernal orchard after a day's drink of sunlight.'  That
+was well: that was how it should be.  One loathes the idea of tortured
+women.
+
+The good fellow was perhaps absurdly poetical.  Still we must have poetry
+to hallow this and other forms of energy: or say, if you like, the right
+view of them impels to poetry.  Otherwise we are in the breeding yards,
+among the litters and the farrows.  It is a question of looking down or
+looking up.  If we are poor creatures--as we are if we do but feast and
+gamble and beget--we shall run for a time with the dogs and come to the
+finish of swine.  Better say, life is holy!  Why, then have we to thank
+her who teaches it.
+
+He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband, making
+him a father: the imagined Carinthia--beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus;
+the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal
+dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she
+alternately softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons.  A mate for the
+caress, an electrical heroine, fronted him.
+
+Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood's wife, cracking sconces,--a demoiselle
+Moll Flanders,--the world's Whitechapel Countess out for an airing,
+infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his
+word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now
+persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to
+stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head
+from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of
+men to behave as an actor.  He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the
+eyeholes.
+
+But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the mother of
+the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her boy was
+his boy.  They met inseparably in that new life.
+
+Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the
+beatific image of Feltre's worshipped Madonna!
+
+The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood's mind, as a star passing
+into cloud.  For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at all
+allied with her; at her husband most, of course:--the punctilious noodle!
+the golden jackass, tethered and goaded!  He had choice among the pick of
+women: the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre
+Coelebs.  She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow
+in producing her male infant.
+
+By the way, was she actually born in wedlock?  Lord Levellier's
+assurances regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser's
+shuffles to clinch his bargain.  Assuming the representative of holy
+motherhood to be a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House
+to which the spotted woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching
+on her.  And altogether the history fumed rank vapours.  Imagine her boy
+in his father's name a young collegian!  No commonly sensitive lad could
+bear the gibes of the fellows raking at antecedents: Fleetwood would be
+the name to start roars.  Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the
+boy's mother.  Her production of a man-child was the further and grosser
+offence.
+
+The world sat on him.  His confession to some degree of weakness, even to
+folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain
+by tearing himself from a thought of his folly's partner, shutting
+himself up and away from her.  Then there was a cessation of annoyance,
+flatteringly agreeable: which can come to us only of our having done the
+right thing, young men will think.  He felt at once warmly with the
+world, enjoyed the world's kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of
+his unprecedented attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an
+understanding of its laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in
+the person of the Whitechapel Countess.  The world sat on him heavily.
+
+He recurred to Gower Woodseer's letter.
+
+The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,--the
+impression had been deep.  A plain transcription of the young mother's
+acts and words did more to portray her: the reader could supply
+reflections.
+
+Would her boy's father be very pleased to see him?  she had asked.
+
+And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from
+her.
+
+'Never that--you have my word!' Fleetwood said; and he nodded
+consentingly over her next remark
+
+'Not while I live, till he must go to school!'
+
+The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled
+mother.
+
+A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient
+in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.
+
+For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that
+he leaned on pride.  To think that he did, became a theme for pride.  The
+mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the
+richer mine.  And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual
+he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring
+bone, muscle, stout heart.
+
+Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the
+earldom.
+
+Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse.  Courage, animal healthfulness, she,
+too, might--her husband not obstructing--transmit; and good looks, eyes
+of the sapphire AEgean.  And therewith such pliability as the Mother of
+Love requires of her servants.
+
+Could that woman resist seductions?
+
+Fleetwood's wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to
+pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether
+the woman could be--and easily!  easily!  he wagered--led to make her
+conduct warrant for his contempt of her.  Led,--that is, misled, you
+might say, if you were pleading for a doll.  But it was necessary to bait
+the pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious
+fine fate one has escaped.  Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in
+the blood, which the woman's beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a
+fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely
+desirous for the stain of it to be washed out.  As this is not the desire
+to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it.  When we know that the
+weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market
+where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the
+female heap: subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past
+flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a
+passion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable passion.
+
+The plot--formless plot--to get release by the sacrifice or at least a
+crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her
+image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology
+offered no improvement of its aspect.  She might come out of the trial
+triumphant.  And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the
+pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he
+loathed the thought.  He was too delicate over the idea of the married
+woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood.  Others might press her
+hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release.  She had set him
+on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and
+erasing stain and scars; that was all.  Henrietta rejected her wealthy
+suitor: she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth,
+glad of a drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught.
+An injured pride could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a
+spectacle.
+
+Devilish, if you like.  He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian
+seclusion.  His wife now drove him to sin again.
+
+She had given him a son.  That fluted of home and honourable life.
+She had her charm, known to him alone.
+
+But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations,
+how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne?  Consideration was
+due to her until she stumbled.  Enough if she wavered.  Almost enough is
+she stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page
+of her was a false introduction.  The surprising apparition of a
+beautiful woman with character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman
+devoted to her husband or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would
+loosen him creditably.  It had to be witnessed, for faith in it.  He
+reverenced our legendary good women, and he bowed to noble deeds; and he
+ascribed the former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a
+scourging to his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates.  Nothing of the
+kind was doing at present.
+
+Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer's letter enriched a
+little incident.  Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he
+had read deliberately and caught the scene.
+
+Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower.  Carinthia and Madge,
+trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
+hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the
+edge in his infant days.  There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water,
+they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to
+it, one or both.  It must have been the mountain-footed one.  A man would
+hesitate, spying below.  Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb
+up, and carrying the lamb!  Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it
+between them.  We who stand aloof admire stupidly.  To defend himself
+from admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
+probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
+forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are
+woven.  Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and
+sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties.  If
+both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself
+into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.
+
+Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
+whose memory was to be impregnated.  His reader would have flown away
+from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then
+envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to
+the winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next
+thought about it.  He knew his Fleetwood so far.
+
+His letter concluded: 'I am in a small Surrey village over a baker's
+shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame's infant school opposite my
+window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or
+the nested fancies.  Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless,
+off any ten square feet of common earth.  I go through my illusions and
+come always back on that good truth.  It says, beware of the world's
+passion for flavours and spices.  Much tasted, they turn and bite the
+biter.  My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in
+their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day.  I learn more
+from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant
+Ixionides.'
+
+Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the
+new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.
+
+'My Ixionides!' he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he
+rejoiced to be enlightened by the title.  He craved the presence of the
+magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think
+of than the whole body of those Ixionides--not bad fellows, here and
+there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish
+fun.  Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled?  No, they had merely
+parted at one of the crossways.  The plebeian could teach that son of
+the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners.  Woodseer was the
+better comrade and director of routes.  Into the forest, up on the
+heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick
+for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it
+be composed of Ixionides: that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut
+that way.
+
+Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree
+anxious for a communication from Wales.  There was none.  Why none?
+
+She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to
+her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly
+interesting.  The mother's wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested
+in a furnace.  He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three
+formal words.  She sulked?  'I am not a fallen lamb!' he said.  Evidently
+one had to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.
+
+Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him,
+the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging
+young shoots of sweeter feelings.  She sulked!  If that woman could not
+get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission.  After
+besmutting the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that
+there was no intention to repent.  Possibly she meant war.  In which case
+a man must fly, or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar
+farces;--to be compared to a pelting of one on the stage.
+
+The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS AVERTED
+
+Livia welcomed him, with commiserating inquiry behind her languid
+eyelids.  'You have all the latest?' it said.
+
+He struck on the burning matter.
+
+'You wish to know the part you have to play, ma'am.'  'Tell me, Russett.'
+
+'You will contradict nothing.'
+
+Her eyebrows asked, 'It means?'
+
+'You have authority from me to admit the facts.'
+
+'They are facts?' she remarked.
+
+'Women love teasing round certain facts, apparently; like the Law courts
+over their pet cases.'
+
+'But, Russett, will you listen?'
+
+'Has the luck been civil of late?'
+
+'I think of something else at present.  No, it has not.'
+
+'Abrane?'
+
+'Pray, attend to me.  No, not Abrane.'
+
+'I believe you've all been cleared out in my absence.  St. Ombre?'
+
+Her complexion varied.  'Mr. Ambrose Mallard has once or twice .  .  .
+But let me beg you--the town is rageing with it.  My dear Russett, a bold
+front now; there 's the chance of your release in view.'
+
+'A rascal in view!  Name the sum.'
+
+'I must reckon.  My head is--can you intend to submit?'
+
+'So it's Brosey Mallard now.  You choose your deputy queerly.  He's as
+bad as Abrane, with steam to it.  Chummy Potts would have done better.'
+
+'He wins one night; loses every pound-note he has the next; and comes
+vaunting--the "dry still Sillery" of the establishment,--a perpetual
+chorus to his losses!'
+
+'His consolation to you for yours.  That is the gentleman.  Chummy
+doesn't change.  Say, why not St. Ombre?  He's cool.'
+
+'There are reasons.'
+
+'Let them rest.  And I have my reasons.  Do the same for them.'
+
+'Yours concern the honour of the family.'
+
+'Deeply: respect them.'
+
+'Your relatives have to be thought of, though they are few and not too
+pleasant.'
+
+'If I had thought much of them, what would our relations be?  They object
+to dicing, and I to leading strings.'
+
+She turned to a brighter subject, of no visible connection with the
+preceding.
+
+'Henrietta comes in May.'
+
+'The month of her colours.'
+
+'Her money troubles are terrible.'
+
+'Both of you appear unlucky in your partners,--if winning was the object.
+She shall have all the distractions we can offer.'
+
+'Your visit to the Chartreuse alarmed her.'
+
+'She has rejoiced her husband.'
+
+'A girl.  She feared the Jesuit in your friend.'
+
+'Feltre and she are about equally affected by music.  They shall meet.'
+
+'Russett, this once: I do entreat you to take counsel with your good
+sense, and remember that you stand where you are by going against my
+advice.  It is a perfect storm over London.  The world has not to be
+informed of your generosity; but a chivalry that invites the most
+horrible of sneers at a man!  And what can I say?  I have said it was
+impossible.'
+
+'Add the postscript: you find it was perfectly possible.'
+
+'I have to learn more than I care to hear.'
+
+'Your knowledge is not in request: you will speak in my name.'
+
+'Will you consult your lawyers, Russett, before you commit yourself?'
+
+'I am on my way to Lady Arpington.'
+
+'You cannot be thinking how serious it is.'
+
+'I rather value the opinion of a hard-headed woman of the world.'
+
+'Why not listen to me?'
+
+'You have your points, ma'am.'
+
+'She's a torch.'
+
+'She serves my purpose.'
+
+Livia shrugged sadly.  'I suppose it serves your purpose to be
+unintelligible to me.'
+
+He rendered himself intelligible immediately by saying, 'Before I go--
+a thousand?'
+
+'Oh, my dear Russett!' she sighed.
+
+'State the amount.'
+
+She seemed to be casting unwieldly figures and he helped her with, 'Mr.
+Isaacs?'
+
+'Not less than three, I fear.'
+
+'Has he been pressing?'
+
+'You are always good to us, Russett.'
+
+'You are always considerate for the honour of the family, ma'am.  Order
+for the money with you here to-morrow.  And I thank you for your advice.
+Do me the favour to follow mine.
+
+'Commands should be the word.'
+
+'Phrase it as you please.'
+
+'You know I hate responsibility.'
+
+'The chorus in classical dramas had generally that sentiment, but the
+singing was the sweeter for it.'
+
+'Whom do you not win when you condescend to the mood, you dear boy?'
+
+He restrained a bitter reply, touching the kind of persons he had won: a
+girl from the mountains, a philosophical tramp of the roads, troops of
+the bought.
+
+Livia spelt at the problem he was.  She put away the task of reading it.
+He departed to see Lady Arpington, and thereby rivet his chains.
+
+As Livia had said, she was a torch.  Lady Endor, Lady Eldritch, Lady
+Cowry, kindled at her.  Again there were flights of the burning brands
+over London.  The very odd marriage; the no-marriage; the two-ends-of-
+the-town marriage; and the maiden marriage a fruitful marriage; the
+monstrous marriage of the countess productive in banishment, and the
+unreadable earl accepting paternity; this Amazing Marriage was again the
+riddle in the cracker for tattlers and gapers.  It rattled upon the
+world's native wantonness, the world's acquired decorum: society's
+irrepressible original and its powerfully resisting second nature.  All
+the rogues of the fine sphere ran about with it, male and female; and
+there was the narrative that suggestively skipped, and that which trod
+the minuet measure, dropping a curtsey to ravenous curiosity; the apology
+surrendering its defensible cause in supplications to benevolence; and
+the benevolence damnatory in a too eloquent urgency; followed by the
+devout objection to a breath of the subject, so blackening it as to call
+forth the profanely circumstantial exposition.  Smirks, blushes, dead
+silences, and in the lower regions roars, hung round it.
+
+But the lady, though absent, did not figure poorly at all.  Granting
+Whitechapel and the shillelagh affair, certain whispers of her good
+looks, contested only to be the more violently asserted; and therewith
+Rose Mackrell's tale of her being a 'young woman of birth,' having a
+'romantic story to tell of herself and her parentage,' made her latest
+performance the champagne event of it hitherto.  Men sparkled when they
+had it on their lips.
+
+How, then, London asked, would the Earl of Fleetwood move his pieces in
+reply to his countess's particularly clever indication of the check
+threatening mate?
+
+His move had no relation to the game, it was thought at first.  The world
+could not suppose that he moved a simple pawn on his marriage board.  He
+purchased a shop in Piccadilly for the sale of fruit and flowers.
+
+Lady Arpington was entreated to deal at the shop, Countess Livia had her
+orders; his friends, his parasites and satellites, were to deal there.
+Intensely earnest as usual, he besought great ladies to let him have the
+overflow of their hothouses; and they classing it as another of the
+mystifications of a purse crazy for repleteness, inquired: 'But is it you
+we are to deal with?' And he quite seriously said: 'With me, yes, at
+present.'  Something was behind the curtain, of course.  His gravity had
+the effect of the ultra-comical in concealing it.
+
+The shop was opened.  We have the assurance of Rose Mackrell, that he
+entered and examined the piles and pans of fruit, and the bouquets
+cunningly arranged by a hand smelling French.  The shop was roomy,
+splendid windows lighted the yellow, the golden, the green and parti-
+coloured stores.  Four doors off, a chemist's motley in bellied glasses
+crashed on the sight.  Passengers along the pavement had presented to
+them such a contrast as might be shown if we could imagine the Lethean
+ferry-boatload brought sharp against Pomona's lapful.  In addition to the
+plucked flowers and fruits of the shop, Rose Mackrell more attentively
+examined the samples doing service at the counters.  They were three,
+under supervision of a watchful-eyed fourth.  Dame Gossip is for quoting
+his wit.  But the conclusion he reached, after quitting the shop and
+pacing his dozen steps, is important; for it sent a wind over the town to
+set the springs of tattle going as wildly as when the herald's trumpet
+blew the announcement for the world to hear out of Wales.
+
+He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in the
+ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she was,
+therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his
+thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the
+mistress of the shop.
+
+And the mistress of the shop?
+
+The question hardly needs be put.
+
+Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.
+
+London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable
+under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop
+had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of
+Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an
+occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.
+
+There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.
+Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows.  Carriages
+driving by stopped to look.  My lord himself had been visible, displaying
+his array of provisions to friends.  Nor was credulity damped appreciably
+when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch.
+It might be the countess's maiden name, if she really was a married
+countess.
+
+But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think its
+Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe.  They were at the
+pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder
+extravagances.  To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too
+much, because any absurdity was anticipated.  And the earl's readiness to
+be complimented on the shop's particular merits, his gratified air at an
+allusion to it, whirled the fun faster.  He seemed entirely unconscious
+that each step he now took wakened peals.
+
+For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist
+for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more
+laughable if not in himself a laughable object.  The earl's handsome
+figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of
+his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in state-
+according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they were
+not strictly divisible.  Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts drew
+into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from Whitechapel.
+She said it a little nervously, but without blushing.  Always on the side
+of the joke, he could ask: 'Who can doubt?' Indeed, scepticism poisoned
+the sport.
+
+The Old Buccaneer has written: Friends may laugh; I am not roused.  My
+enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night.
+
+Our enemy's laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say.  He can barely
+mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by
+laughter of friends.  An old warrior's tough fibre would, perhaps, be
+insensible to that small crackle.  In civil life, however, the friend's
+laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course: and
+the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from
+hearing it.  Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its
+being about him: he cannot imagine such 'lese-majeste' in the subservient
+courtiers too prudent to betray a sign.  So Fleetwood was unwarned; and
+his child-like unconsciousness of the boiling sentiments around,
+seasoned, pricked, and maddened his parasites under compression to
+invent, for a faint relief.  He had his title for them, they their tales
+of him.
+
+Dame Gossip would recount the tales.  She is of the order of persons
+inclining to suspect the tittle of truth in prodigies of scandal.  She is
+rustling and bustling to us of 'Carinthia Jane's run up to London to see
+Sarah Winch's grand new shop,' an eclipse of all existing grand London
+western shops; and of Rose Mackrell's account of her dance of proud
+delight in the shop, ending with a 'lovely cheese' just as my lord
+enters; and then a scene, wild beyond any conceivable 'for pathos and
+humour'--her pet pair of the dissimilar twins, both banging at us for
+tear-drops by different roads, through a common aperture:--and the earl
+has the Whitechapel baby boy plumped into his arms; and the countess
+fetches him a splendid bob-dip and rises out of a second cheese to twirl
+and fandango it; and, all serious on a sudden, request, whimperingly
+beseech, his thanks to her for the crowing successor she has presented
+him with: my lord ultimately, but carefully, depositing the infant on a
+basket of the last oranges of the season, fresh from the Azores, by
+delivery off my lord's own schooner-yacht in Southampton water; and
+escaping, leaving his gold-headed stick behind him--a trophy for the
+countess?  a weapon, it may be.
+
+Quick she tucks up her skirts, she is after him.  Dame Gossip speaks
+amusingly enough of the chase, and many eye-witnesses to the earl's
+flight at top speed down the right side of the way along by the Green
+Park; and of a Prince of the Blood, a portly Royal Duke on foot, bumped
+by one or the other of them, she cannot precisely say which, but 'thinks
+it to have been Carinthia Jane,' because the exalted personage, his shock
+of surprise abating, turned and watched the chase, in much merriment.
+And it was called, we are informed, 'The Piccadilly Hare and Hound' from
+that day.
+
+Some tradition of an extenuated nobleman pursued by a light-footed lady
+amid great excitement, there is; the Dame attaches importance also to
+verses of one of the ballads beginning to gain currency at the time
+(issuing ostensibly from London's poetic centre, the Seven Dials, which
+had, we are to conjecture, got the story by discolouring filtration
+through footmen retailing in public-houses the stock of anecdotes they
+gathered when stationed behind Rose Mackrell's chair, or Captain
+Abrane's, or Chumley 'Potts's), and would have the whole of it quoted:--
+
+        "'Tho' fair I be a powdered peruke,
+          And once was a gaping silly,
+          Your Whitechapel Countess will prove, Lord Duke,
+          She's a regular tiger-lily.
+          She'll fight you with cold steel
+                    or she'll run you off your legs
+          Down the length of Piccadilly!"
+
+That will satisfy; and perhaps indicate the hand.
+
+'Popular sympathy, of course, was all on the side of the Fair, as ever in
+those days when women had not forfeited it by stepping from their
+sanctuary seclusion.'
+
+The Dame shall expose her confusions.  She really would seem to fancy
+that the ballad verifies the main lines of the story, which is an
+impossible one.  Carinthia had not the means to travel: she was
+moneyless.  Every bill of her establishment was paid without stint by Mr.
+Howell Edwards, the earl's manager of mines; but she had not even the
+means for a journey to the Gowerland rocks she longed to see.  She had
+none since she forced her brother to take the half of her share of their
+inheritance, L1400, and sent him the remainder.
+
+Accepted by Chillon John as a loan, says Dame Gossip, and no sooner
+received than consumed by the pressing necessities of a husband with the
+Rose Beauty of England to support in the comforts and luxuries he deemed
+befitting.
+
+Still the Dame leans to her opinion that 'Carinthia Jane' may have been
+seen about London: for 'where we have much smoke there must be fire.'
+And the countess never denying an imputation not brought against her in
+her hearing, the ballad was unchallenged and London's wags had it their
+own way.  Among the reasons why they so persistently hunted the earl,
+his air of a smart correctness shadowed by this new absurdity invited
+them, as when a spot of mud on the trimmest of countenances arrests
+observation: Humour plucked at him the more for the good faith of his
+handsome look under the prolific little disfigurement.  Besides, a
+wealthy despot, with no conception of any hum around him, will have the
+wags in his track as surely as the flexibles in front: they avenge his
+exactions.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Always the shout for more produced it ("News")
+Anecdotist to slaughter families for the amusement
+Call of the great world's appetite for more (Invented news)
+Enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night
+He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly
+Magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness
+She was thrust away because because he had offended
+Women treat men as their tamed housemates
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4485 ***
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+eBook #4485 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4485)
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+{
+  "DATA": {
+    "CREDIT": "This etext was produced by David Widger",
+    "EBOOK_NUMBER": "4485"
+  }
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Marriage, v3
+by George Meredith
+#91 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: The Amazing Marriage, v3
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4485]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 26, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Marriage, v3, by Meredith
+********This file should be named 4485.txt or 4485.zip********
+
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+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
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+
+The "legal small print" and other information about this book
+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
+important information, as it gives you specific rights and
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+
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+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+
+
+
+THE AMAZING MARRIAGE
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1895
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XX.       STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE
+          MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
+XXI.      IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF
+          OUR YOUNGER MAN
+XXII.     A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
+XXIII.    IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN
+XXIV.     A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
+XXV.      THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
+XXVI.     AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
+XXVII.    WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
+XXVIII.   BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS
+          AVERTED
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE MORAL
+EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
+
+Money of his father's enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in
+fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,
+were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature's face did not
+arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank
+sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his
+father's hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold.  Without it, he would have
+been useless in this case of need.  The philosopher could starve with
+equanimity, and be the stronger.  But one had, it seemed here clearly, to
+put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one's
+help.  Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were
+teaching an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised
+were doctorial giants beside it.
+
+The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold.  Admiral Fakenham's butler
+refused at first to take a name to his master.  Gower persisted, stating
+the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib
+good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was
+induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.
+
+She sprang up alarmed.  After having seen the young lady happily married
+and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from
+the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the
+scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable
+stood forth appallingly.  The messenger, the butler said, was no
+gentleman.  She inspected Gower and heard him speak.  An anomaly had come
+to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a
+nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was
+frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing.  In return for the
+compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room.  The story of the young
+countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church in
+a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends, in
+the Whitechapel of London--the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts,
+bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who was
+the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach?  A previously
+disregarded horror of a man.  She went trembling to the admiral, though
+his health was delicate, his temper excitable.  It was, she considered,
+an occasion for braving the doctor's interdict.
+
+Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham
+reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair.  He told a plain
+tale.  Its effect was to straighten the admiral's back, and enlarge in
+grey glass a pair of sea-blue eyes.  And, 'What's that?  Whitechapel?'
+the admiral exclaimed,--at high pitch, far above his understanding.
+The particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with,
+'Greengrocer?' He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in
+his pet girl's honeymoon: 'A prizefight?'
+
+To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.
+Gower's habiliments were those of the 'queer fish,' the admiral saw.  But
+the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy
+effort to remember it.  'Prize-fight!--Greengrocer!  Whitechapel!' he
+rang the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he
+cried: 'Where's the husband?'
+
+That was the emissary's question likewise.
+
+'If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.'
+
+'Disappeared?  Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman!  Prize-
+fight the first day of her honeymoon?  Good Lord!  Leaves her at the
+inn?'
+
+'She was left.'
+
+'When was she left?'
+
+'As soon as the fight was over--as far as I understand.'
+
+The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.
+
+'Her brother's travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees--married my daughter.
+She has an uncle, a hermit.'  He became pale.  'I must do it.  The rascal
+insults us all.  Flings her off the day he married her!  It 's a slap in
+the face to all of us.  You are acquainted with the lady, sir.  Would you
+call her a red-haired girl?'
+
+'Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.'
+
+'She has the eyes for a man to swear by.  I feel the loss of her, I can
+tell you.  She was wine and no penalty to me.  Is she much broken under
+it?--if I 'm to credit .  .  .  I suppose I must.  It floors me.'
+
+Admiral Baldwin's frosty stare returned on him.  Gower caught an image of
+it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten by
+the beams.
+
+'Nothing breaks her courage,' he said.
+
+'To be sure, my poor dear!  Who could have guessed when she left my house
+she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer's in Whitechapel.
+But the dog's not mad, though his bite 's bad; he 's an eccentric
+mongrel.  He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from his
+first breeching.  He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will,
+mark me.  This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don't
+start to-night.  Oblige me, half a minute.'
+
+The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood, and
+dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word 'Head.'
+
+Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the
+admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an
+error of judgement.  The butler had argued it with her.  She belonged to
+the list of persons appointed to cut life's thread when it strains, their
+general kindness being so liable to misdirection.
+
+Gower left the room and went into the garden.  He had never seen a death;
+and the admiral's peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of cold
+mist and a dripping stillness.  How we go, was the question among his
+problems:--if we are to go!  his youthful frame insistingly added.
+
+The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of
+his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to
+believe in it.  Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously,
+and a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and
+paper, and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies,
+held ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable.  He got his
+wits to the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young
+countess and the friend she might be about to lose.  She could number her
+friends on her fingers.  Admiral Fakenham's exclamations of the name of
+the place where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had
+undergone.  Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and
+the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of
+her, that they and those two girls had become by the twist of
+circumstances the most serviceable of her friends.
+
+Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young lord,--
+burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the moment it
+was his own.  Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
+gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man.  He could be
+magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness.  He coveted beauty
+in women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower
+judged by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
+observations of him.  Why marry her to cast her off instantly?  The crude
+philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral.  And, further, what
+did the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
+endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door?  Older men
+might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
+had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.
+
+Dame Gossip boils.  Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
+persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that
+is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
+succession of collisions.  The fault of the method is, that they do not
+instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the
+uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like the
+tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
+seductive.  The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us
+more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal;
+and the Dame will have him only as an index-post.  Hence her endless
+ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of character,
+--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people!  To preserve
+Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we must be
+inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than shaking
+the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing activity of
+the head.
+
+Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
+sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to
+stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey
+with him to London, doctor or no doctor.  The doctor would not hear of
+it.  The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning
+for the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully
+affecting his linen.  Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a
+mere show of reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat
+the bed where he lay, a gouty volcano.  Gower's one shirt was passing
+through the various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way
+to negro.  His natural candour checked the downward course.  He mentioned
+to Mrs. Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that
+this article of his attire 'was beginning to resemble London snow.'  She
+was amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow.
+'It will save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her.
+She then remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a
+reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer
+speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on
+the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.
+
+In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess
+Livia, who had come down to see the admiral 'concerning an absurd but
+annoying rumour running over London.'  Gower was out for a walk.  He knew
+of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of
+his clothing.
+
+'But I know the man,' said Livia.  'Lord Fleetwood picked him up
+somewhere, and brought him to us.  Clever: Why, is he here?'
+
+'He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.'
+
+'Sent by whom?'
+
+Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew
+stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming
+herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the
+admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor's next visit; Mr.
+Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten
+minutes, to divert him with his talk.  She protected in this wretched
+manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of
+secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to
+Admiral Baldwin at once.  Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was
+unheeded.
+
+The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the
+knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood!  Henrietta had
+spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood's hatred of the title of Dowager.
+But when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear
+to excite him?  If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire 'one
+of his broadsides,'--as they said in the family, to assert its and that
+might exhaust him; and there was peril in that.  And who was guilty?
+Mrs. Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided.
+She made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.
+
+Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
+cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the
+choice of his thoughts as well.  He was in the house with his devoutly,
+simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work
+without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral's shirt-collar
+cutting his ears.  The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know
+whether it was for rapture or annoyance.  As a result he was but
+histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of
+the lady appeared in the room.
+
+She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
+summoned immediately.  The remorseful woman flew.
+
+'Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting news.
+Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed.  You are Lord Fleetwood's friend and
+will not allow him to be prejudged.  He will be in town shortly.  I know
+him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty--and to
+a woman?  He is the soul of chivalry.  So, in his way, is the admiral.
+If he were only more patient!  Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood's version.
+I am certain it will satisfy me.  The admiral wishes you to step up to
+him.  Be very quiet; you will be; consent to everything.  I was unaware
+of his condition: the things I heard were incredible.  I hope the doctor
+will not delay.  Now go.  Beg to retire soon.'
+
+Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.
+
+Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
+extreme exhaustion.  He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
+bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: 'Kill myself?  Not half so
+quick as they'd do it.  I can't rest for that Whitechapel of yours.
+Please fetch pen and paper: it's a letter.'
+
+The letter began, 'Dear Lady Arpington.'
+
+The dictation of it came in starts.  Atone moment it seemed as if life's
+ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift.  An old
+friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky
+brevity.  It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl
+of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at
+a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to
+stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at
+furthest.  He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have
+the young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.
+
+Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.
+
+'Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil's abroad"--done it !' he
+said, sinking back.  'Now seal, you'll find wax--the ring at my watch-
+chain.'
+
+He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
+twitched by a dream.  There had been a scene with Livia.  The dictating
+of the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.
+
+Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs.  He wanted the address of
+Lady Arpington's town house.
+
+'You have a letter for her?' said Livia, and held her hand for it in a
+way not to be withstood.
+
+'There's no superscription,' he remarked.
+
+'I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+'I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+'By no means.'  She touched his arm.  'You are Lord Fleetwood's friend.'
+
+A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral's shirt-collar at his
+ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in
+overlooking the spectacle he presented.  Still, he considered; he had
+wits alive enough, just to perceive a duty.
+
+'The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+'You are afraid to entrust it to the post?'
+
+'I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.'
+
+'You will entrust it to me.'
+
+'Anything on earth of my own.'
+
+'The treasure would be valued.  This you confide to my care.'
+
+'It is important.'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Indeed it is.'
+
+'Say that it is, then.  It is quite safe with me.  It may be important
+that it should not be delivered.  Are you not Lord Fleetwood's friend?
+Lady Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and
+me.  Besides, I don't think she has come to town yet.  She generally sees
+out the end of the hunting season.  Leave the letter to me: it shall go.
+You, with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle
+has not his whole judgement at present.  There are two sides to a case.
+Lord Fleetwood's friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up
+to his enemies while he is absent.  Things going favourably here, I drive
+back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my
+carriage.'
+
+He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.
+
+They talked of Baden.  His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was
+a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him.
+He spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby's
+reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and
+seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar.  The touching of him again would
+not be required to set him pacing to her steps.  His hang of the head
+testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
+with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to
+conceal the crack of a string.  The merit of being one of her army of
+admirers was accorded to him.  The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.
+
+Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
+admiral's chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.
+Admiral Baldwin's condition was becoming ominous.  He sent messages
+downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest's departure until they two
+could make the journey together next day.  The tortured and blissful
+young man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher's cloak, hung conscience-
+ridden in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of
+the vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and
+mixed with his cup of amorous worship.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR
+YOUNGER MAN
+
+The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
+stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual.  He yielded
+his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly
+after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one
+of Gower's crucial trials.  It condemned him, for the pacifying of a
+dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt
+him, contributed to the brand on his race.  He and his father upheld a
+solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their
+people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms.  His loathing of
+any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an
+English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without
+which was no comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to
+him.  For Nature is the Truth.
+
+He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the
+petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;
+and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the
+right to a sense of honour.  'We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
+Woodseer,' she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it
+manifested.  There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common
+grounds between them, accompanying the dead words.  Mistress of the
+letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to
+bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it.
+A face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he,
+so clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.
+
+She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme.  Gower journeyed to
+London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;
+enamoured of it, and straining for health.  He had to reflect at the
+journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing
+observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a
+flowing river.
+
+The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house.  We are
+perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
+mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
+darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart
+of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower
+with an envy to resemble him in practice.  His philosophy, too,
+reproached him for being outshone.  Apart from his philosophy, he stood
+confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction.  Adoration
+of a woman takes the breath out of philosophy.  And if one had only to
+say sheer donkey, he consenting to be driven by her!  One has to say
+worse in this case; for the words are, liar and traitor.
+
+Carinthia's attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect
+for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
+principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen.  The sight of
+her lashed him.  She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go
+the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people.  She spoke of
+the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having
+only the wish to assist in ministering.  Probably the great wretchedness
+bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of
+Admiral Baldwin's end; her bosom sprang up: 'He was next to father,'
+was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the
+lodgings of poverty.  She had descended on the world.  There was of
+course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her;
+the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an
+urchin who had amused her.
+
+As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
+'They have no mornings here'; and the childish remark set her quivering
+on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower's memory.  Scarce
+anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she
+had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
+brother's return, she could have added.  She mentioned the goodness of
+Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support.  Money and
+its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter
+need of it for the first of human purposes by others.  Her speech was not
+of so halting or foreign an English.  She grew rapidly wherever she was
+planted.
+
+Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
+necessitated in Gower.  He pursued it, and listened to his father
+similarly at work: 'A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of
+souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she
+--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her
+on the day of their nuptials.
+
+She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant.  Can you imagine the
+doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?'
+
+Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:
+
+'Yes, I can imagine it, I'm doing it myself.  I shall be doing it till
+I've written a letter and paid a visit.'
+
+He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
+revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the
+plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because
+of the insensibility to beauty.  Out of which he passed to the writing of
+the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended
+immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from
+Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood.  A
+duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of
+conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence
+to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman's recollection,
+ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man
+suspecting them of the bite of rabies.
+
+An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.
+
+She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat
+for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance
+with the admiral had quieted her suspicions.  The world had only to stand
+beside her, and it would hear what she had heard.  She rushed to the
+conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.
+
+'Really, really, that young man's freaks appear designed for the express
+purpose of heightening our amazement!' she exclaimed.  'He won't easily
+get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there's no
+knowing.  Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's I hold sacred.  At least
+I can see for myself.  You can't tell me more of the facts?  If Lord
+Fleetwood's in town, I will call him here at once.  I will drive down to
+this address you give me.  She is a civil person?'
+
+'Her breeding is perfect,' said Gower.
+
+'Perfect breeding, you say?' Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.
+She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-
+possession.  He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her.  She was
+of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of
+an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to
+his clothing.  Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the
+complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the
+humblest who bear the main elements of it must be.  Certain humorous
+turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to
+leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.
+
+One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer's brief
+words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great
+lady's plain imperative.  She was connected with his family on the
+paternal side.
+
+He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
+Marriage, turning over documents, here say.  He went to Lady Arpington
+disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
+equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum
+of the ear.  He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way.  When
+very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had
+spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him.  Another
+fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his
+latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word.  He had
+plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic
+life--'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer
+said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,
+moodily talked of getting in his intervals.  He had gone down to a young
+and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a
+Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a
+lifelong bondage to the 'beautiful Gorgon,' under cover of a white
+flannel frock.  The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains
+of a woman, to redeem his word.
+
+But there was a plea on behalf of this woman.  The life she offered
+might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
+nevertheless, exorcise a devil.  Carinthia promised, it might seem to
+chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could,
+he now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil
+inhabiting him had at least been easier, 'up in a corner.'
+
+He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
+both, that made them one, by subduing him.  For it was a charm; an actual
+feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
+wordless in thought.  There, among the folds of the incense vapours of
+our heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive
+of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for
+compensation the exorcising of a devil.
+
+Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil.  It was alert and frisky,
+flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in
+the thought it made Carinthia's intimate charm appear as no better than a
+thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command
+the charm.  Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta's incomparable beauty
+and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the
+world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman
+--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--'It is my
+husband.'  The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not
+love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at
+the hint of her loving the man she had married.  Did she?  It might be
+tried.
+
+She?  That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
+flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man.  Or the love is a
+ship that will not sail a sea.
+
+Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
+proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
+Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
+tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
+country' beside that golden Henrietta's.
+
+Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions.  Often their fairest,
+apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
+graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of
+the poetic.  Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
+unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
+discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion.  How
+they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
+to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
+round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
+Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
+in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
+products, not esteemed by him.  Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
+Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
+'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
+graceful in the furnace of the trial.  She wore through the critic ordeal
+his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
+was rather better than not withered by it.
+
+On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
+other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
+contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
+ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
+furnace.  And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
+her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
+have been love.
+
+The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
+end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
+season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
+in his mastery, snare him in her surrender.  It must have been the
+veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
+yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
+favourite maidens.  Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
+the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic.  Though, true, she
+had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty.  Henrietta, illumined
+with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of
+love.  Would she?  For credulous men she would be golden coin of the
+currency.  She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the
+running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter's
+heart with pity.
+
+Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
+fought and laid his wilder self.  He might be likened to the doctor's
+patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug of
+healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
+robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have
+rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken
+the intonation of good words.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
+
+The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the
+pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens
+courtliness to hard attention.
+
+After the names of Admiral Baldwin and 'the Mr. Woodseer,' the name of
+Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington.  It might have been the name
+of any other place.
+
+'Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,' she said, observing the young
+earl.  'I drove down there yesterday.  I saw the lady calling herself
+Countess of Fleetwood.  By right?  She was a Miss Kirby.'
+
+'She has the right,' Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge
+of musketry.
+
+'Marriage not contested.  You knew of her being in that place?--I can't
+describe it.'
+
+'Your ladyship will pardon me?'
+
+London's frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to
+penetrate.
+
+He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.
+
+As iron as he looked, he said: 'She stays there by choice.'
+
+The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.
+
+'You are not acquainted with the district.'
+
+'One of my men comes out of it.'
+
+'The coming out of it !  .  .  .  However, I understand her story, that
+she travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without
+resources.  She waited weeks; I forget how many.  She has a description
+of maid in attendance on her.  She came to London to find her husband.
+You were at the mines, we heard.  Her one desire is to meet her husband.
+But, goodness!  Fleetwood, why do you frown?  You acknowledge the
+marriage, she has the name of the church; she was married out of that old
+Lord Levellier's house.  You drove her--I won't repeat the flighty
+business.  You left her, and she did her best to follow you.  Will the
+young men of our time not learn that life is no longer a game when they
+have a woman for partner in the match!
+
+You don't complain of her flavour of a foreign manner?  She can't be so
+very .  .  .  Admiral Baldwin's daughter has married her brother; and he
+is a military officer.  She has germs of breeding, wants only a little
+rub of the world to smooth her.  Speak to the point:--do you meet her
+here?  Do you refuse?'
+
+'At present?  I do.'
+
+'Something has to be done.'
+
+'She was bound to stay where I left her.'
+
+'You are bound to provide for her becomingly.'
+
+'Provision shall be made, of course.'
+
+'The story will .  .  .  unless--and quickly, too.'
+
+I know, I know!'
+
+Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel at
+him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree
+fire and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.
+
+The black flash flew.
+
+'It 's a thing to mend as well as one can,' Lady Arpington said.  'I am
+not inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any.  Get
+her away from that place.  She won't come to me unless it 's to meet her
+husband.  Ah, well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are,
+if you married her.  We'll leave the husband undiscussed: with this
+reserve, that it seems to me men are now beginning to play the
+misunderstood.'
+
+'I hope they know themselves better,' said Fleetwood; and he begged for
+the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who
+was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her
+dwelling.
+
+Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an
+assault on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old
+Buccaneer; it compelled to urgent measures.  He, as he felt horribly in
+pencilling her address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the
+goad.  Her mask of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft,
+which could be power; and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed
+to hatred.
+
+'A shop,' Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: 'potatoes,
+vegetable stuff.  Honest people, I am to believe.  She is indifferent to
+her food, she says.  She works, helping one of their ministers--one of
+their denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves!  Anything to
+escape from the Church!  She's likely to become a Methodist.  With Lord
+Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared
+Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time.  Well,
+she may claim to belong to it now.  She would not be persuaded against
+visitations to pestiferous hovels.  What else is there to do in such a
+place?  She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in
+the dark back room of a small greengrocer's shop in Whitechapel.  There--
+you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood's present address.'
+
+It drenched him with ridicule.
+
+'I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,' he said, and
+maintained his rigidity.
+
+The great lady stiffened.
+
+'I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once.  The
+admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I
+warn you--very well, very well.  In your own interests, it will be.  If
+she is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will
+stick to her.'
+
+'She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,' said Fleetwood.
+'She will have Esslemont to live in.'
+
+'There will be more than one to speak as to that.  You should know her.'
+
+'I do not know her.'
+
+'You married her.'
+
+'The circumstances are admitted.'
+
+'If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a
+previous interview.  She is bent on meeting you.'
+
+'I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of
+the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it.  Those are the
+terms.'
+
+'She has a brother living, I remind you.'
+
+'State the deduction, if you please, my lady.'
+
+'She is not of 'a totally inferior family.'
+
+'She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a
+diligent reader of his book of MAXIMS FOR MEN.'
+
+'Dear me!  Then Kirby--Captain Kirby!  I remember.  That's her origin,
+is it?' the great lady cried, illumined.  'My mother used to talk of the
+Cressett scandal.  Old Lady Arpington, too.  At any rate, it ended in
+their union--the formalities were properly respected, as soon as they
+could be.'
+
+'I am unaware.'
+
+'I detest such a tone of speaking.  Speaking as you do now--married to
+the daughter?  You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.'
+
+'Quite, ma'am, let me assure you.  Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would be
+dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion's Maxims.
+They will learn that I am myself.'
+
+'You don't improve as you proceed.  I tell you this, you'll not have me
+for a friend.  You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal
+to a prophecy, you won't have London with you; and you'll hear of Lord
+Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.'
+
+The preluding box on them reddened him.
+
+'She will have the offer of Esslemont.'
+
+'Undertake to persuade her in person.'
+
+'I have spoken on that head.'
+
+'Well, I may be mistaken,--I fancied it before I knew of the pair she
+springs from: you won't get her consent to anything without your
+consenting to meet her.  Surely it's the manlier way.  It might be
+settled for to-morrow, here, in this room.  She prays to meet you.'
+
+With an indicated gesture of 'Save me from it,' Fleetwood bowed.
+
+He left no friend thinking over the riddle of his conduct.  She was a
+loud-voiced lady, given to strike out phrases.  The 'Whitechapel
+Countess' of the wealthiest nobleman of his day was heard by her on
+London's wagging tongue.  She considered also that he ought at least have
+propitiated her; he was in the position requiring of him to do something
+of the kind, and he had shown instead the dogged pride which calls for a
+whip.  Fool as he must have been to go and commit himself to marriage
+with a girl of whom he knew nothing or little, the assumption of pride
+belonged to the order of impudent disguises intolerable to behold and
+not, in a modern manner, castigate.
+
+Notwithstanding a dislike of the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood, Lady
+Arpington paid Livia an afternoon visit; and added thereby to the stock
+of her knowledge and the grounds of her disapprobation.
+
+Down in Whitechapel, it was known to the Winch girls and the Woodseers
+that Captain Kirby and his wife had spent the bitterest of hours in
+vainly striving to break their immoveable sister's will to remain there.
+
+At the tea-time of simple people, who make it a meal, Gower's appetite
+for the home-made bread of Mary Jones was checked by the bearer of a
+short note from Lord Fleetwood.  The half-dozen lines were cordial,
+breathing of their walk in the Austrian highlands, and naming a renowned
+city hotel for dinner that day, the hour seven, the reply yes or no by
+messenger.
+
+'But we are man to man, so there's no "No" between us two,' the note
+said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been
+philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important
+fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when
+for men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.
+
+Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him
+magnanimous.
+
+'It may be the solution,' his father remarked.
+
+Both had the desire; and Gower's reply was the yes, our brave male word,
+supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it as a
+form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN
+
+Right soon the London pot began to bubble.  There was a marriage.
+
+'There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not
+consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,' the Old
+Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a
+series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.
+
+This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black
+as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous
+eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon's
+descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world.  Asserted
+here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of
+vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible.  Contradiction
+retired into corners, only to be swept out of them.  For this marriage,
+abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled
+the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world's
+cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.
+
+For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last
+night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been
+enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches
+riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them!
+She caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him
+with the customary facility of a pecking pullet.
+
+But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so
+gobbled?
+
+There is the mystery of it.  On his coming of age, that young man gave
+sign of his having a city head.  He put his guardians deliberately aside,
+had his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control:
+managed a particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of her
+lovely cousin; and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he chose
+to go and no other.  He had a will.
+
+The world accounted him wildish?
+
+Always from his own offset, to his own ends.  Never for another's
+dictation or beguilement.  Never for a woman.  He was born with a
+suspicion of the sex.  Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and
+drag men in the foulest ruts of prose.
+
+We are to believe he has been effectively captured?
+
+It is positively a marriage; he admits it.
+
+Where celebrated?
+
+There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment.  Three counties claim the
+church; two ends of London.
+
+She is not a person of society, lineage?
+
+Nor of beauty.  She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking
+like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade
+witch.  The kind is famous.  Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of
+her; she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the
+mire to enthral our knightliest.  Is it a popular hero?  She has him,
+sooner or later.  A planet Croesus?  He falls to her.
+
+That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of a
+corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.
+
+Small is her need to be young--especially if it is the man who is very
+young.  She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for
+the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it.  Self-respecting
+women treat men as their tamed housemates.  She blows the horn of the
+wild old forest, irresistible to the animal.  O the droop of the eyelids,
+the curve of a lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle;
+and the sparkling agreement, the reserve--the motherly feminine petition
+that she may retain her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate
+or not, by permission of superior authority!--proof at once of her
+intelligence and her appreciativeness.  Her infinitesimal spells are
+seen; yet, despite experience, the magnetism in their repulsive display
+is barely apprehended by sedate observers until the astounding capture is
+proclaimed.  It is visible enough then:--and O men!  O morals!  If she
+can but trick the smallest bit in stooping, she has the pick of men.
+
+Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.
+Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it.  Speaks foreign English.  He thinks her
+more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off
+the highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye.
+Sir Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the horror of the
+hands of that tramp the young lord had her from.  They afflict him
+malariously still.  The man, he says, the man as well was an infatuation,
+because he talks like a Dictionary Cheap Jack, and may have had an
+education and dropped into vagrancy, owing to indiscretions.  Lord
+Fleetwood ran about in Germany repeating his remarks.  But the man is
+really an accomplished violinist, we hear.  She dances the tambourine
+business.  A sister of the man, perhaps, if we must be charitable.  They
+are, some say, a couple of Hungarian gypsies Lord F. found at a show and
+brought over to England, and soon had it on his conscience that he ought
+to marry her, like the Quixote of honour that he is; which is equal to
+saying crazy, as there is no doubt his mother was.
+
+The marriage is no longer disputable; poor Lady Fleetwood, whatever her
+faults as a step-mother, does no longer deny the celebration of a
+marriage; though she might reasonably discredit any such story if he,
+on the evening of the date of the wedding day, was at a Ball, seen by her
+at the supper-table; though it is admitted he left the Ball-room at
+night.  But the next day he certainly was in his place among the Peers
+and voted against the Government, and then went down to his estates in
+Wales, being an excellent holder of the reins, whether on the coach box
+or over the cash box.
+
+More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight from
+the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special
+delectation.  She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne.
+Young Mr. Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and
+cheered the victor for being her husband's man.  And after the shocking
+exhibition, good-bye; the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant of
+a wayside inn, and may have learnt in her solitude that she would have
+been wise to feign disgust; for men to the smallest degree cultivated are
+unable to pardon a want of delicacy in a woman who has chosen them, as
+they are taught to think by their having chosen her.
+
+So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the
+early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be
+called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.
+
+Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants
+for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the
+tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor,
+Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged
+both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when
+their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank
+of Ophelia's ditch.  Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir
+Meeson Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the
+blush, by a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks.  High-nosed dames
+will surpass eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where
+Ahem sounds the warning note to curtained decency.  The courtly M. de St.
+Ombre had to stand confused.  He, however, gave another version of
+Captain Abrane's 'fiddler,' and precipitated the great ladies into the
+reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French Revolution,
+have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Class.  Homme
+d'esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than vagabond,
+was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further example of the
+French deficiency in humour.
+
+Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is.  Lady Cowry has it from Sir
+Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has
+installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table;
+fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving
+oranges at a small fruit-shop.  With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her
+there; and she can't be got to leave the place unless her husband drives
+his coach down to fetch her.  That he declines to do; so she remains the
+Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a
+shilling of her husband's money, if she 's not to bring him to his knees;
+and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those
+dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments.
+One signal from the man he has hired, and he stops drinking--he will stop
+speaking as soon as the man's mouth is open.  He is under a complete
+fascination, attributable, some say, to passes of the hands, which the
+man won't wash lest he should weaken their influence.
+
+For it cannot be simply his violin playing.  They say he was a pupil of
+a master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us
+think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious.  Lord
+Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously.  But
+the man's influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and
+fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists--if the man
+wishes it.  Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.
+
+Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man,
+formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no
+connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at
+the most.  He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German philosophy;
+otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and dress.  It
+is my lord who has had the chief influence.  And the Countess Livia now
+backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young man to
+be found.  She may have her reasons.
+
+As for the Whitechapel Countess .  .  .  the whole story of the Old
+Buccaneer and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo,
+presage of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had
+incomprehensibly espoused to discard.  Those two had a son and a daughter
+born aboard:--in wedlock, we trust.  The girl may be as wild a one as the
+mother.  She has a will as determined as her husband's.  She is offered
+Esslemont, the earl's Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none
+of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to
+entreat her.  The injury was deep on one side or the other.  It may be
+almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together.  Will
+either of them deal the stroke for freedom?  And which is the likelier?
+
+Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh
+of London.  Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from
+his shades at a call of the great world's appetite for more, and, rushing
+upon stationary Fact, supplied the required.  Marvel upon marvel was
+recounted.  The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined,
+where all was increasingly funny.
+
+Always the shout for more produced it.  She and her band of Whitechapel
+boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went.  She stood
+knocking at his door through a whole night.  He dared not lug her before
+a magistrate for fear of exposure.  Once, riding in the park with a troop
+of friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was
+levelled, and she cried: 'There is the English nobleman who marries a
+girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!'
+
+He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:--
+my lady the countess was on board!  A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the
+square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a
+sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name
+of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.
+
+The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best.  They let pass
+incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the nobility
+and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of
+potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their
+residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript,
+Vive L'aristocratie!  Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of
+the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.
+
+He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman.  But it
+was nothing worse than the parasite that he had.  This was the parasite's
+gentle treason.  He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug
+fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his
+patron kindly.  Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were
+personages during the town's excitement, besought for having something to
+say.  Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they
+created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh
+wherever they alighted.  Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an
+eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his
+fellows.  They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.
+
+He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl's fortunes to the cunning
+of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a
+gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young
+nobleman he was plotting to ruin.  Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane's
+latest effort to hit the dirty object's name, by calling him 'Fleetwood's
+Mr. Woodlouse.'  And was the rascal a sorcerer?  Sir Meeson spoke of him
+in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his
+disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: 'I begin to be of Russett's
+opinion, that his fault is his honesty.'  The rascal had won or partly
+won the empress of her sex!  This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most
+fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of
+the tramp's borrowed plumes!  Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory
+word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.
+
+Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of
+Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long
+since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable.  Thither one fair
+June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her
+beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what
+were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to
+conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies
+veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of
+whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my
+lord's pugilist, Christopher Ives.
+
+Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.
+
+The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for
+supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous
+generation.  Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no
+less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing
+Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his
+anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, 'that a dried fish is
+no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often
+render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the
+incident.'  His exact meaning in 'smoky flavour' we are not to know; but
+whether that M. de St. Ombre should witness the effect of English humour
+upon them, or that the ladies could permit themselves to laugh, their
+voices accompanied the gentlemen in silvery volleys.  There had been
+'Mackrell' at Fleetwood's dinner-table; which was then a way of saying
+that dry throats made no count of the quantity of champagne imbibed,
+owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused.  However, there was loud laughter
+as they strolled, and it was noticed; and Fleetwood crying out,
+'Mackrell!  Mackrell!' in delighted repudiation of the wag's last sally,
+the cry of 'Hooray, Mackrell !' was caught up by the crowd.  They were
+not the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party is bad
+breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.
+
+So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was good-
+humoured about it.
+
+Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his
+dancing.  He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine, sure
+of pleasing his patron; and the maid, passing from surprise to merriment,
+entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without emulation, for
+she likewise had the passion for the dance.  Whereby it befell that the
+pair footed in a way to gather observant spectators; and if it had not
+been that the man from whom the maid was willy-nilly snatched, conceived
+resentment, things might have passed comfortably; for Kit's quips and
+cuts and high capers, and the Sunday gravity of the barge face while the
+legs were at their impish trickery, double motion to the music, won the
+crowd to cheer.  They conjectured him to be a British sailor.  But the
+destituted man said, sailor or no sailor,--bos'en be hanged!  he should
+pay for his whistle.
+
+Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the
+worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short
+loan of her.--The man had an itch to strike.  Choosing rather to be
+struck first, he vented nasty remarks.  My lord spoke to Kit and moved
+on.  At the moment of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a
+waggery of some sort, heard to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous
+effect, that the prompt and immoderate laugh succeeding it might
+reasonably be taken for a fling of scorn at himself, by an injured man.
+They were a party; he therefore proceeded to make one, appealing to
+English sentiment and right feeling.  The blameless and repentant maid
+plucked at his coat to keep him from dogging the heels of the gentlemen.
+Fun was promised; consequently the crowd waxed.
+
+'My lord,' had been let fall by Kit Ines.  Conjoined to 'Mackrell,' it
+rang finely, and a trumpeting of 'Lord Mackrell' resounded.  Lord
+Mackrell was asked for 'more capers and not so much sauce.'  Various fish
+took part in his title of nobility.  The wag Mackrell continuing to be
+discreetly silent, and Kit Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd
+fell in love with their display of English humour, disposed to the surly
+satisfaction of a big street dog that has been appeased by a smaller
+one's total cessation of growls.
+
+All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures of
+young women on the scene.  They fronted the advance of the procession.
+They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell.  Not a bit of it--he won't
+listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him.  It's regular
+imploring: 'my lord! my lord!'
+
+O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell!  Listen to the
+young woman, you Mackrell, or you'll get Billingsgate!  Here's Mr. Jig-
+and-Reel behind here, says she's done him!  By Gosh!  What's up now?
+
+One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young
+woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell's way.  The crowd pressed to see.
+Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off.  They performed an envelopment
+of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women.  Kit left his
+mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two.  He
+rattled at her.  But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him.
+What did she say?
+
+Merely to hear, for no other reason,' a peace-loving crowd of clerks and
+tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions,
+night-larks of different classes, both sexes, there in that place for
+simple entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour,
+contracted, so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to
+the most orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir
+Meeson Corby.
+
+He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.
+'Cock Robin crowing' provoked a jolly round of barking chaff.  The noise
+in a dense ring drew Fleetwood's temper.  He gave the word to Kit Ines,
+and immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit.  The fists
+worked right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for
+sickle or scythe.  And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed
+her venerable self in the style and the perfect sufficiency of the
+strokes.  A bruiser delivered them.  No shame to back away before a
+bruiser.  There was rather an admiring envy of the party claiming the
+nimble champion on their side, until the very moderate lot of the
+Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path with sticks
+pointed.
+
+If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to get
+through.  An aggressive minority, and with Cock Robin squealing for
+constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to
+have a lesson.  The sticks were fallen on; bump came the mass.  Kit Ines
+had to fight his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish
+ring, but the gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to cheer
+the spirits of the ladies:--'All right, my friend, you're a trifle
+mistaken, it 's my stick, not yours.'  Therewith the wrestle for the
+stick.
+
+The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson
+Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not a
+common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him.  Her
+stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby's
+ebony stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the
+sconces, then to dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl,
+perhaps a lady, her cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much
+as tightening her lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched
+for by Rose Mackrell, who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head,
+cried: 'Damn it all, she's clever, though!'  She took her station beside
+Lord Fleetwood.
+
+He had been as cool as she, or almost.  Now he was maddened; she defended
+him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a touch;
+unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow's
+public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule.  Have
+you seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables
+that betrays the mishandling of him by his groom?  Something so did
+Fleetwood plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul cried
+out on her sticking to him like a plaster!
+
+Welcome were the constables.  His guineas winked at their chief, as fair
+women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers
+of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words
+of his: 'Right, my lord,' smelling my lord in the unerring manner of
+those days.  My lord's party were escorted to the gates, not a little
+jeered; though they by no means had the worst of the tussle.  But the
+puffing indignation of Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and torn
+frill and buttons plucked from his coat, and his threat of the
+magistrates, excited the crowd to derisive yells.
+
+My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.
+
+The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language.  They, according to
+the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported
+themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race.  Both
+gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done such
+gallant service with Sir Meeson's ebony wand.  He was beginning to fuss
+vociferously about the loss of the stick--a family stick, goldheaded, the
+family crest on it, priceless to the family--when Mrs. Kirby-Levellier
+handed it to him inside the coach.
+
+'But where is she?' M. de St.  Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia's
+touch on his arm in the dark.
+
+At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured, 'Ah!'
+
+He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a
+manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.
+
+They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on
+the subject.  Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection
+with a boiling topic of current scandal,--glaringly illustrative of it,
+moreover,--were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been
+sworn to secresy.  Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an
+exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself.
+So he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give the
+last wink of reason to the wine-cup.  Persecuted as he was, nothing
+remained for him but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.
+
+That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at
+Sir Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its
+being the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young nobleman
+to exhibit.  She pitied him: she had done him some wrong.  She read into
+him, too, as none else could.  Seeing the solitary tortures behind the
+pleasant social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask
+seemed pathetic.  She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her
+bosom of tears.  Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly
+mentionable.  Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this!
+The incorrigible cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her
+pictured, at a word of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world
+acting audience.  Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house
+and were alone.  Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which
+is more eloquent than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads.  My
+lord, it was thought by the ladies, had directed his man to convey her
+safely to her chosen home, whence she might be expected very soon to be
+issuing and striking the gong of London again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
+
+Ladies who have the pride of delicate breeding are not more than rather
+violently hurled back on the fortress it is, when one or other of the
+gross mishaps of circumstance may subject them to a shock: and this
+happening in the presence of gentlemen, they are sustained by the within
+and the without to keep a smooth countenance, however severe their
+affliction.  Men of heroic nerve decline similarly to let explosions
+shake them, though earth be shaken.  Dragged into the monstrous grotesque
+of the scene at the Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal,
+masking any signs that they were stripped for a flagellation.  Only, the
+fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if
+the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the
+world was an ignoble beast.  They did not discuss Carinthia's latest
+craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they were in the
+interjectory state.
+
+Henrietta was Livia's guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
+'To get money!  money!' her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
+dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had
+fallen.  She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible
+economy:--'think of the smallest trifles!' so that her Chillon travelled
+unaccompanied, they were separated.  Her iterations upon money were the
+vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
+She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a
+line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself
+with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the
+enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings;
+and that miserly Lord Levellier's indebtedness to Chillon--large sums!
+and Chillon's praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father's
+estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the
+money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance;
+but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been
+for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite
+unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had chosen;
+apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground
+against him: and though a single sign of submission would place the
+richest purse in England at her disposal.  'She refuses Esslemont!  She
+insists on his meeting her!  No child could be so witless.  Let him be
+the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for
+her brother's sake!  She loves her brother?  No: deaf to him, to me, to
+every consideration except her blind will.'
+
+Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.
+
+It refreshed a phlegmatic lady's disposition for prophecy.  Lovers
+abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but
+they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who
+tugs at them for subsistence or existence.  The condition, if they are
+much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness,
+to be bitterly misanthropical.
+
+Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta's
+unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law's misconduct, or the crude
+expression of it.  She could not guess that Carinthia's unhappiness in
+marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by
+the conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to
+bring it to pass.  Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she
+blamed Carinthia in another's hearing.
+
+After some repose, the cousins treated their horrible misadventure as a
+piece of history.  Livia was cool; she had not a husband involved in it,
+as Henrietta had; and London's hoarse laugh surely coming on them, spared
+her the dread Henrietta suffered, that Chillon would hear; the most
+sensitive of men on any matter touching his family.
+
+'And now a sister added to the list!  Will there be names, Livia?'
+
+'The newspapers!' Livia's shoulders rose.
+
+'We ought to have sworn the gentlemen to silence.'
+
+'M. de St. Ombre is a tomb until he writes his Memoirs.  I hold Sir
+Meeson under lock.  But a spiced incident, a notorious couple,--an
+anecdotal witness to the scene,--could you expect Mr. Rose Mackrell to
+contain it?  The sacredest of oaths, my dear!'
+
+That relentless force impelling an anecdotist to slaughter families for
+the amusement of dinner-tables, was brought home to Henrietta by her
+prospect of being a victim; and Livia reminding her of the excessive
+laughter at Rose Mackrell's anecdotes overnight, she bemoaned her having
+consented to go to those Gardens in mourning.
+
+'How could Janey possibly have heard of the project to go?
+
+'You went to please Russett, he to please you, and that wild-cat to
+please herself,' said Livia.  'She haunts his door, I suppose, and
+follows him, like a running footman.  Every step she takes widens the
+breach.  He keeps his temper, yes, keeps his temper as he keeps his word,
+and one morning it breaks loose, and all that's done has to be undone.
+It will bemust.  That extravaganza, as she is called, is fatal, dogs him
+with burlesque--of all men!'
+
+'Why not consent to meet her once, Chillon asks.'
+
+'You are asking Russett to yield an inch on demand, and to a woman.'
+
+'My husband would yield to a woman what he would refuse to all the men in
+Europe and America,' said Henrietta; and she enjoyed her thrill of
+allegiance to her chivalrous lord and courtier.
+
+'No very extraordinary specimen of a newly married man, who has won the
+Beauty of England and America for his wife-at some cost to some people,'
+Livia rejoined.
+
+There came a moisture on the eyelashes of the emotional young woman, from
+a touch of compassion for the wealthy man who had wished to call her
+wife, and was condemned by her rejection of him to call another woman
+wife, to be wifeless in wedding her, despite his wealth.
+
+She thinks he loves her; it is pitiable, but she thinks it--after the
+treatment she has had.  She begs to see him once.'
+
+'And subdue him with a fit of weeping,' Livia was moved to say by sight
+of the tear she hated.  'It would harden Russett--on other eyes, too!
+Salt-water drops are like the forced agony scenes in a play: they bring
+down the curtain, they don't win the critics.  I heard her "my husband"
+and saw his face.'
+
+'You didn't hear a whimper with it,' Henrietta said.  'She's a mountain
+girl, not your city madam on the boards.  Chillon and I had her by each
+hand, implored her to leave that impossible Whitechapel, and she
+trembled, not a drop was shed by her.  I can almost fancy privation and
+squalor have no terrors for Janey.  She sings to the people down there,
+nurses them.  She might be occupying Esslemont--our dream of an English
+home!  She is the destruction of the idea of romantic in connection with
+the name of marriage.  I talk like a simpleton.  Janey upsets us all.
+My lord was only--a little queer before he knew her: His Mr. Woodseer may
+be encouraging her.  You tell me the creature has a salary from him equal
+to your jointure.'
+
+'Be civil to the man while it lasts,' Livia said, attentive to a
+degradation of tone--in her cousin, formerly of supreme self-containment.
+
+The beautiful young woman was reminded of her holiday in town.
+She brightened, and the little that it was, and the meanness of the
+satisfaction, darkened her.  Envy of the lucky adventurer Mr. Woodseer,
+on her husband's behalf, grew horridly conscious for being reproved.  So
+she plucked resolution to enjoy her holiday and forget the contrasts of
+life-palaces running profusion, lodgings hammered by duns; the pinch of
+poverty distracting every simple look inside or out.  There was no end to
+it; for her husband's chivalrous honour forced him to undertake the
+payment of her father's heavy debts.  He was right and admirable, it
+could not be contested; but the prospect for them was a grinding gloom,
+an unrelieved drag, as of a coach at night on an interminable uphill
+flinty road.
+
+These were her sensations, and she found it diverting to be admired;
+admired by many while she knew herself to be absorbed in the possession
+of her by one.  It bestowed the before and after of her marriage.  She
+felt she was really, had rapidly become, the young woman of the world,
+armed with a husband, to take the flatteries of men for the needed
+diversion they brought.  None moved her; none could come near to touching
+the happy insensibility of a wife who adored her husband, wrote to him
+daily, thought of him by the minute.  Her former worshippers were
+numerous at Livia's receptions; Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and the
+rest.  Odd to reflect on--they were the insubstantial but coveted wealth
+of the woman fallen upon poverty, ignoble poverty!  She could not
+discard her wealth.  She wrote amusingly of them, and fully, vivacious
+descriptions, to Chillon; hardly so much writing to him as entering her
+heart's barred citadel, where he resided at his ease, heard everything
+that befell about her.  If she dwelt on Lord Fleetwood's kindness in
+providing entertainments, her object was to mollify Chillon's anger in
+some degree.  She was doing her utmost to gratify him, 'for the purpose
+of paving a way to plead Janey's case.'  She was almost persuading
+herself she was enjoying the remarks of his friend, confidant, secretary,
+or what not, Livia's worshipper, Mr. Woodseer, 'who does as he wills with
+my lord; directs his charities, his pleasures, his opinions, all because
+he is believed to have wonderful ideas and be wonderfully honest.'
+Henrietta wrote: 'Situation unchanged.  Janey still At that place'; and
+before the letter was posted, she and Livia had heard from Gower Woodseer
+of the reported disappearance of the Countess of Fleetwood and her maid.
+Gower's father had walked up from Whitechapel, bearing news of it to the
+earl, she said.
+
+'And the earl is much disturbed?' was Livia's inquiry.
+
+'He has driven down with my father,' Gower said carelessly, ambiguously
+in the sound.
+
+Troubled enough to desire the show of a corresponding trouble, Henrietta
+read at their faces.
+
+'May it not be--down there--a real danger?'
+
+The drama, he could inform her, was only too naked down there for
+disappearances to be common.
+
+'Will it be published that she is missing?'
+
+'She has her maid with her, a stout-hearted girl.  Both have courage.
+I don't think we need take measures just yet.'
+
+'Not before it is public property?'
+
+Henrietta could have bitten her tongue for laying her open to the censure
+implied in his muteness.  Janey perverted her.
+
+Women were an illegible manuscript, and ladies a closed book of the
+binding, to this raw philosopher, or he would not so coldly have judged
+the young wife, anxious on her husband's account, that they might escape
+another scorching.  He carried away his impression.
+
+Livia listened to a remark on his want of manners.
+
+'Russett puts it to the credit of his honesty,' she said.  'Honesty is
+everything with us at present.  The man has made his honesty an excellent
+speculation.  He puts a piece on zero and the bank hands him a sackful.
+We may think we have won him to serve us, up comes his honesty.  That's
+how we have Lady Arpington mixed in it--too long a tale.  But be guided
+by me; condescend a little.'
+
+'My dear!  my whole mind is upon that unhappy girl.  It would break
+Chillon's heart.'
+
+Livia pished.  'There are letters we read before we crack the seal.  She
+is out of that ditch, and it suits Russett that she should be.  He's not
+often so patient.  A woman foot to foot against his will--I see him
+throwing high stakes.  Tyrants are brutal; and really she provokes him
+enough.  You needn't be alarmed about the treatment she 'll meet.  He
+won't let her beat him, be sure.'
+
+Neither Livia nor Gower wondered at the clearing of the mystery, before
+it went to swell the scandal.  A young nobleman of ready power, quick
+temper, few scruples, and a taxed forbearance, was not likely to stand
+thwarted and goaded-and by a woman.  Lord Fleetwood acted his part,
+inscrutable as the blank of a locked door.  He could not conceal that he
+was behind the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
+
+Gower's bedroom window looked over the shrubs of the square, and as his
+form of revolt from a city life was to be up and out with the sparrows in
+the early flutter of morning, for a stretch of the legs where grass was
+green and trees were not enclosed, he rarely saw a figure below when he
+stood dressing.  Now there appeared a petticoated one stationary against
+the rails, with her face lifted.  She fronted the house, and while he
+speculated abstractedly, recognition rushed on him.  He was down and
+across the roadway at leaps.
+
+'It's Madge here!'
+
+The girl panted for her voice.
+
+'Mr. Woodseer, I'm glad; I thought I should have to wait hours.  She's
+safe.'
+
+'Where?'
+
+'Will you come, sir?'
+
+'Step ahead.'
+
+Madge set forth to north of the square.
+
+He judged of the well-favoured girl that she could steer her way through
+cities: mouth and brows were a warning to challenger pirate craft of a
+vessel carrying guns; and the red lips kept their firm line when they
+yielded to the pressure for speech.
+
+'It's a distance.  She's quite safe, no harm; she's a prisoner; she's
+well fed; she's not ill treated.'
+
+'You 're out?'
+
+'That's as it happens.  I'm lucky in seeing you early.  He don't mean to
+hurt her; he won't be beaten.  All she asks is ten minutes with him.  If
+he would!--he won't.  She didn't mean to do him offence t' other night in
+that place--you've heard.  Kit Ines told me he was on duty there--going.
+She couldn't help speaking when she had eyes on her husband.  She kisses
+the ground of his footsoles, you may say, let him be ever so unkind.  She
+and I were crossing to the corner of Roper Street a rainy night, on way
+to Mile End, away down to one of your father's families, Mother Davis and
+her sick daughter and the little ones, and close under the public-house
+Goat and Beard we were seized on and hustled into a covered carriage that
+was there, and they drove sharp.  She 's not one to scream.  We weren't
+frightened.  We both made the same guess.  They drove us to the house she
+'s locked in, and me, too, up till three o'clock this morning.'
+
+'You've seen nobody, Madge?'
+
+'He 's fixed she 's to leave London, Mr. Woodseer.  I've seen Kit Ines.
+And she 's to have one of the big houses to her use.  I guessed Kit Ines
+was his broom.  He defends it because he has his money to make--and be a
+dirty broom for a fortune!  But any woman's sure of decent handling with
+Kit Ines--not to speak of lady.  He and a mate guard the house.  An old
+woman cooks.'
+
+'He guards the house, and he gave you a pass?'
+
+'Not he.  His pride's his obedience to his "paytron"--he calls his
+master, and won't hear that name abused.  We are on the first floor; all
+the lower doors are locked day and night.  New Street, not much
+neighbours; she wouldn't cry out of the window.  She 's to be let free if
+she'll leave London.'
+
+'You jumped it!'
+
+'If I'd broke a leg, Mr. Kit Ines would have had to go to his drams.  It
+wasn't very high; and a flower-bed underneath.  My mistress wanted to be
+the one.  She has to be careful.  She taught me how to jump down not to
+hurt.  She makes you feel you can do anything.  I had a bother to get her
+to let me and be quiet herself.  She's not one to put it upon others,
+you'll learn.  When I was down I felt like a stick in the ground and sat
+till I had my feet, she at the window waiting; and I started for you.
+She kissed her hand.  I was to come to you, and then your father, you
+nowhere seen.  I wasn't spoken to.  I know empty London.'
+
+'Kit Ines was left sleeping in the house?'
+
+'Snoring, I dare say: He don't drink on duty.'
+
+'He must be kept on duty.'
+
+'Drink or that kind of duty, it's a poor choice.'
+
+'You'll take him in charge, Madge.'
+
+'I've got a mistress to look after.'
+
+'You've warmed to her.'
+
+'That's not new; Mr. Woodseer.  I do trust you, and you his friend.  But
+you are the minister's son, and any man not a great nobleman must have
+some heart for her.  You'll learn.  He kills her so because she's fond of
+him--loves him, however he strikes.  No, not like a dog, as men say of
+us.  She'd die for him this night, need were.  Live with her, you won't
+find many men match her for brave; and she's good.  My Sally calls her a
+Bible saint.  I could tell you stories of her goodness, short the time
+though she's been down our way.  And better there for her than at that
+inn he left her at to pine and watch the Royal Sovereign come swing come
+smirk in sailor blue and star to meet the rain--would make anybody
+disrespect Royalty or else go mad!  He's a great nobleman, he can't buy
+what she's ready to give; and if he thinks he breaks her will now, it's
+because she thinks she's obeying a higher than him, or no lord alive and
+Kit Ines to back him 'd hold her.  Women want a priest to speak to men
+certain times.  I wish I dared; we have to bite our tongues.  He's master
+now, but, as I believe God's above, if he plays her false, he's the one
+to be brought to shame.  I talk.'
+
+'Talk on, Madge,' said Gower, to whom the girl's short-syllabled run of
+the lips was a mountain rill compared with London park waters.
+
+'You won't let him hurry her off where she'll eat her heart for never
+seeing him again?  She prays to be near him, if she's not to see him.'
+
+'She speaks in that way?'
+
+'I get it by bits.  I'm with her so, it's as good as if I was inside her.
+She can't obey when it goes the wrong way of her heart to him.'
+
+'Love and wisdom won't pull together, and they part company for good at
+the church door,' said Gower.  'This matrimony's a bad business.'
+
+Madge hummed a moan of assent.  'And my poor Sally 'll have to marry.
+I can't leave my mistress while she wants me, and Sally can't be alone.
+It seems we take a step and harm's done, though it's the right step we
+take.'
+
+'It seems to me you've engaged yourself to follow Sally's lead, Madge.'
+
+'Girls' minds turn corners, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+He passed the remark.  What it was that girls' minds occasionally or
+habitually did, or whether they had minds to turn, or whether they took
+their whims for minds, were untroubled questions with a young man
+studying abstract and adoring surface nature too exclusively to be aware
+of the manifestation of her spirit in the flesh, as it is not revealed so
+much by men.  However, she had a voice and a face that led him to be
+thoughtful over her devotedness to her mistress, after nearly losing her
+character for the prize-fighter, and he had to thank her for invigorating
+him.  His disposition was to muse and fall slack, helpless to a friend.
+Here walked a creature exactly the contrary.  He listened to the steps of
+the dissimilar pair on the detonating pavement, and eyed a church clock
+shining to the sun.
+
+She was sure of the direction: 'Out Camden way, where the murder was.'
+
+They walked at a brisk pace, conversing or not.
+
+'Tired?  You must be,' he said.
+
+'Not when I'm hot to do a thing.'
+
+'There's the word of the thoroughbred!'
+
+'You don't tire, sir,' said she.  'Sally and I see you stalking out for
+the open country in the still of the morning.  She thinks you look pale
+for want of food, and ought to have some one put a biscuit into your
+pocket overnight.'
+
+'Who'd have guessed I was under motherly observation!'
+
+'You shouldn't go so long empty, if you listen to trainers.'
+
+'Capital doctors, no doubt.  But I get a fine appetite.'
+
+'You may grind the edge too sharp.'
+
+He was about to be astonished, and reflected that she had grounds for her
+sagacity.  His next thought plunged him into contempt for Kit Ines, on
+account of the fellow's lapses to sottishness.  But there would be no
+contempt of Kit Ines in a tussle with him.  Nor could one funk the tussle
+and play cur, if Kit's engaged young woman were looking on.  We get to
+our courage or the show of it by queer screws.
+
+Contemplative over these matters, the philosopher transformed to man of
+action heard Madge say she read directions in London by churches, and
+presently exclaiming disdainfully, and yet relieved, 'Spooner Villas,'
+she turned down a row of small detached houses facing a brickfield, that
+had just contributed to the erection of them, and threatened the big city
+with further defacements.
+
+Madge pointed to the marks of her jump, deep in flower-bed earth under an
+open window.
+
+Gower measured the height with sensational shanks.
+
+She smote at the door.  Carinthia nodded from her window.  Close upon
+that, Kit Ines came bounding to the parlour window; he spied and stared.
+Gower was known to him as the earl's paymaster; so he went to the passage
+and flung the door open, blocking the way.
+
+'Any commands, your honour?'
+
+'You bring the countess to my lord immediately,' said Gower.
+
+Kit swallowed his mouthful of surprise in a second look at Madge and the
+ploughed garden-bed beneath the chamber window.
+
+'Are the orders written, sir?'
+
+'To me?--for me to deliver to you?--for you to do my lord's bidding?
+Where's your head?'
+
+Kit's finger-nails travelled up to it.  Madge pushed past him.
+She and her mistress, and Kit's mate, and the old woman receiving the
+word for a cup of tea, were soon in the passage.  Kit's mate had a ready
+obedience for his pay, nothing else,--no counsel at all, not a suggestion
+to a head knocked to a pudding by Madge's jump and my lord's paymaster
+here upon the scene.
+
+'My lady was to go down Wales way, sir.'
+
+'That may be ordered after.'
+
+'I 'm to take my lady to my lord?' and, 'Does it mean my lady wants a
+fly?' Kit asked, and harked back on whether Madge had seen my lord.
+
+'At five in the morning?--don't sham donkey with me,' said Gower.
+
+The business looked inclined to be leaky, but which the way for proving
+himself other than a donkey puzzled Kit: so much so, that a shove made
+him partly grateful.  Madge's clever countermove had stunned his
+judgement.  He was besides acting subordinate to his patron's paymaster;
+and by the luck of it, no voice of woman interposed.  The countess and
+her maid stood by like a disinterested couple.  Why be suspicious, if he
+was to keep the countess, in sight?  She was a nice lady, and he
+preferred her good opinion.  She was brave, and he did her homage.  It
+might be, my lord had got himself round to the idea of thanking her for
+saving his nob that night, and his way was to send and have her up, to
+tell her he forgave her, after the style of lords.  Gower pricked into
+him by saying aside: 'Mad, I suppose, in case of a noise?' And he could
+not answer quite manfully, lost his eyes and coloured.  Neighbours might
+have required an explanation of shrieks, he confessed.  Men have
+sometimes to do nasty work for their patrons.
+
+They were afoot, walking at Carinthia's pace before half-past seven.
+She would not hear of any conveyance.  She was cheerful, and, as it was
+pitiful to see, enjoyed her walk.  Hearing of her brother's departure for
+the Austrian capital, she sparkled.  Her snatches of speech were short
+flights out of the meditation possessing her.  Gower noticed her easier
+English, that came home to the perpetual student he was.  She made use of
+some of his father's words, and had assimilated them mentally besides
+appropriating them: the verbalizing of 'purpose,' then peculiar to his
+father, for example.  She said, in reply to a hint from him: 'If my lord
+will allow me an interview, I purpose to be obedient.'  No one could
+imagine of her that she spoke broken-spiritedly.  Her obedience was to a
+higher than a mortal lord: and Gower was touched to the quick through the
+use of the word.
+
+Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think
+her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the
+world; but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion,
+and she had at least natural grace, a deerlike step.  Although her
+picturesqueness did not swarm on him with images illuminating night,
+subduing day, like the Countess Livia's, it was marked, it could tower
+and intermittently eclipse; and it was of the uplifting and healing kind
+by comparison, not a delicious balefulness.
+
+The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences,
+were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.
+
+'My lord lives in a square,' she said.
+
+'We shall soon be there now,' he encouraged her, doubtful though the
+issue appeared.
+
+'It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the
+Venediger,--all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.'
+
+'If we could fly!'
+
+'We love them.'
+
+'Why, then we beat a wing--yes.'
+
+'For I have them when I want them to sight.  It is the feet are so
+desirous.  I feel them so this morning, after prisonership.  I could not
+have been driven to my lord.'
+
+'I know the feeling,' said Gower; 'any movement of us not our own
+impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind.  And by the way, my dear
+lady, I spoke of the earl's commands to this man behind us walking with
+your Madge.  My father would accuse me of Jesuitry.  Ines mentioned
+commands, and I took advantage of it.'
+
+'I feared,' said Carinthia.  'I go for my chance.'
+
+Gower had a thought of the smaller creature, greater by position, to whom
+she was going for her chance.  He alluded to his experience of the earl's
+kindness in relation to himself, from a belief in his 'honesty'; dotted
+outlines of her husband's complex character, or unmixed and violently
+opposing elements.
+
+She remarked: 'I will try and learn.'
+
+The name of the street of beautiful shops woke a happy smile on her
+mouth.  'Father talked of it; my mother, too.  He has it written down in
+his Book of Maxims.  When I was a girl, I dreamed of one day walking up
+Bond Street.'
+
+They stepped from the pavement and crossed the roadway for a side-street
+leading to the square.  With the swift variation of her aspect at times,
+her tone changed.
+
+'We are near.  My lord will not be troubled by me.  He has only to meet
+me.  There has been misunderstanding.  I have vexed him; I could not help
+it.  I will go where he pleases after I have heard him give orders.  He
+thinks me a frightful woman.  I am peaceful.'
+
+Gower muttered her word 'misunderstanding.'  They were at the earl's
+house door.  One tap at it, and the two applicants for admission would
+probably be shot as far away from Lord Fleetwood as when they were on the
+Styrian heights last autumn.  He delivered the tap, amused by the idea.
+It was like a summons to a genie of doubtful service.
+
+My lord was out riding in the park.
+
+Only the footman appeared at that early hour, and his countenance was
+blank whitewash as he stood rigid against the wall for the lady to pass.
+Madge followed into the morning room; Ines remained in the hall, where he
+could have the opening speech with his patron, and where he soon had
+communication with the butler.
+
+This official entered presently to Gower, presenting a loaded forehead.
+A note addressed to Mrs. Kirby-Levellier at the Countess Livia's house
+hard by was handed to him for instant despatch.  He signified a
+deferential wish to speak.
+
+'You can speak in the presence of the Countess of Fleetwood, Mr. Waytes,'
+Gower said.
+
+Waytes checked a bend of his shoulders.  He had not a word, and he turned
+to send the note.  He was compelled to think that he saw a well-grown
+young woman in the Whitechapel Countess.
+
+Gower's note reached Henrietta on her descent to the breakfast-table.
+She was, alone, and thrown into a torture of perplexity: for she wanted
+advice as to the advice to be given to Janey, and Livia was an utterly
+unprofitable person to consult in the case.  She thought of Lady
+Arpington, not many doors distant.  Drinking one hasty cup of tea, she
+sent for her bonnet, and hastened away to the great lady, whom she found
+rising from breakfast with the marquis.
+
+Lady Arpington read Gower's note.  She unburdened herself: 'Oh!  So it 's
+no longer a bachelor's household!'
+
+Henrietta heaved the biggest of sighs.  'I fear the poor dear may have
+made matters worse.'
+
+To which Lady Arpington said: 'Worse or better, my child!' and shrugged;
+for the present situation strained to snapping.
+
+She proposed to go forthwith, and give what support she could to the
+Countess of Fleetwood.
+
+They descended the steps of the house to the garden and the Green Park's
+gravel walk up to Piccadilly.  There they had view of Lord Fleetwood on
+horseback leisurely turning out of the main way's tide.  They saw him
+alight at the mews.  As they entered the square, he was met some doors
+from the south corner by his good or evil genius, whose influence with
+him came next after the marriage in the amazement it caused, and was
+perhaps to be explained by it; for the wealthiest of young noblemen
+bestowing his name on an unknown girl, would be the one to make an absurd
+adventurer his intimate.  Lord Fleetwood bent a listening head while Mr.
+Gower Woodseer, apparently a good genius for the moment, spoke at his
+ear.
+
+How do we understand laughter at such a communication as he must be
+hearing from the man?  Signs of a sharp laugh indicated either his cruel
+levity or that his presumptuous favourite trifled--and the man's talk
+could be droll, Lady Arpington knew: it had, she recollected angrily,
+diverted her, and softened her to tolerate the intruder into regions from
+which her class and her periods excluded the lowly born, except at the
+dinner-tables of stale politics and tattered scandal.  Nevertheless, Lord
+Fleetwood mounted the steps to his house door, still listening.  His
+'Asmodeus,' on the tongue of the world, might be doing the part of Mentor
+really.  The house door stood open.
+
+Fleetwood said something to Gower; he swung round, beheld the ladies and
+advanced to them, saluting.  'My dear Lady Arpington!  quite so, you
+arrive opportunely.  When the enemy occupies the citadel, it's proper to
+surrender.  Say, I beg, she can have the house, if she prefers it.  I
+will fall back on Esslemont.  Arrangements for her convenience will be
+made.  I thank you, by anticipation.'
+
+His bow included Henrietta loosely.  Lady Arpington had exclaimed:
+'Enemy, Fleetwood?' and Gower, in his ignorance of the smoothness of
+aristocratic manners, expected a remonstrance; but Fleetwood was allowed
+to go on, with his air of steely geniality and a decision, that his
+friend imagined he could have broken down like an old partition board
+under the kick of a sarcasm sharpening an appeal.
+
+'Lord Fleetwood was on the point of going in,' he assured the great lady.
+
+'Lord Fleetwood may regret his change of mind,' said she.  'The Countess
+of Fleetwood will have my advice to keep her footing in this house.'
+
+She and Henrietta sat alone with Carinthia for an hour.  Coming forth,
+Lady Arpington ejaculated to herself: 'Villany somewhere!--You will do
+well, Henrietta, to take up your quarters with her a day or two.  She can
+hold her position a month.  Longer is past possibility.'
+
+A shudder of the repulsion from men crept over the younger lady.  But she
+was a warrior's daughter, and observed: 'My husband, her brother, will be
+back before the month ends.'
+
+'No need for hostilities to lighten our darkness,' Lady Arpington
+rejoined.  'You know her?  trust her?'
+
+'One cannot doubt her face.  She is my husband's sister.  Yes, I do trust
+her.  I nail my flag to her cause.'
+
+The flag was crimson, as it appeared on her cheeks; and that intimated a
+further tale, though not of so dramatic an import as the cognizant short
+survey of Carinthia had been.
+
+These young women, with the new complications obtruded by them, irritated
+a benevolent great governing lady, who had married off her daughters and
+embraced her grandchildren, comfortably finishing that chapter; and
+beheld now the apparition of the sex's ancient tripping foe, when
+circumstances in themselves were quite enough to contend against on their
+behalf.  It seemed to say, that nature's most burdened weaker must always
+be beaten.  Despite Henrietta's advocacy and Carinthia's clear face, it
+raised a spectral form of a suspicion, the more effective by reason of
+the much required justification it fetched from the shades to plead
+apologies for Lord Fleetwood's erratic, if not mad, and in any case ugly,
+conduct.  What otherwise could be his excuse?  Such was his need of one,
+that the wife he crushed had to be proposed for sacrifice, in the mind of
+a lady tending strongly to side with her and condemn her husband.
+
+Lady Arpington had counselled Carinthia to stay where she was, the Fates
+having brought her there.  Henrietta was too generous to hesitate in her
+choice between her husband's sister and the earl.  She removed from
+Livia's house to Lord Fleetwood's.  My lord was at Esslemont two days;
+then established his quarters at Scrope's hotel, five minutes' walk from
+the wedded lady to whom the right to bear his title was granted, an
+interview with him refused.  Such a squaring for the battle of spouses
+had never--or not in mighty London--been seen since that old fight began.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
+
+Dame Gossip at this present pass bursts to give us a review of the social
+world siding for the earl or for his countess; and her parrot cry of
+'John Rose Mackrell!' with her head's loose shake over the smack of her
+lap, to convey the contemporaneous tipsy relish of the rich good things
+he said on the subject of the contest, indicates the kind of intervention
+it would be.
+
+To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder,
+that he was the countess's voluble advocate at a period when her friends
+were shy to speak of her.  After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in
+burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell's
+enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in.  He tracked her to her
+parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some
+Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny: and, a turn of great good luck
+helping him to a copy of the book of the MAXIMS FOR MEN, he would quote
+certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby's
+personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to
+prove that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations.
+They had the repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and
+truncehons that have tasted brains.  They wove no mild sort of halo for
+the head of a shillelagh-flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from
+the writer and doer.
+
+People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a
+suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her
+lord's town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope's
+hotel.  He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might
+have heightened a rageing scandal.  The nobleman forbore.  A woman's blow
+gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it
+may: we win the world's after-thoughts.  Rose Mackrell sketched the
+earl;--always alert, smart, quick to meet a combination and protect a
+dignity never obtruded, and in spite of himself the laugh of the town.
+His humour flickered wildly round the ridiculous position of a prominent
+young nobleman, whose bearing and character were foreign to a position of
+ridicule.
+
+Nevertheless, the earl's figure continuing to be classic sculpture, it
+allied him with the aristocracy of martyrs, that burn and do not wince.
+He propitiated none, and as he could not but suffer shrewdly, he gained
+esteem enough to shine through the woman's pitiless drenching of him.
+During his term at Scrope's hotel, the carousals there were quite old-
+century and matter of discourse.  He had proved his return to sound sense
+in the dismissal of 'the fiddler,' notoriously the woman's lieutenant, or
+more; and nightly the revelry closed at the great gaming tables of St.
+James's Street, while Whitechapel held the coroneted square, well on her
+way to the Law courts, as Abrane and Potts reported; and positively so,
+'clear case.'  That was the coming development and finale of the
+Marriage.  London waited for it.
+
+A rich man's easy smile over losses at play, merely taught his emulous
+troop to feel themselves poor devils in the pocket.  But Fleetwood's
+contempt of Sleep was a marvel, superhuman, and accused them of an
+inferior vigour, hard for young men to admit by the example.  He never
+went to bed.  Issuing from Fortune's hall-doors in the bright, lively,
+summer morning, he mounted horse and was away to the hills.  Or he took
+the arm of a Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Feltre, and walked with him
+from the green tables and the establishment's renowned dry still Sillery
+to a Papist chapel.  As it was not known that he had given his word to
+abjure his religion, the pious gamblers did no worse than spread an alarm
+and quiet it, by the citation of his character for having a try at
+everything.
+
+Henrietta despatched at this period the following letter to Chillon:
+
+'I am with Livia to-morrow.  Janey starts for Wales to-morrow morning, a
+voluntary exile.  She pleaded to go back to that place where you had to
+leave her, promising she would not come Westward; but was persuaded.
+Lady Arpington approves.  The situation was getting too terribly
+strained.  We met and passed my lord in the park.
+
+'He was walking his horse-elegant cavalier that he is: would not look on
+his wife.  A woman pulled by her collar should be passive; if she pulls
+her way, she is treated as a dog.  I see nothing else in the intention of
+poor Janey's last offence to him.  There is an opposite counsel, and he
+can be eloquent, and he will be heard on her side.  How could she manage
+the most wayward when she has not an idea of ordinary men!  But, my
+husband, they have our tie between them; it may move him.  It subdues
+her--and nothing else would have done that.  If she had been in England a
+year before the marriage, she would, I think, have understood better how
+to guide her steps and her tongue for his good pleasure.  She learns
+daily, very quickly: observes, assimilates; she reads and has her
+comments--would have shot far ahead of your Riette, with my advantages.
+
+'Your uncle--but he will bear any charge on his conscience as long as he
+can get the burden off his shoulders.  Do not fret, my own!  Reperuse the
+above--you will see we have grounds for hope.
+
+'He should have looked down on her!  No tears from her eyes, but her eyes
+were tears.  She does not rank among beautiful women.  She has her
+moments for outshining them--the loveliest of spectres!  She caught at my
+heart.  I cannot forget her face looking up for him to look down.  A
+great painter would have reproduced it, a great poet have rendered the
+impression.  Nothing short of the greatest.  That is odd to say of one so
+simple as she.  But when accidents call up her reserves, you see mountain
+heights where mists were--she is actually glorified.  Her friend--I do
+believe a friend--the Mr. Woodseer you are to remember meeting somewhere
+--a sprained ankle--has a dozen similes ready for what she is when pain
+or happiness vivify her.  Or, it may be, tender charity.  She says, that
+if she feels for suffering people, it is because she is the child of
+Chillon's mother.  In like manner Chillon is the son of Janey's father.
+
+'Mr. Woodseer came every other evening.  Our only enlivenment.  Livia
+followed her policy, in refusing to call.  We lived luxuriously; no
+money, not enough for a box at the opera, though we yearned--you can
+imagine.  Chapters of philosophy read out and expounded instead.  Janey
+likes them.  He sets lessons to her queer maid--reading, writing,
+pronunciation of English.  An inferior language to Welsh, for poetical
+purposes, we are informed.  So Janey--determining to apply herself to
+Welsh, and a chameleon Riette dreading that she will be taking a contrary
+view of the honest souls--as she feels them to be--when again under
+Livia's shadow.
+
+'The message from Janey to Scrope's hotel was despatched half-an-hour
+after we had driven in from the park; fruit of a brown meditation.  I
+wrote it--third person--a single sentence.  Arrangements are made for her
+to travel comfortably.  It is funny--the shops for her purchases of
+clothes, necessaries, etc., are specified; she may order to any extent.
+Not a shilling of money for her poor purse.  What can be the secret of
+that?  He does nothing without an object.  To me, uniformly civil, no
+irony, few compliments.  Livia writes, that I am commended for keeping
+Janey company.  What can be the secret of a man scrupulously just with
+one hand, and at the same time cruel with the other?  Mr. Woodseer says,
+his wealth:--"More money than is required for their needs, men go into
+harness to Plutus,"--if that is clever.
+
+'I have written my husband--as Janey ceases to call her own; and it was
+pretty and touching to hear her "my husband."--Oh!  a dull letter.  But
+he is my husband though he keeps absent--to be longed for--he is my
+husband still, my husband always.  Chillon is Henrietta's husband, the
+world cries out, and when she is flattered she does the like, for then it
+is not too presumptuous that she should name Henrietta Chillon's wife.
+In my ears, husband has the sweeter sound.  It brings an angel from
+overhead.  Will it bring him one-half hour sooner?  My love!  My dear!
+If it did, I should be lisping "husband, husband, husband" from cock-crow
+to owl's cry.  Livia thinks the word foolish, if not detestable.  She and
+I have our different opinions.  She is for luxury.  I choose poverty and
+my husband.  Poverty has its beauty, if my husband is the sun of it.
+Elle radote.  She would not have written so dull a letter to her husband
+if she had been at the opera last night, or listened to a distant street-
+band.  No more--the next line would be bleeding.  He should have her
+blood too, if that were her husband's--it would never be; but if it were
+for his good in the smallest way.  Chillon's wish is to give his blood
+for them he loves.  Never did woman try more to write worthily to her
+absent lord and fall so miserably into the state of dripping babe from
+bath on nurse's knee.  Cover me, my lord; and love, my cause for--no, my
+excuse, my refuge from myself.  We are one?  Oh!  we are one!--and we
+have been separated eight and twenty days.
+
+                                   'HENRIETTA KIRBY-LEVELLIER.'
+
+That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land
+and be warmed.
+
+The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where
+his waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;--resembling
+craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young
+Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she
+was now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest
+as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest.
+Chillon had a wife.  Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his
+knowledge of his wife's nature.  Carinthia might bear it and harden to
+flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays.  His thoughts, all
+his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the
+pleasure she flew in--a butterfly's grub without it.  Accurately so did
+the husband and lover read his wife--adoring her the more.
+
+Her letter's embracing close was costly to them.  It hurried him to the
+compromise of a debateable business, and he fell into the Austrian
+Government's terms for the payment of the inheritance from his father;
+calculating that--his sister's share deducted-money would be in hand to
+pay pressing debts and enable Henrietta to live unworried by cares until
+he should have squeezed debts, long due and increasing, out of the
+miserly old lord, his uncle.  A prospect of supplies for twelve months,
+counting the hack and carriage Henrietta had always been used to, seemed
+about as far as it was required to look by the husband hastening homeward
+to his wife's call.  Her letter was a call in the night.  Besides, there
+were his yet untried Inventions.  The new gunpowder testing at Croridge
+promised to provide Henrietta with many of the luxuries she could have
+had, and had abandoned for his sake.  The new blasting powder and a
+destructive shell might build her the palace she deserved.  His uncle
+was, no doubt, his partner.  If, however, the profits were divided,
+sufficient wealth was assured.  But his uncle remained a dubious image.
+The husband and lover could enfold no positive prospect to suit his
+wife's tastes beyond the twelve months.
+
+We have Dame Gossip upon us.
+
+--One minute let mention be of the excitement over Protestant England
+when that rumour disseminated, telling of her wealthiest nobleman's visit
+to a monastery, up in the peaks and snows; and of his dwelling among the
+monks, and assisting in all their services day and night, hymning and
+chanting, uttering not one word for one whole week: his Papistical
+friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured
+him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon
+echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners
+into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life's end, not
+to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them
+into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they would have
+settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would have
+impoverished--is not too strong a word--the country by taking the money's
+worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares of
+our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the
+Protestant faith.  Underrate it now--then it was a truly justifiable
+anxiety: insomuch that you heard people of station, eminent titled
+persons, asking, like the commonest low Radicals, whether it was prudent
+legislation to permit of the inheritance of such vast wealth by a young
+man, little more than a boy, and noted for freaks.  And some declared it
+could not be allowed for foreign monks to have a claim to inherit English
+property.  There was a general consent, that if the Earl of Fleetwood
+went to the extreme of making over his property to those monks, he should
+be pronounced insane and incapable.  Ultimately the world was a little
+pacified by hearing that a portion of it was entailed, Esslemont and the
+Welsh mines.
+
+So it might be; but what if he had no child!  The marriage amazing
+everybody scarcely promised fruit, it was thought.  Countess Livia, much
+besought for her opinion, scouted the possibility.  And Carinthia Jane
+was proclaimed by John Rose Mackrell (to his dying day the poor gentleman
+tried vainly to get the second syllable of his name accentuated) a young
+woman who would outlive twice over the husband she had.  He said of his
+name, it was destined to pass him down a dead fish in the nose of
+posterity, and would affect his best jokes; which something has done, or
+the present generation has lost the sense of genuine humour.
+
+Thanks to him, the talk of the Whitechapel Countess again sprang up,
+merrily as ever; and after her having become, as he said, 'a desiccated
+celebrity,' she outdid cabinet ministers and naughty wives for a living
+morsel in the world's mouth.  She was denounced by the patriotic party as
+the cause of the earl's dalliance with Rome.
+
+The earl, you are to know, was then coasting along the Mediterranean, on
+board his beautiful schooner yacht, with his Lord Feltre, bound to make
+an inspection of Syrian monasteries, and forget, if he could, the face of
+all faces, another's possession by the law.
+
+Those two lords, shut up together in a yacht, were advised by their
+situation to be bosom friends, and they quarrelled violently, and were
+reconciled, and they quarrelled again; they were explosive chemicals;
+until the touch of dry land relieved them of what they really fancied the
+spell of the Fiend.  For their argumentative topic during confinement was
+Woman, when it was not Theology; and even off a yacht, those are subjects
+to kindle the utmost hatred of dissension, if men are not perfectly
+concordant.  They agreed upon land to banish any talk of Women or
+Theology, where it would have been comparatively innocent; so they both
+desiring to be doing the thing they had sworn they would not do, the
+thoughts of both were fastened on one or the other interdicted subject.
+They hardly spoke; they perceived in their longing minds, that the
+imagined spell of, the Fiend was indeed the bile of the sea, secreted
+thickly for want of exercise, and they both regretted the days and nights
+of their angry controversies; unfit pilgrims of the Holy Land, they
+owned.
+
+To such effect, Lord Fleetwood wrote to Gower Woodseer, as though there
+had been no breach between them, from Jerusalem, expressing the wish to
+hear his cool wood-notes of the philosophy of Life, fresh drawn from
+Nature's breast; and urgent for an answer, to be addressed to his hotel
+at Southampton, that he might be greeted on his return home first by his
+'friend Gower.'
+
+He wrote in the month of January.  His arrival at Southampton was on the
+thirteenth day of March; and there he opened a letter some weeks old, the
+bearer of news which ought by rights to make husbands proudly happy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
+
+Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good fortune
+was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
+reading of Gower's lines.  Other letters were opened: from the Countess
+Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier.  There was one
+from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication dated
+South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the effect, that
+the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered on the day of
+the date, with a copy of the document forwarded.
+
+Livia scornfully stated the tattling world's 'latest.'  The captain was
+as brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be taken
+for a challenge of the eye.  It stamped the adversary's frown on
+Fleetwood reading.  Lady Arpington was more politic; she wrote of
+'a healthy boy,' and 'the healthy mother giving him breast,' this being
+'the way for the rearing of strong men.'  She condescended to the
+particulars, that she might touch him.
+
+The earl had not been so reared: his mother was not the healthy mother.
+One of his multitudinous, shifty, but ineradicable ambitions was to
+exhibit an excellingly vigorous, tireless constitution.  He remembered
+the needed refreshment of the sea-breezes aboard his yacht during the
+week following the sleep-discarded nights at Scrope's and the green
+tables.  For a week he hung to the smell of brine, in rapturous amity
+with Feltre, until they yellowed, differed, wrangled, hated.
+
+A powerful leaven was put into him by the tidings out of Wales.  Gower,
+good fellow, had gone down to see the young mother three weeks after the
+birth of her child.  She was already renewing her bloom.  She had
+produced the boy in the world's early manner, lightly, without any of the
+tragic modern hovering over death to give the life.  Gower compared it to
+a 'flush of the vernal orchard after a day's drink of sunlight.'  That
+was well: that was how it should be.  One loathes the idea of tortured
+women.
+
+The good fellow was perhaps absurdly poetical.  Still we must have poetry
+to hallow this and other forms of energy: or say, if you like, the right
+view of them impels to poetry.  Otherwise we are in the breeding yards,
+among the litters and the farrows.  It is a question of looking down or
+looking up.  If we are poor creatures--as we are if we do but feast and
+gamble and beget--we shall run for a time with the dogs and come to the
+finish of swine.  Better say, life is holy!  Why, then have we to thank
+her who teaches it.
+
+He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband, making
+him a father: the imagined Carinthia--beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus;
+the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal
+dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she
+alternately softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons.  A mate for the
+caress, an electrical heroine, fronted him.
+
+Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood's wife, cracking sconces,--a demoiselle
+Moll Flanders,--the world's Whitechapel Countess out for an airing,
+infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his
+word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now
+persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to
+stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head
+from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of
+men to behave as an actor.  He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the
+eyeholes.
+
+But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the mother of
+the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her boy was
+his boy.  They met inseparably in that new life.
+
+Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the
+beatific image of Feltre's worshipped Madonna!
+
+The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood's mind, as a star passing
+into cloud.  For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at all
+allied with her; at her husband most, of course:--the punctilious noodle!
+the golden jackass, tethered and goaded!  He had choice among the pick of
+women: the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre
+Coelebs.  She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow
+in producing her male infant.
+
+By the way, was she actually born in wedlock?  Lord Levellier's
+assurances regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser's
+shuffles to clinch his bargain.  Assuming the representative of holy
+motherhood to be a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House
+to which the spotted woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching
+on her.  And altogether the history fumed rank vapours.  Imagine her boy
+in his father's name a young collegian!  No commonly sensitive lad could
+bear the gibes of the fellows raking at antecedents: Fleetwood would be
+the name to start roars.  Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the
+boy's mother.  Her production of a man-child was the further and grosser
+offence.
+
+The world sat on him.  His confession to some degree of weakness, even to
+folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain
+by tearing himself from a thought of his folly's partner, shutting
+himself up and away from her.  Then there was a cessation of annoyance,
+flatteringly agreeable: which can come to us only of our having done the
+right thing, young men will think.  He felt at once warmly with the
+world, enjoyed the world's kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of
+his unprecedented attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an
+understanding of its laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in
+the person of the Whitechapel Countess.  The world sat on him heavily.
+
+He recurred to Gower Woodseer's letter.
+
+The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,--the
+impression had been deep.  A plain transcription of the young mother's
+acts and words did more to portray her: the reader could supply
+reflections.
+
+Would her boy's father be very pleased to see him?  she had asked.
+
+And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from
+her.
+
+'Never that--you have my word!' Fleetwood said; and he nodded
+consentingly over her next remark
+
+'Not while I live, till he must go to school!'
+
+The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled
+mother.
+
+A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient
+in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.
+
+For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that
+he leaned on pride.  To think that he did, became a theme for pride.  The
+mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the
+richer mine.  And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual
+he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring
+bone, muscle, stout heart.
+
+Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the
+earldom.
+
+Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse.  Courage, animal healthfulness, she,
+too, might--her husband not obstructing--transmit; and good looks, eyes
+of the sapphire AEgean.  And therewith such pliability as the Mother of
+Love requires of her servants.
+
+Could that woman resist seductions?
+
+Fleetwood's wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to
+pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether
+the woman could be--and easily!  easily!  he wagered--led to make her
+conduct warrant for his contempt of her.  Led,--that is, misled, you
+might say, if you were pleading for a doll.  But it was necessary to bait
+the pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious
+fine fate one has escaped.  Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in
+the blood, which the woman's beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a
+fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely
+desirous for the stain of it to be washed out.  As this is not the desire
+to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it.  When we know that the
+weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market
+where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the
+female heap: subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past
+flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a
+passion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable passion.
+
+The plot--formless plot--to get release by the sacrifice or at least a
+crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her
+image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology
+offered no improvement of its aspect.  She might come out of the trial
+triumphant.  And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the
+pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he
+loathed the thought.  He was too delicate over the idea of the married
+woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood.  Others might press her
+hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release.  She had set him
+on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and
+erasing stain and scars; that was all.  Henrietta rejected her wealthy
+suitor: she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth,
+glad of a drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught.
+An injured pride could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a
+spectacle.
+
+Devilish, if you like.  He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian
+seclusion.  His wife now drove him to sin again.
+
+She had given him a son.  That fluted of home and honourable life.
+She had her charm, known to him alone.
+
+But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations,
+how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne?  Consideration was
+due to her until she stumbled.  Enough if she wavered.  Almost enough is
+she stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page
+of her was a false introduction.  The surprising apparition of a
+beautiful woman with character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman
+devoted to her husband or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would
+loosen him creditably.  It had to be witnessed, for faith in it.  He
+reverenced our legendary good women, and he bowed to noble deeds; and he
+ascribed the former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a
+scourging to his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates.  Nothing of the
+kind was doing at present.
+
+Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer's letter enriched a
+little incident.  Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he
+had read deliberately and caught the scene.
+
+Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower.  Carinthia and Madge,
+trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
+hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the
+edge in his infant days.  There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water,
+they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to
+it, one or both.  It must have been the mountain-footed one.  A man would
+hesitate, spying below.  Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb
+up, and carrying the lamb!  Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it
+between them.  We who stand aloof admire stupidly.  To defend himself
+from admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
+probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
+forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are
+woven.  Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and
+sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties.  If
+both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself
+into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.
+
+Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
+whose memory was to be impregnated.  His reader would have flown away
+from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then
+envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to
+the winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next
+thought about it.  He knew his Fleetwood so far.
+
+His letter concluded: 'I am in a small Surrey village over a baker's
+shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame's infant school opposite my
+window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or
+the nested fancies.  Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless,
+off any ten square feet of common earth.  I go through my illusions and
+come always back on that good truth.  It says, beware of the world's
+passion for flavours and spices.  Much tasted, they turn and bite the
+biter.  My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in
+their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day.  I learn more
+from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant
+Ixionides.'
+
+Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the
+new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.
+
+'My Ixionides!' he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he
+rejoiced to be enlightened by the title.  He craved the presence of the
+magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think
+of than the whole body of those Ixionides--not bad fellows, here and
+there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish
+fun.  Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled?  No, they had merely
+parted at one of the crossways.  The plebeian could teach that son of
+the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners.  Woodseer was the
+better comrade and director of routes.  Into the forest, up on the
+heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick
+for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it
+be composed of Ixionides: that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut
+that way.
+
+Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree
+anxious for a communication from Wales.  There was none.  Why none?
+
+She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to
+her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly
+interesting.  The mother's wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested
+in a furnace.  He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three
+formal words.  She sulked?  'I am not a fallen lamb!' he said.  Evidently
+one had to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.
+
+Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him,
+the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging
+young shoots of sweeter feelings.  She sulked!  If that woman could not
+get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission.  After
+besmutting the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that
+there was no intention to repent.  Possibly she meant war.  In which case
+a man must fly, or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar
+farces;--to be compared to a pelting of one on the stage.
+
+The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS AVERTED
+
+Livia welcomed him, with commiserating inquiry behind her languid
+eyelids.  'You have all the latest?' it said.
+
+He struck on the burning matter.
+
+'You wish to know the part you have to play, ma'am.'  'Tell me, Russett.'
+
+'You will contradict nothing.'
+
+Her eyebrows asked, 'It means?'
+
+'You have authority from me to admit the facts.'
+
+'They are facts?' she remarked.
+
+'Women love teasing round certain facts, apparently; like the Law courts
+over their pet cases.'
+
+'But, Russett, will you listen?'
+
+'Has the luck been civil of late?'
+
+'I think of something else at present.  No, it has not.'
+
+'Abrane?'
+
+'Pray, attend to me.  No, not Abrane.'
+
+'I believe you've all been cleared out in my absence.  St. Ombre?'
+
+Her complexion varied.  'Mr. Ambrose Mallard has once or twice .  .  .
+But let me beg you--the town is rageing with it.  My dear Russett, a bold
+front now; there 's the chance of your release in view.'
+
+'A rascal in view!  Name the sum.'
+
+'I must reckon.  My head is--can you intend to submit?'
+
+'So it's Brosey Mallard now.  You choose your deputy queerly.  He's as
+bad as Abrane, with steam to it.  Chummy Potts would have done better.'
+
+'He wins one night; loses every pound-note he has the next; and comes
+vaunting--the "dry still Sillery" of the establishment,--a perpetual
+chorus to his losses!'
+
+'His consolation to you for yours.  That is the gentleman.  Chummy
+doesn't change.  Say, why not St. Ombre?  He's cool.'
+
+'There are reasons.'
+
+'Let them rest.  And I have my reasons.  Do the same for them.'
+
+'Yours concern the honour of the family.'
+
+'Deeply: respect them.'
+
+'Your relatives have to be thought of, though they are few and not too
+pleasant.'
+
+'If I had thought much of them, what would our relations be?  They object
+to dicing, and I to leading strings.'
+
+She turned to a brighter subject, of no visible connection with the
+preceding.
+
+'Henrietta comes in May.'
+
+'The month of her colours.'
+
+'Her money troubles are terrible.'
+
+'Both of you appear unlucky in your partners,--if winning was the object.
+She shall have all the distractions we can offer.'
+
+'Your visit to the Chartreuse alarmed her.'
+
+'She has rejoiced her husband.'
+
+'A girl.  She feared the Jesuit in your friend.'
+
+'Feltre and she are about equally affected by music.  They shall meet.'
+
+'Russett, this once: I do entreat you to take counsel with your good
+sense, and remember that you stand where you are by going against my
+advice.  It is a perfect storm over London.  The world has not to be
+informed of your generosity; but a chivalry that invites the most
+horrible of sneers at a man!  And what can I say?  I have said it was
+impossible.'
+
+'Add the postscript: you find it was perfectly possible.'
+
+'I have to learn more than I care to hear.'
+
+'Your knowledge is not in request: you will speak in my name.'
+
+'Will you consult your lawyers, Russett, before you commit yourself?'
+
+'I am on my way to Lady Arpington.'
+
+'You cannot be thinking how serious it is.'
+
+'I rather value the opinion of a hard-headed woman of the world.'
+
+'Why not listen to me?'
+
+'You have your points, ma'am.'
+
+'She's a torch.'
+
+'She serves my purpose.'
+
+Livia shrugged sadly.  'I suppose it serves your purpose to be
+unintelligible to me.'
+
+He rendered himself intelligible immediately by saying, 'Before I go--
+a thousand?'
+
+'Oh, my dear Russett!' she sighed.
+
+'State the amount.'
+
+She seemed to be casting unwieldly figures and he helped her with, 'Mr.
+Isaacs?'
+
+'Not less than three, I fear.'
+
+'Has he been pressing?'
+
+'You are always good to us, Russett.'
+
+'You are always considerate for the honour of the family, ma'am.  Order
+for the money with you here to-morrow.  And I thank you for your advice.
+Do me the favour to follow mine.
+
+'Commands should be the word.'
+
+'Phrase it as you please.'
+
+'You know I hate responsibility.'
+
+'The chorus in classical dramas had generally that sentiment, but the
+singing was the sweeter for it.'
+
+'Whom do you not win when you condescend to the mood, you dear boy?'
+
+He restrained a bitter reply, touching the kind of persons he had won: a
+girl from the mountains, a philosophical tramp of the roads, troops of
+the bought.
+
+Livia spelt at the problem he was.  She put away the task of reading it.
+He departed to see Lady Arpington, and thereby rivet his chains.
+
+As Livia had said, she was a torch.  Lady Endor, Lady Eldritch, Lady
+Cowry, kindled at her.  Again there were flights of the burning brands
+over London.  The very odd marriage; the no-marriage; the two-ends-of-
+the-town marriage; and the maiden marriage a fruitful marriage; the
+monstrous marriage of the countess productive in banishment, and the
+unreadable earl accepting paternity; this Amazing Marriage was again the
+riddle in the cracker for tattlers and gapers.  It rattled upon the
+world's native wantonness, the world's acquired decorum: society's
+irrepressible original and its powerfully resisting second nature.  All
+the rogues of the fine sphere ran about with it, male and female; and
+there was the narrative that suggestively skipped, and that which trod
+the minuet measure, dropping a curtsey to ravenous curiosity; the apology
+surrendering its defensible cause in supplications to benevolence; and
+the benevolence damnatory in a too eloquent urgency; followed by the
+devout objection to a breath of the subject, so blackening it as to call
+forth the profanely circumstantial exposition.  Smirks, blushes, dead
+silences, and in the lower regions roars, hung round it.
+
+But the lady, though absent, did not figure poorly at all.  Granting
+Whitechapel and the shillelagh affair, certain whispers of her good
+looks, contested only to be the more violently asserted; and therewith
+Rose Mackrell's tale of her being a 'young woman of birth,' having a
+'romantic story to tell of herself and her parentage,' made her latest
+performance the champagne event of it hitherto.  Men sparkled when they
+had it on their lips.
+
+How, then, London asked, would the Earl of Fleetwood move his pieces in
+reply to his countess's particularly clever indication of the check
+threatening mate?
+
+His move had no relation to the game, it was thought at first.  The world
+could not suppose that he moved a simple pawn on his marriage board.  He
+purchased a shop in Piccadilly for the sale of fruit and flowers.
+
+Lady Arpington was entreated to deal at the shop, Countess Livia had her
+orders; his friends, his parasites and satellites, were to deal there.
+Intensely earnest as usual, he besought great ladies to let him have the
+overflow of their hothouses; and they classing it as another of the
+mystifications of a purse crazy for repleteness, inquired: 'But is it you
+we are to deal with?' And he quite seriously said: 'With me, yes, at
+present.'  Something was behind the curtain, of course.  His gravity had
+the effect of the ultra-comical in concealing it.
+
+The shop was opened.  We have the assurance of Rose Mackrell, that he
+entered and examined the piles and pans of fruit, and the bouquets
+cunningly arranged by a hand smelling French.  The shop was roomy,
+splendid windows lighted the yellow, the golden, the green and parti-
+coloured stores.  Four doors off, a chemist's motley in bellied glasses
+crashed on the sight.  Passengers along the pavement had presented to
+them such a contrast as might be shown if we could imagine the Lethean
+ferry-boatload brought sharp against Pomona's lapful.  In addition to the
+plucked flowers and fruits of the shop, Rose Mackrell more attentively
+examined the samples doing service at the counters.  They were three,
+under supervision of a watchful-eyed fourth.  Dame Gossip is for quoting
+his wit.  But the conclusion he reached, after quitting the shop and
+pacing his dozen steps, is important; for it sent a wind over the town to
+set the springs of tattle going as wildly as when the herald's trumpet
+blew the announcement for the world to hear out of Wales.
+
+He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in the
+ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she was,
+therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his
+thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the
+mistress of the shop.
+
+And the mistress of the shop?
+
+The question hardly needs be put.
+
+Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.
+
+London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable
+under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop
+had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of
+Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an
+occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.
+
+There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.
+Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows.  Carriages
+driving by stopped to look.  My lord himself had been visible, displaying
+his array of provisions to friends.  Nor was credulity damped appreciably
+when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch.
+It might be the countess's maiden name, if she really was a married
+countess.
+
+But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think its
+Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe.  They were at the
+pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder
+extravagances.  To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too
+much, because any absurdity was anticipated.  And the earl's readiness to
+be complimented on the shop's particular merits, his gratified air at an
+allusion to it, whirled the fun faster.  He seemed entirely unconscious
+that each step he now took wakened peals.
+
+For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist
+for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more
+laughable if not in himself a laughable object.  The earl's handsome
+figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of
+his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in state-
+according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they were
+not strictly divisible.  Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts drew
+into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from Whitechapel.
+She said it a little nervously, but without blushing.  Always on the side
+of the joke, he could ask: 'Who can doubt?' Indeed, scepticism poisoned
+the sport.
+
+The Old Buccaneer has written: Friends may laugh; I am not roused.  My
+enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night.
+
+Our enemy's laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say.  He can barely
+mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by
+laughter of friends.  An old warrior's tough fibre would, perhaps, be
+insensible to that small crackle.  In civil life, however, the friend's
+laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course: and
+the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from
+hearing it.  Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its
+being about him: he cannot imagine such 'lese-majeste' in the subservient
+courtiers too prudent to betray a sign.  So Fleetwood was unwarned; and
+his child-like unconsciousness of the boiling sentiments around,
+seasoned, pricked, and maddened his parasites under compression to
+invent, for a faint relief.  He had his title for them, they their tales
+of him.
+
+Dame Gossip would recount the tales.  She is of the order of persons
+inclining to suspect the tittle of truth in prodigies of scandal.  She is
+rustling and bustling to us of 'Carinthia Jane's run up to London to see
+Sarah Winch's grand new shop,' an eclipse of all existing grand London
+western shops; and of Rose Mackrell's account of her dance of proud
+delight in the shop, ending with a 'lovely cheese' just as my lord
+enters; and then a scene, wild beyond any conceivable 'for pathos and
+humour'--her pet pair of the dissimilar twins, both banging at us for
+tear-drops by different roads, through a common aperture:--and the earl
+has the Whitechapel baby boy plumped into his arms; and the countess
+fetches him a splendid bob-dip and rises out of a second cheese to twirl
+and fandango it; and, all serious on a sudden, request, whimperingly
+beseech, his thanks to her for the crowing successor she has presented
+him with: my lord ultimately, but carefully, depositing the infant on a
+basket of the last oranges of the season, fresh from the Azores, by
+delivery off my lord's own schooner-yacht in Southampton water; and
+escaping, leaving his gold-headed stick behind him--a trophy for the
+countess?  a weapon, it may be.
+
+Quick she tucks up her skirts, she is after him.  Dame Gossip speaks
+amusingly enough of the chase, and many eye-witnesses to the earl's
+flight at top speed down the right side of the way along by the Green
+Park; and of a Prince of the Blood, a portly Royal Duke on foot, bumped
+by one or the other of them, she cannot precisely say which, but 'thinks
+it to have been Carinthia Jane,' because the exalted personage, his shock
+of surprise abating, turned and watched the chase, in much merriment.
+And it was called, we are informed, 'The Piccadilly Hare and Hound' from
+that day.
+
+Some tradition of an extenuated nobleman pursued by a light-footed lady
+amid great excitement, there is; the Dame attaches importance also to
+verses of one of the ballads beginning to gain currency at the time
+(issuing ostensibly from London's poetic centre, the Seven Dials, which
+had, we are to conjecture, got the story by discolouring filtration
+through footmen retailing in public-houses the stock of anecdotes they
+gathered when stationed behind Rose Mackrell's chair, or Captain
+Abrane's, or Chumley 'Potts's), and would have the whole of it quoted:--
+
+        "'Tho' fair I be a powdered peruke,
+          And once was a gaping silly,
+          Your Whitechapel Countess will prove, Lord Duke,
+          She's a regular tiger-lily.
+          She'll fight you with cold steel
+                    or she'll run you off your legs
+          Down the length of Piccadilly!"
+
+That will satisfy; and perhaps indicate the hand.
+
+'Popular sympathy, of course, was all on the side of the Fair, as ever in
+those days when women had not forfeited it by stepping from their
+sanctuary seclusion.'
+
+The Dame shall expose her confusions.  She really would seem to fancy
+that the ballad verifies the main lines of the story, which is an
+impossible one.  Carinthia had not the means to travel: she was
+moneyless.  Every bill of her establishment was paid without stint by Mr.
+Howell Edwards, the earl's manager of mines; but she had not even the
+means for a journey to the Gowerland rocks she longed to see.  She had
+none since she forced her brother to take the half of her share of their
+inheritance, L1400, and sent him the remainder.
+
+Accepted by Chillon John as a loan, says Dame Gossip, and no sooner
+received than consumed by the pressing necessities of a husband with the
+Rose Beauty of England to support in the comforts and luxuries he deemed
+befitting.
+
+Still the Dame leans to her opinion that 'Carinthia Jane' may have been
+seen about London: for 'where we have much smoke there must be fire.'
+And the countess never denying an imputation not brought against her in
+her hearing, the ballad was unchallenged and London's wags had it their
+own way.  Among the reasons why they so persistently hunted the earl,
+his air of a smart correctness shadowed by this new absurdity invited
+them, as when a spot of mud on the trimmest of countenances arrests
+observation: Humour plucked at him the more for the good faith of his
+handsome look under the prolific little disfigurement.  Besides, a
+wealthy despot, with no conception of any hum around him, will have the
+wags in his track as surely as the flexibles in front: they avenge his
+exactions.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Always the shout for more produced it ("News")
+Anecdotist to slaughter families for the amusement
+Call of the great world's appetite for more (Invented news)
+Enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night
+He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly
+Magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness
+She was thrust away because because he had offended
+Women treat men as their tamed housemates
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
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