initial commit of ebook 4486HEADmain

3 files changed, 3840 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/4486.json b/old/4486.json
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3cdb478
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4486.json
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+{
+  "DATA": {
+    "CREDIT": "This etext was produced by David Widger",
+    "EBOOK_NUMBER": "4486"
+  }
+}
diff --git a/old/4486.txt b/old/4486.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c1d4147
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4486.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3834 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Marriage, v4
+by George Meredith
+#92 in our series by George Meredith
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg file.
+
+We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk,
+thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.
+
+Please do not remove this.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
+view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
+The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information
+they need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext.
+To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end,
+rather than having it all here at the beginning.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
+further information, is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.
+
+
+
+Title: The Amazing Marriage, v4
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4486]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 26, 2002]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Marriage, v4, by Meredith
+********This file should be named 4486.txt or 4486.zip********
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+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
+tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+THE AMAZING MARRIAGE
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1895
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+XXIX.     CARINTHIA IN WALES
+XXX.      REBECCA WYTHAN
+XXXI.     WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
+XXXII.    IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD
+          FATHER'S LESSONS
+XXXIII.   A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE
+XXXIV.    A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE
+          COUNTESS OF FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
+XXXV.     IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED
+XXXVI.    BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE
+XXXVII.   BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER LORD
+XXXVIII.  A DIP INTO THE SPRING'S WATERS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+CARINTHIA IN WALES
+
+An August of gales and rains drove Atlantic air over the Welsh highlands.
+Carinthia's old father had impressed on her the rapture of 'smelling
+salt' when by chance he stood and threw up his nostrils to sniff largely
+over a bed of bracken, that reminded him of his element, and her fancy
+would be at strain to catch his once proud riding of the seas.  She felt
+herself an elder daughter of the beloved old father, as she breathed it
+in full volume from the billowy West one morning early after sunrise and
+walked sisterly with the far-seen inexperienced little maid, whom she saw
+trotting beside him through the mountain forest, listening, storing his
+words, picturing the magnetic, veined great gloom of an untasted world.
+
+This elder daughter had undergone a shipwreck; but clear proof that she
+had not been worsted was in the unclouded liveliness of the younger one
+gazing forward.  Imaginative creatures who are courageous will never be
+lopped of the hopeful portion of their days by personal misfortune.
+Carinthia could animate both; it would have been a hurt done to a living
+human soul had she suffered the younger self to run overcast.  Only, the
+gazing forward had become interdicted to her experienced self.  Nor could
+she vision a future having any horizon for her child.  She saw it in
+bleak squares, and snuggled him between dangers weathered and dangers
+apprehended.
+
+The conviction that her husband hated her had sunk into her nature.
+Hating the mother, he would not love her boy.  He was her boy, and
+strangely bestowed, not beautifully to be remembered rapturously or
+gratefully, and with deep love of the father.  She felt the wound
+recollection dealt her.  But the boy was her one treasure, and no
+treasure to her husband.  They were burdens, and the heir of his House,
+child of a hated mother, was under perpetual menace from an unscrupulous
+tyrannical man.  The dread and antagonism were first aroused by the birth
+of her child.  She had not known while bearing him her present acute
+sensation of the hunted flying and at bay.  Previously, she could say:
+I did wrong here; I did wrong there.  Distrust had brought the state of
+war, which allows not of the wasting of our powers in confessions.
+
+Her husband fed her and he clothed her; the limitation of his bounty was
+sharply outlined.  Sure of her rectitude, a stranger to the world, she
+was not very sensible of dishonour done to her name.  It happened at
+times that her father inquired of her how things were going with his
+little Carin; and then revolt sprang up and answered on his behalf rather
+fiercely.  She was, however, prepared for any treaty including
+forgiveness, if she could be at peace in regard to her boy, and have an
+income of some help to her brother.  Chillon was harassed on all sides;
+she stood incapable of aiding; so foolishly feeble in the shadow of her
+immense longing to strive for him, that she could think her husband had
+purposely lamed her with an infant.  Her love of her brother, now the one
+man she loved, laid her insufficiency on the rack and tortured imbecile
+cries from it.
+
+On the contrary, her strange husband had blest her with an infant.
+Everything was pardonable to him if he left her boy untouched in the
+mother's charge.  Much alone as she was, she raised the dead to pet and
+cherish her boy.  Chillon had seen him and praised him.  Mrs. Owain
+Wythan, her neighbour over a hill, praised him above all babes on earth,
+poor childless woman!
+
+She was about to cross the hill and breakfast with Mrs. Wythan.  The time
+for the weaning of the babe approached, and had as prospect beyond it her
+dull fear that her husband would say the mother's work was done, and
+seize the pretext to separate them: and she could not claim a longer term
+to be giving milk, because her father had said: 'Not a quarter of a month
+more than nine for the milk of the mother'--or else the child would draw
+an unsustaining nourishment from the strongest breast.  She could have
+argued her exceptional robustness against another than he.  But the dead
+father wanting to build a great race of men and women ruled.
+
+Carinthia knelt at the cradle of a princeling gone from the rich repast
+to his alternative kingdom.
+
+'You will bring him over when he wakes,' she said to Madge.  'Mrs. Wythan
+would like to see him every day.  Martha can walk now.'
+
+'She can walk and hold a child in her two arms, my lady,' said Madge.
+'She expects miners popping up out of the bare ground when she sees no
+goblins.'
+
+'They!--they know him, they would not hurt him, they know my son,' her
+mistress answered.
+
+The population of the mines in revolt had no alarms for her.  The works
+were empty down below.  Men sat by the wayside brooding or strolled in
+groups, now and then loudly exercising their tongues; or they stood in
+circle to sing hymns: melancholy chants of a melancholy time for all.
+
+How would her father have acted by these men?  He would have been among
+them.  Dissensions in his mine were vapours of a day.  Lords behaved
+differently.  Carinthia fancied the people must regard their master as a
+foreign wizard, whose power they felt, without the chance of making their
+cry to him heard.  She, too, dealt with a lord.  It was now his wish for
+her to leave the place where she had found some shreds of a home in the
+thought of being useful.  She was gathering the people's language; many
+of their songs she could sing, and please them by singing to them.  They
+were not suspicious of her; at least, their women had open doors for her;
+the men, if shy, were civil.  She had only to go below, she was greeted
+in the quick tones of their speech all along the street of the slate-
+roofs.
+
+But none loved the castle, and she as little, saving the one room in it
+where her boy lay.  The grey of Welsh history knew a real castle beside
+the roaring brook frequently a torrent.  This was an eighteenth century
+castellated habitation on the verge of a small wood midway up the height,
+and it required a survey of numberless happy recollections to illumine
+its walls or drape its chambers.  The permanently lighted hearth of a
+dear home, as in that forsaken unfavoured old white house of the wooded
+Austrian crags, it had not.  Rather it seemed a place waiting for an ill
+deed to be done in it and stop all lighting of hearths thereafter.
+
+Out on the turf of the shaven hills, her springy step dispersed any misty
+fancies.  Her short-winged hive set to work in her head as usual,
+building scaffoldings of great things to be done by Chillon, present
+evils escaped.  The rolling big bade hills with the riding clouds excited
+her as she mounted, and she was a figure of gladness on the ridge bending
+over to hospitable Plas Llwyn, where the Wythans lived, entertaining rich
+and poor alike.
+
+They had led the neighbourhood to call on the discarded Countess of
+Fleetwood.
+
+A warm strain of arms about her neck was Carinthia's welcome from Mrs.
+Wythan lying along the couch in her boudoir; an established invalid, who
+yearned sanely to life, and caught a spark of it from the guest eyed
+tenderly by her as they conversed.
+
+'Our boy?--our Chillon Kirby till he has his baptism names; he is well?
+I am to see him?'
+
+'He follows me.  He sleeps almost through the night now.'
+
+'Ah, my dear,' Mrs. Wythan sighed, imagining: 'It would disappoint me if
+he did not wake me.'
+
+'I wake at his old time and watch him.'
+
+Carinthia put on the baby's face in the soft mould of slumber.
+
+'I see him!' Mrs. Wythan cried.  'He is part mine.  He has taught Owain
+to love babies.'
+
+A tray of breakfast was placed before the countess.  'Mr. Wythan is down
+among his men?' she said.
+
+'Every morning, as long as this agitation lasts.  I need not say good
+appetite to you after your walk.  You have no fear of the men, I know.
+Owain's men are undisturbed; he has them in hand.  Absentee masters can't
+expect continued harmony.  Dear, he tells me Mr. Edwards awaits the
+earl.'
+
+Drinking her tea, Carinthia's eyelids shut; she set down her cup, 'If he
+must come,' she said.  'He wishes me to leave.  I am to go again where I
+have no friends, and no language to learn, and can be of no use.  It is
+not for me that I dread his coming.  He speaks to command.  The men ask
+to be heard.  He will have submission first.  They do not trust him.  His
+coming is a danger.  For me, I should wish him to come.  May I say . . ?'
+
+'Your Rebecca bids you say, my darling.'
+
+'It is, I am with the men because I am so like them.  I beg to be heard.
+He commands obedience.  He is a great nobleman, but I am the daughter of
+a greater man, and I have to say, that if those poor miners do harm, I
+will not stand by and see an anger against injustice punished.  I wish
+his coming, for him to agree upon the Christian names of the boy.  I feel
+his coming will do me, injury in making me offend him worse.  I would
+avoid that.  Oh, dear soul!  I may say it to you:--he cannot hurt me any
+more.  I am spared loving him when I forgive him; and I do.  The loving
+is the pain.  That is gone by.'
+
+Mrs. Wythan fondled and kissed Carinthia's hand.
+
+'Let me say in my turn; I may help you, dear.  You know I have my
+husband's love, as he mine.  Am I, have I ever been a wife to him?  Here
+I lie, a dead weight, to be carried up and down, all of a wife that Owain
+has had for years.  I lie and pray to be taken, that my good man, my
+proved good man, may be free to choose a healthy young woman and be
+rewarded before his end by learning what a true marriage is.  The big
+simpleton will otherwise be going to his grave, thinking he was married!
+I see him stepping about softly in my room, so contented if he does not
+disturb me, and he crushes me with a desire to laugh at him while I
+worship.  I tricked him into marrying the prostrate invalid I am, and he
+can't discover the trick, he will think it's a wife he has, instead of a
+doctor's doll.  Oh! you have a strange husband, it has been a strange
+marriage for you, but you have your invincible health, you have not to
+lie and feel the horror of being a deception to a guileless man, whose
+love blindfolds him.  The bitter ache to me is, that I can give nothing.
+You abound in power to give.'
+
+Carinthia lifted her open hands for sign of their emptiness.
+
+'My brother would not want, if I could give.  He may have to sell out of.
+the army, he thinks, fears; and I must look on.  Our mother used to say
+she had done something for her country in giving a son like Chillon to
+the British army.  Poor mother!  Our bright opening days all seem to end
+in rain.  We should turn to Mr. Wythan for a guide.'
+
+'He calls you Morgan le Fay christianized.'
+
+'What I am!' Carinthia raised and let fall her head.  'An example makes
+dwarfs of us.  When Mr. Wythan does penance for temper by descending into
+his mine and working among his men for a day with the pick, seated, as he
+showed me down below, that is an example.  If I did like that, I should
+have no firedamp in the breast, and not such a task to forgive, that when
+I succeed I kill my feelings.'
+
+The entry of Madge and Martha, the nurse-girl, with the overflowing
+armful of baby, changed their converse into melodious exclamations.
+
+'Kit Ines has arrived, my lady,' Madge said.  'I saw him on the road and
+stopped a minute.'
+
+Mrs. Wythan studied Carinthia.  Her sharp invalid's ears had caught the
+name.  She beckoned.  'The man who--the fighting man?'
+
+'It will be my child this time,' said Carinthia; 'I have no fear for
+myself.'  She was trembling, though her features were hard for the war
+her lord had declared, as it seemed.  'Did he tell you his business
+here?' she asked of Madge.
+
+'He says, to protect you, my lady, since you won't leave.'
+
+'He stays at the castle?'
+
+'He is to stay there, he says, as long as the Welsh are out.'
+
+'The "Welsh" are misunderstood by Lord Fleetwood,'
+
+Mrs. Wythan said to Carinthia.  'He should live among them.  They will
+not hurt their lady.  Protecting may be his intention; but we will have
+our baby safe here.  Not?' she appealed.  'And baby's mother.  How
+otherwise?'
+
+'You read my wishes,' Carinthia rejoined.  'The man I do not think a bad
+man.  He has a master.  While I am bound to my child I must be restful,
+and with the man at the castle Martha's goblins would jump about me day
+and night.  My boy makes a coward of his mother.'
+
+'We merely take a precaution, and I have the pleasure of it,' said her
+hostess.  'Give orders to your maid not less than a fortnight.  It will
+rejoice my husband so much.'
+
+As with the warmly hospitable, few were the words.  Madge was promised by
+her mistress plenty of opportunities daily for seeing Kit Ines, and her
+mouth screwed to one of women's dimples at a corner.  She went off in a
+cart to fetch boxes, thinking: We are a hunted lot!  So she was not
+mildly disposed for the company of Mr. Kit on her return to the castle.
+
+England's champion light-weight thought it hard that his, coming down to
+protect the castle against the gibbering heathen Welsh should cause a
+clearing out, and solitariness for his portion.
+
+'What's the good of innocence if you 're always going to suspect a man!'
+he put it, like a true son of the pirates turned traders.  'I've got a
+paytron, and a man in my profession must have a paytron, or where is he?
+Where's his money for a trial of skill?  Say he saves and borrows and
+finds the lump to clap it down, and he's knocked out o' time.  There he
+is, bankrup', and a devil of a licking into the bargain.  That 's the
+cream of our profession, if a man has got no paytron.
+
+No prize-ring can live without one.  The odds are too hard on us.  My
+lady ought to take into account I behaved respectful when I was obliged
+to do my lord's orders and remove her from our haunts, which wasn't to
+his taste.  Here I'm like a cannon for defending the house, needs be, and
+all inside flies off scarified.'
+
+'It strikes me, Kit Ines, a man with a paytron is no better than a tool
+of a man,' said Madge.
+
+'And don't you go to be sneering at honest tools,' Ines retorted.  'When
+will women learn a bit of the world before they're made hags of by old
+Father Wear-and-Tear!  A young woman in her prime, you Madge! be such a
+fool as not see I serve tool to stock our shop.'
+
+'Your paytron bid you steal off with my lady's child, Kit Ines, you'd do
+it to stock your shop.'
+
+Ines puffed.  'If you ain't a girl to wallop the wind!  Fancy me at that
+game!  Is that why my lady--but I can't be suspected that far?  You make
+me break out at my pores.  My paytron's a gentleman: he wouldn't ask and
+I couldn't act such a part.  Dear Lord! it'd have to be stealing off, for
+my lady can use a stick; and put it to the choice between my lady and her
+child and any paytron living, paytron be damned, I'd say, rather'n go
+against my notions of honour.  Have you forgot all our old talk about the
+prize-ring, the nursery of honour in Old England?'
+
+'That was before you sold yourself to a paytron, Kit Ines.'
+
+'Ah!  Women wants mast-heading off and on, for 'em to have a bit of a
+look-out over life as it is.  They go stewing over books of adventure
+and drop into frights about awful man.  Take me, now; you had a no small
+admiration for my manly valour once, and you trusted yourself to me, and
+did you ever repent it?--owning you're not the young woman to tempt to t'
+other way.'
+
+'You wouldn't have found me talking to you here if I had.'
+
+'And here I'm left to defend an empty castle, am I?'
+
+'Don't drink or you'll have your paytron on you.  He's good use there.'
+
+'I ask it, can I see my lady?'
+
+'Drunk nor sober you won't.  Serve a paytron, be a leper, you'll find,
+with all honest folk.'
+
+Ines shook out an execrating leg at the foul word.  'Leper, you say?  You
+say that?  You say leper to me?'
+
+'Strut your tallest, Kit Ines.  It's the money rattles in your pocket
+says it.'
+
+'It's my reputation for decent treatment of a woman lets you say it,
+Madge Winch.'
+
+'Stick to that as long as your paytron consents.  It's the one thing
+you've got left.'
+
+'Benefit, you hussy, and mind you don't pull too stiff.'
+
+'Be the woman and have the last word!'
+
+His tongue was checked.  He swallowed the exceeding sourness of a retort
+undelivered, together with the feeling that she beat him in the wrangle
+by dint of her being an unreasonable wench.
+
+Madge huffed away to fill her boxes.
+
+He stood by the cart, hands deep down his pockets, when she descended.
+She could have laughed at the spectacle of a champion prize-fighter out
+of employ, hulking idle, because he was dog to a paytron; but her
+contempt of him declined passing in small change.
+
+'So you're off.  What am I to tell my lord when he comes?' Kit growled.
+'His yacht's fetching for a Welsh seaport.'
+
+She counted it a piece of information gained, and jumped to her seat,
+bidding the driver start.  To have pretty well lost her character for a
+hero changed into a patron's dog, was a thought that outweighed the show
+of incivility.  Some little distance away, she reproached herself for
+not having been so civil as to inquire what day my lord was expected,
+by his appointment.  The girl reflected on the strangeness of a body of
+discontented miners bringing my lord and my lady close, perhaps to meet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+REBECCA WYTHAN
+
+The earl was looked for at the, chief office of the mines, and each day
+an expectation of him closed in disappointment, leaving it to be surmised
+that there were more serious reasons for his continued absence during a
+crisis than any discussed; whether indeed, as when a timepiece neglects
+to strike the hour which is, by the reckoning of natural impatience,
+past, the capital charge of 'crazy works' must not be brought against a
+nobleman hitherto precise upon business, of a just disposition, fairly
+humane.  For though he was an absentee sucking the earth through a tube,
+in Ottoman ease, he had never omitted the duty of personally attending on
+the spot to grave cases under dispute.  The son of the hardheaded father
+came out at a crisis; and not too highhandedly: he could hear an opposite
+argument to the end.  Therefore, since he refused to comply without
+hearing, he was wanted on the spot imperatively, now.
+
+Irony perusing History offers the beaten and indolent a sugary acid in
+the indication of the spites and the pranks, the whims and the tastes,
+at the springs of main events.  It is, taken by itself, destructive
+nourishment.  But those who labour in the field to shovel the clods of
+earth to History, would be wiser of their fellows for a minor dose of it.
+Mr. Howell Edwards consulting with Mr. Owain Wythan on the necessity,
+that the earl should instantly keep his promise to appear among the men
+and stop the fermentation, as in our younger days a lordly owner still
+might do by small concessions and the physical influence--the nerve-
+charm--could suppose him to be holding aloof for his pleasure or his
+pride; perhaps because of illness or inability to conceive the actual
+situation at a distance.  He mentioned the presence of the countess, and
+Mr. Wythan mentioned it, neither of them thinking a rational man would so
+play the lunatic as to let men starve, and wreck precious mines, for the
+sake of avoiding her.
+
+Sullen days went by.  On these days of the slate-cloud or the leaden-
+winged, Carinthia walked over the hills to her staring or down-eyed
+silent people, admitted without a welcome at some doors, rejected at
+some.  Her baskets from the castle were for the most part received as
+graciously.  She continued to direct them for delivery where they were
+needed, and understood why a charity that supplied the place of justice
+was not thanked.  She and her people here were one regarding the master,
+as she had said.  They could not hurt her sensitiveness, she felt too
+warmly with them.  And here it was not the squalid, flat, bricked east-
+corner of London at the close of her daily pilgrimage.  Up from the
+solitary street of the slate-roofs, she mounted a big hill and had the
+life of high breathing.  A perpetual escape out of the smoky, grimy city
+mazes was trumpeted to her in the winds up there: a recollected contrast
+lightened the skyless broad spaces overhead almost to sunniness.  Having
+air of the hills and activity for her limbs, she made sunshine for
+herself.  Regrets were at no time her nestlings.
+
+Look backward only to correct an error of conduct for the next attempt,
+says one of her father's Maxims; as sharply bracing for women as for men.
+She did not look back to moan.  Now that her hunger for the safety of her
+infant was momentarily quieted, she could see Kit Ines hanging about the
+lower ground, near the alehouse, and smile at Madge's comparison of him
+to a drummed-out soldier, who would like to be taken for a holiday
+pensioner.
+
+He saluted; under the suspicion of his patron's lady his legs were
+hampered, he dared not approach her; though his innocence of a deed not
+proposed to him yet--and all to stock that girl Madge's shop, if done!
+knocked at his ribs with fury to vindicate himself before the lady and
+her maid.  A gentleman met them and conducted them across the hills.
+
+And two Taffy gentlemen would hardly be sufficient for the purpose,
+supposing an ill-used Englishman inclined to block their way!--What, and
+play footpad, Kit Ines?  No, it's just a game in the head.  But a true
+man hates to feel himself suspected.  His refuge is the beer of the
+country.
+
+Next day there were the two gentlemen to conduct the lady and her maid;
+and Taffy the first walks beside the countess; and that girl Madge
+trudges along with no other than my lord's Mr. Woodseer, chattering like
+a watering-can on a garden-bed: deuce a glance at Kit Ines.  How can she
+keep it up and the gentleman no more than nodding?  How does he enjoy
+playing second fiddle with the maid while Mr. tall brown-face Taffy
+violins it to her ladyship a stone's throw in front?  Ines had less
+curiosity to know the object of Mr. Woodseer's appearance on the scene.
+Idle, unhandsomely treated, and a cave of the yawns, he merely commented
+on his observations.
+
+'Yes, there he is, don't look at him,' Madge said to Gower; 'and whatever
+he's here for, he has a bad time of it, and rather more than it's
+pleasant for him to think over, if a slave to a "paytron" thinks at all.
+I won't judge him; my mistress is bitten with the fear for the child,
+worse than ever.  And the earl, my lord, not coming, and he wanting her
+to move again, seems to her he durstn't do it here and intends to snap at
+the child on the road.  She-'s forced to believe anything of such a
+husband and father.  And why does he behave so?  I can't spell it.  He's
+kind to my Sally--you've seen the Piccadilly shop?--because she was . . .
+she did her best in love and duty for my lady.  And behaves like a
+husband hating his wife's life on earth!  Then he went down with good Mr.
+Woodseer, and called on Sally, pretending to inquire, after she was
+kidnapped by that Kit Ines acting to please his paytron, he must be shown
+up to the room where she slept, and stands at the door and peeps in,
+Sally's letter says, and asks if he may enter the room.  He went to the
+window looking on the chimneys she used to see, and touched an ornament
+over the fireplace, called grandfather's pigtail case--he was a sailor;
+only a ridiculous piece of china, that made my lady laugh about the story
+of its holding a pigtail.  But he turns it over because she did--Sally
+told him.  He couldn't be pretending when he bought the beautiful shop
+and stocked it for Sally.  He gets her lots of customers; and no rent to
+pay till next Michaelmas a year.  She's a made woman through him.  He
+said to her, he had heard from Mr. Woodseer the Countess of Fleetwood
+called her sister; he shook her hand.'
+
+'The Countess of Fleetwood called both of you her sisters, I think,' said
+Gower.
+
+'I'm her servant.  I'd rather serve her than have a fortune.'
+
+'You were born with a fortune one would like to have a nibble at, Madge.'
+
+'I can't lay hand on it, then.'
+
+'It's the capacity for giving, my dear.'
+
+'Please, Mr. Gower, don't say that; you'll make me cry.  He keeps his
+wife so poor she hasn't a shilling of her own; she wearies about her
+brother; she can't help.  He can spend hundreds on my Sally for having
+been good to her, in our small way--it's a fairy tale; and he won't hear
+of money for his wife, except that she's never to want for anything it
+can buy.'
+
+'You give what it can't buy.'
+
+'Me.  I'm "a pugilist's wench"--I've heard myself called.  She was the
+first who gave me a lift; never mind me.  Have you come to take her away?
+She'd trust herself and the child to you.'
+
+'Take her?--reason with her as to the best we can do.  He holds off from
+a meeting just now.  I fancy he's wearing round to it.  His keeping his
+wife without money passes comprehension.  After serving him for a few
+months, I had a store invested to support me for years--as much as I need
+before I join the ranks of the pen.  I was at my reading and writing and
+drowsing, and down he rushes: I 'm in harness again.  I can't say it's
+dead waste of time; besides I pick up an independence for the days ahead.
+But I don't respect myself for doing the work.  Here's the difference
+between us two servants, Madge: I think of myself, and you don't.'
+
+'The difference is more like between the master and mistress we serve,
+Mr. Gower.'
+
+'Well, I'd rather be the woman in this case.'
+
+'You know the reputation I've got.  And can only just read, and can't
+spell.  My mistress teaches me bits of German and French on her walks.'
+
+Gower took a new observation of this girl, whom he had not regarded as
+like himself, a pushing blade among the grasses.  He proposed to continue
+her lessons, if she cared to learn; saying it could be done in letters.
+
+'I won't be ashamed of writing, if you mean it,' said she.  'My mistress
+will have a usefuller servant.  She had a strange honeymoon of a
+marriage, if ever was--and told me t' other day she was glad because it
+brought us together--she a born lady!'
+
+'A fling-above born ladies.  She's quick as light to hit on a jewel where
+there is one, whether it shines or not.  She stands among the Verities of
+the world.'
+
+'Yes,' Madge said, panting for more.  'Do speak of her.  When you praise
+her, I feel she's not wasted.  Mistress; and friend and wife--if he'd let
+her be; and mother; never mother like her.  The boy 'll be a sturdy.
+She'll see he has every chance.  He's a lucky little one to have that
+mother.'
+
+'You think her handsome, Madge?'
+
+Gower asked it, wishing to hear a devotee's confusion of qualities and
+looks.
+
+The question was a drop on lower spheres, and it required definitions, to
+touch the exact nature of the form of beauty, and excuse a cooler tone on
+the commoner plane.  These demanded language.  She rounded the
+difficulty, saying: 'You see engravings of archery; that 's her figure--
+her real figure.  I think her face .  .  .  I can't describe .  .  .  it
+flashes.'
+
+'That's it,' said Gower, delighted with his perception of a bare mind at
+work and hitting the mark perforce of warmth.  'When it flashes, it's
+unequalled.  There's the supremacy of irregular lines.  People talk of
+perfect beauty: suitable for paintings and statues.  Living faces, if
+they're to show the soul, which is the star on the peak of beauty, must
+lend themselves to commotion.  Nature does it in a breezy tree or over
+ruffled waters.  Repose has never such splendid reach as animation--
+I mean, in the living face.  Artists prefer repose.  Only Nature can
+express the uttermost beauty with her gathering and tuning of discords.
+Well, your mistress has that beauty.  I remember my impression when I saw
+her first on her mountains abroad.  Other beautiful faces of women go
+pale, grow stale.  The diversified in the harmony of the flash are
+Nature's own, her radiant, made of her many notes, beyond our dreams to
+reproduce.  We can't hope to have a true portrait of your mistress.  Does
+Madge understand?'
+
+The literary dose was a strong one for her; but she saw the index, and
+got a lift from the sound.  Her bosom heaved.  'Oh, I do try, Mr. Gower.
+I think I do a little.  I do more while you're talking.  You are good to
+talk so to me.  You should have seen her the night she went to meet my
+lord at those beastly Gardens Kit Ines told me he was going to.  She was
+defending him.  I've no words.  You teach me what's meant by poetry.  I
+couldn't understand that once.'
+
+Their eyes were on the countess and her escort in advance.  Gower's
+praises of her mistress's peculiar beauty set the girl compassionately
+musing.  His eloquence upon the beauty was her clue.
+
+Carinthia and Mr. Wythan started at a sharp trot in the direction of the
+pair of ponies driven by a groom along the curved decline of the narrow
+roadway.  His whip was up for signal.
+
+It concerned the house and the master of it.  His groom drove rapidly
+down, while he hurried on the homeward way, as a man will do, with the
+dread upon him that his wife's last breath may have been yielded before
+he can enfold her.
+
+Carinthia walked to be overtaken, not daring to fever her blood at a
+swifter pace; 'lamed with an infant,' the thought recurred.
+
+'She is very ill, she has fainted, she lies insensible,' Madge heard from
+her of Mrs. Wythan.  'We were speaking of her when the groom appeared.
+It has happened twice.  They fear the third.  He fears it, though he
+laughs at a superstition.  Now step, I know you like walking, Mr.
+Woodseer.  Once I left you behind.'
+
+'I have the whole scene of the angel and the cripple,' Gower replied.
+
+'O that day!'
+
+They 'were soon speculating on the unimpressionable house in its clump of
+wood midway below, which had no response for anxieties.
+
+A maid-servant at the garden gate, by Mr. Wythan's orders, informed
+Carinthia that her mistress had opened her eyes: There was a hope of
+weathering the ominous third time.  But the hope was a bird of short
+flight from bush to bush until the doctor should speak to confirm it.
+Even the child was under the shadow of the house.  Carinthia had him in
+her arms, trusting to life as she hugged him, and seeing innumerable
+darts out of all regions assailing her treasure.
+
+'She wishes to have you,' Mr. Wythan came and said to her.  'Almost her
+first word.  The heart is quickening.  She will live for me if she can.'
+
+He whispered it.  His features shot the sparkle.
+
+Rebecca Wythan had strength to press Carinthia's hand faintly.  She made
+herself heard: 'No pain.'  Her husband sat upright, quite still,
+attentive for any sign.  His look of quiet pleasure ready to show,
+sprightliness dwelt on her.  She returned the look, unable to give it
+greeting.  Past the sense of humour, she wanted to say: 'See the poor
+simple fellow who will think it a wife that he has!' She did but look.
+
+Carinthia spoke his name, 'Mr. Wythan,' by chance, and Rebecca breathed
+heavily until she formed the words: 'Owain to me.'
+
+'To me,' Owain added.
+
+The three formed a chain of clasped hands.
+
+It was in the mind of the sick lady to disburden herself of more than her
+weakness could utter, so far was she above earthly links.  The desire in
+her was to be quit of the flesh, bearing a picture of her husband as
+having the dues of his merits.
+
+Her recovered strength next day brought her nearer to our laws.  'You
+will call him Owain, Carinthia?' she said.  'He is not one to presume on
+familiarity.  I must be going soon.  I cannot leave him the wife I would
+choose.  I can leave him the sister.  He is a sure friend.  He is the
+knightly man women dream of.  I harp on it because I long for testimony
+that I leave him to have some reward.  And this may be, between two so
+pure at heart as you two.'
+
+'Dear soul friend, yes, and Owain, yes, I can say it,' Carinthia
+rejoined.  'Brother?  I have only my Chillon.  My life is now for him.
+I am punished for separating myself from the son of my father.  I have no
+heart for a second brother.  What I can give to my friend I will.  I
+shall love you in him, if I am to lose you.'
+
+'Not Owain--it was I was the wretch refused to call on the lonely lady at
+the castle until I heard she had done a romantic little bit of thing--
+hushed a lambkin's bleating.  My loss!  my loss!  And I could afford it
+so poorly.  Since then Carinthia has filled my days.  I shudder to leave
+you and think of your going back to the English.  Their sneer withers.
+They sent you down among us as a young woman to be shunned.'
+
+'I did wildly, I was ungoverned, I had one idea,' said Carinthia.
+'One idea is a bullet, good for the day of battle to beat the foe,
+father tells us.  It was a madness in me.  Now it has gone, I see all
+round.  I see straight, too.  With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but
+itself.  Whizz!  we go.  I did.  I shall no longer offend in that way.
+Mr. Gower Woodseer is here from my lord.'
+
+'With him the child will be safe.'
+
+'I am not alarmed.  It is to request--they would have me gone, to prepare
+the way for my lord.'
+
+'You have done, it; he has the castle to himself.  I cannot-spare you.
+A tyrant ordering you to go should be defied.  My Lord Fleetwood puts
+lightning into my slow veins.'
+
+'We have talked: we shall be reproved by the husband and the doctor,'
+said Carinthia.
+
+Sullen days continued and rolled over to night at the mines.  Gower's
+mission was rendered absurd by the countess's withdrawal from the castle.
+He spoke of it to Mr. Wythan once, and the latter took a big breath and
+blew such a lord to the winds.  'Persuade our guest to leave us, that the
+air may not be tainted for her husband when he comes?  He needn't call;
+he's not obliged to see her.  She's offered Esslemont to live in?  I
+believe her instinct's right--he has designs on the child.  A little more
+and we shall have a mad dog in the fellow.  He doubles my work by keeping
+his men out.  If she were away we should hear of black doings.  Twenty
+dozen of his pugilists wouldn't stop the burning.'
+
+They agreed that persuasions need not be addressed to the countess.  She
+was and would remain Mr. Wythan's guest.  As for the earl, Gower inclined
+to plead hesitatingly, still to plead, on behalf of a nobleman owning his
+influence and very susceptible to his wisdom, whose echo of a pointed
+saying nearly equalled the satisfaction bestowed by print.  The titled
+man affected the philosopher in that manner; or rather, the crude
+philosopher's relish of brilliant appreciation stripped him of his robe.
+For he was with Owain Wythan at heart to scorn titles which did not
+distinguish practical offices.  A nation bowing to them has gone to pith,
+for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he
+had to do it often.  Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their
+magnetism for us unless we nerve the mind to wakeful repulsion.  He
+protested he had reason to think the earl was humanizing, though he might
+be killing a woman in the process.  'Could she wish for better?' he
+asked, with at least the gravity of the undermining humourist; and he
+started Owain to course an idea when he remarked of Lord Fleetwood:
+'Imagine a devil on his back on a river, flying a cherub.'
+
+Owain sparkled from the vision of the thing to wrath with it.
+
+'Ay, but while he's floating, his people are edging on starvation.  And
+I've a personal grievance.  I keep, you know, open hall, bread and cheese
+and beer, for poor mates.  His men are favouring us with a call.  We have
+to cart treble from the town.  If I straighten the sticks he dies to
+bend, it'll be a grievance against me--and a fig for it!  But I like to
+be at peace with my neighbours, and waft them "penillion" instead of
+dealing the "cleddyfal" of Llewellyn.'
+
+At last the tension ceased; they had intelligence of the earl's arrival.
+
+His countess was little moved by it; and the reason for that lay in her
+imagination being absorbed.  Henrietta had posted her a journal telling
+of a deed of Chillon's: no great feat, but precious for its 'likeness to
+him,' as they phrased it; that is, for the light it cast on their
+conception of the man.  Heading a squadron in a riotous Midland town, he
+stopped a charge, after fire of a shot from the mob, and galloped up the
+street to catch a staggering urchin to his saddle-bow, and place the mite
+in safety.  Then it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made
+for him.
+
+Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world's hot
+stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother's thoughtful
+little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was
+divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an
+unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
+
+The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her
+detestation of imagerial epigrams.  Otherwise Gower Woodseer's dash at
+the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it
+further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a 'devil on his
+back on a river' was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and
+teaser.
+
+Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew
+the breath from him;--and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and
+gurgle of the nurses, he could swear.  He kicked at the bondage to our
+common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.
+But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish
+curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard.  They were,
+it seemed, external--no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace
+across wintry air.  They were, as it chanced, Nature's woman in him
+plucking at her separated partner, Custom's man; something of an oriental
+voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures
+without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life's convict couple
+walk linked to one another, to their issue more.
+
+There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother
+would have.  The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,--he
+would be no mean one, no coward.
+
+That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a
+mother:--Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded
+the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the
+tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy--that mother,
+a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the
+world.  'It is my husband' sounded foolish, sounded freshish,--a new
+note.  Would she repeat it?  The bit of simplicity would bear repeating
+once.  Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to perfect
+herself.  She's a good way off that, and may spoil herself in the
+process; but she has a certain power.  Her donkey obstinacy in refusing
+compliance, and her pursuit of 'my husband,' and ability to drench him
+with ridicule, do not exhibit the ordinary young female.  She stamps her
+impression on the people she meets.  Her husband is shaken to confess it
+likewise, despite a disagreement between them.
+
+He has owned he is her husband: he has not disavowed the consequence.
+That fellow, Gower Woodseer, might accuse the husband of virtually lying,
+if he by his conduct implied her distastefulness or worse.  By heaven!
+as felon a deed as could be done.  Argue the case anyhow, it should be
+undone.  Let her but cease to madden.  For whatever the rawness of the
+woman, she has qualities; and experience of the facile loves of London
+very sharply defines her qualities.  Think of her as raw, she has the
+gift of rareness: forget the donkey obstinacy, her character grasps.
+In the grasp of her character, one inclines, and her husband inclines,
+to become her advocate.  She has only to discontinue maddening.
+
+The wealthy young noble prized any form of rareness wherever it was
+visible, having no thought of the purchase of it, except with worship.
+He could listen pleased to the talk of a Methodist minister sewing
+bootleather.  He picked up a roadside tramp and made a friend of him,
+and valued the fellow's honesty, submitted to his lectures, pardoned his
+insolence.  The sight of Carinthia's narrow bedroom and strip of bed over
+Sarah Winch's Whitechapel shop had gone a step to drown the bobbing
+Whitechapel Countess.  At least, he had not been hunted by that gaunt
+chalk-quarry ghost since his peep into the room.  Own it!  she likewise
+has things to forgive.  Women nurse their larvae of ideas about fair
+dealing.  But observe the distinction: aid if women understood justice
+they would be the first to proclaim, that when two are tied together, the
+one who does the other serious injury is more naturally excused than the
+one who-tenfold abhorrent if a woman!--calls up the grotesque to
+extinguish both.
+
+With this apology for himself, Lord Fleetwood grew tolerant of the person
+honourably avowed as his wife.  So; therefore, the barrier between him
+and his thoughts of her was broken.  The thoughts carrying red doses were
+selected.  Finally, the taste to meet her sprouted.  If agreeable, she
+could be wooed; if barely agreeable, tormented; if disagreeable, left as
+before.
+
+Although it was the hazard of a die, he decided to follow his taste.
+Her stay at the castle had kept him long from the duties of his business;
+and he could imagine it a grievance if he pleased, but he put it aside.
+Alighting at his chief manager's office, he passed through the heated
+atmosphere of black-browed, wiry little rebels, who withheld the salute
+as they lounged: a posture often preceding the spring in compulsorily
+idle workers.  He was aware of instinct abroad, an antagonism to the
+proprietor's rights.  They roused him to stand by them, and were his own
+form of instinct, handsomely clothed.  It behoved that he should examine
+them and the claims against them, to be sure of his ground.  He and Mr.
+Howell Edwards debated the dispute for an hour; agreeing, partially
+differing.  There was a weakness on the principle in Edwards.  These
+fellows fixed to the spot are for compromise too much.  An owner of mines
+has no steady reckoning of income if the rate of wage is perpetually to
+shift according to current, mostly ignorant, versions of the prosperity
+of the times.  Are we so prosperous?  It is far from certain.  And if the
+rate ascends, the question of easing it down to suit the discontinuance
+of prosperity agitating our exchequer--whose demand is for fixity--
+perplexes us further.
+
+However, that was preliminary.  He and Howell Edwards would dine and
+wrangle it out.  The earl knew himself a hot disputant after dinner.
+Incidentally he heard of Lady Fleetwood as a guest of Mrs. Wythan; and
+the circumstance was injurious to him because he stood against Mr.
+Wythan's pampering system with his men.
+
+Ines up at the castle smelt of beer, and his eyelids were sottish.
+Nothing to do tries the virtue of the best.  He sought his excuse in a
+heavy lamentation over my lady's unjust suspicion of him,--a known man of
+honour, though he did serve his paytron.
+
+The cause of Lady Fleetwood's absence was exposed to her outraged lord,
+who had sent the man purely to protect her at this castle, where she
+insisted on staying.  The suspicion cast on the dreary lusher was the
+wife's wild shot at her husband.  One could understand a silly woman's
+passing terror.  Her acting under the dictate of it struck the husband's
+ribbed breast as a positive clap of hostilities between them across a
+chasm.
+
+His previous placable mood was immediately conceived by him to have been
+one of his fits of generosity; a step to a frightful dutiful embrace of
+an almost repulsive object.  He flung the thought of her back on her
+Whitechapel.  She returned from that place with smiles, dressed in a
+laundry white with a sprinkle of smuts, appearing to him as an adversary
+armed and able to strike.  There was a blow, for he chewed resentments;
+and these were goaded by a remembered shyness of meeting her eyes when he
+rounded up the slope of the hill, in view of his castle, where he
+supposed she would be awaiting 'my husband.'  The silence of her absence
+was lively mockery of that anticipation.
+
+Gower came on him sauntering about the grounds.
+
+'You're not very successful down here,' Fleetwood said, without greeting.
+
+'The countess likes the air of this country,' said Gower, evasively,
+impertinently, and pointlessly; offensively to the despot employing him
+to be either subservient or smart.
+
+'I wish her to leave it.'
+
+'She wishes to see you first.'
+
+'She takes queer measures.  I start to-morrow for my yacht at Cardiff.'
+There the matter ended; for Fleetwood fell to talking of the mines.  At
+dinner and after dinner it was the topic, and after Howell Edwards had
+departed.
+
+When the man who has a heart will talk of nothing but what concerns his
+interests, and the heart is hurt, it may be perceived by a cognizant
+friend, that this is his proud mute way of petitioning to have the
+tenderer subject broached.  Gower was sure of the heart, armoured or
+bandaged though it was,--a haunt of evil spirits as well,--and he began:
+'Now to speak of me half a minute.  You cajoled me out of my Surrey room,
+where I was writing, in the vein .  .  .'
+
+'I've had the scene before me!' the earl interposed.  'Juniper dells and
+that tree of the flashing leaf, and that dear old boy, your father, young
+as you and me, and saying love of Nature gives us eternal youth.  On with
+you.'
+
+'I doubted whether I should be of use to you.  I told you the amount of
+alloy in my motives.  A year with you, I have subsistence for ten years
+assured to me.'
+
+'Don't be a prosy dog, Gower Woodseer.'
+
+'Will you come over to the Wythans before you go?'
+
+'I will not.'
+
+'You would lengthen your stride across a wounded beast?'
+
+'I see no wound to the beast.'
+
+'You can permit yourself to kick under cover of a metaphor.'
+
+'Tell me what you drive at, Gower.'
+
+'The request is, for you to spare pain by taking one step--an extra
+strain on the muscles of the leg.  It 's only the leg wants moving.'
+
+'The lady has legs to run away, let them bring her back.'
+
+'Why have me with you, then?  I'm useless.  But you read us all, see
+everything, and wait only for the mood to do the right.  You read me,
+and I'm not open to everybody.  You read the crux of a man like me in my
+novel position.  You read my admiration of a beautiful woman and effort
+to keep honest.  You read my downright preference of what most people
+would call poverty, and my enjoyment of good cookery and good company.
+You enlist among the crew below as one of our tempters.  You find I come
+round to the thing I like best.  Therefore, you have your liking for me;
+and that's why you turn to me again, after your natural infidelities.
+So much for me.  You read this priceless lady quite as clearly.
+You choose to cloud her with your moods.  She was at a disadvantage,
+'arriving in a strange country, next to friendless; and each new incident
+bred of a luckless beginning--I could say more.'
+
+Fleetwood nodded.  'You are read without the words: You read in history,
+too, I suppose, that there are two sides to most cases.  The loudest is
+not often the strongest.  However, now the lady shows herself crazed.
+That's reading her charitably.  Else she has to be taken for a spiteful
+shrew, who pretends to suspect anything that's villanous, because she can
+hit on no other way of striking.'
+
+'Crazed, is a wide shot and hits half the world,' muttered Gower.  'Lady
+Fleetwood had a troubled period after her marriage.  She suffered a sort
+of kidnapping when she was bearing her child.  There's a book by an
+Edinburgh doctor might be serviceable to you.  It enlightens me.  She
+will have a distrust of you, as regards the child, until she understands
+you by living with you under one roof.'
+
+'Such animals these women are!' Good Lord !' Fleetwood ejaculated.
+'I marry one, and I 'm to take to reading medical books!' He yawned.
+
+'You speak that of women and pretend to love Nature,' said Gower.
+'You hate Nature unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook.
+That's the way to the madhouse or the monastery.  There we expiate the
+sin of sins.  A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in
+the soil, and trim and point him to grow, and she's an animal for her
+pains!  The secret of your malady is, you've not yet, though you're
+on a healthy leap for the practices of Nature, hopped to the primary
+conception of what Nature means.  Women are in and of Nature.  I've
+studied them here--had nothing to do but study them.  That most noble of
+ladies' whole mind was knotted to preserve her child during her time of
+endurance up to her moment of trial.  Think it over.  It's your one
+chance of keeping sane.
+
+And expect to hear flat stuff from me while you go on playing tyrant.'
+
+'You certainly take liberties,' Fleetwood's mildest voice remarked.
+
+'I told you I should try you, when you plucked me out of my Surrey nest.'
+
+Fleetwood, passed from a meditative look to a malicious half-laugh.
+'You seem to have studied the "most noble of ladies" latterly rather like
+a barrister with a brief for the defendant--plaintiff, if you like!'
+
+'As to that, I'll help you to an insight of a particular weakness of
+mine,' said Gower.  'I require to have persons of even the highest value
+presented to me on a stage, or else I don't grasp them at all--they 're
+simply pictures.  I saw the lady; admired, esteemed, sufficiently, I
+supposed, until her image appeared to me in the feelings of another.
+Then I saw fathoms.  No doubt, it was from feeling warmer.  I went
+through the blood of the other for my impression.'
+
+'Name the other,' said the earl, and his features were sharp.
+
+You can have the name,' Gower answered.  'It was the girl, Madge Winch.'
+
+Fleetwood's hard stare melted to surprise and contemptuous amusement.
+'You see the lady to be the "most noble of ladies" through the warming
+you get by passing into the feelings of Madge Winch?'
+
+Sarcasm was in the tone, and beneath it a thrill of compassionateness
+traversed him and shot a remorseful sting with the vision of those two
+young women on the coach at the scene of the fight.  He had sentience of
+their voices, nigh to hearing them.  The forlorn bride's hand given to
+the anxious girl behind her gushed an image of the sisterhood binding
+women under the pangs they suffer from men.  He craved a scourging that
+he might not be cursing himself; and he provoked it, for Gower was very
+sensitive to a cold breath on the weakness he had laid bare; and when
+Fleetwood said: 'You recommend a bath in the feelings of Madge Winch?'
+the retort came:--'It might stop you on the road to a cowl.'
+
+Fleetwood put on the mask of cogitation to cover a shudder, 'How?'
+
+'A question of the man or the monk with you, as I fancy I've told you
+more than once!'
+
+'You may fancy committing any impertinence and be not much out.'
+
+'The saving of you is that you digest it when you've stewed it down.'
+
+'You try me!'
+
+'I don't impose the connection.'
+
+'No, I take the blame for that.'
+
+They sat in dumbness, fidgeted, sprang to their feet, and lighted bedroom
+candles.
+
+Mounting the stairs, Gower was moved to let fall a benevolent look on the
+worried son of fortune.  'I warned you I should try you.  It ought to be
+done politely.  If I have to speak a truth I 'm boorish.  The divinely
+damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments.  It's about the same as
+pitching a handful of earth.'
+
+'You dirt your hands, hit or miss.  Out of this corridor!  Into my room,
+and spout your worst,' cried the earl.
+
+Gower entered his dressing-room and was bidden to smoke there.
+
+'You're a milder boor when you smoke.  That day down in Surrey with the
+grand old bootmaker was one of our days, Gower Woodseer!  There's no
+smell of the boor in him.  Perhaps his religion helps him, more than
+Nature-worship: not the best for manners.  You won't smoke your pipe?
+--a cigar?  Lay on, then, as hard as you like.'
+
+'You're asking for the debauchee's last luxury--not a correction,' said
+Gower, grimly thinking of how his whip might prove effective and punish
+the man who kept him fruitlessly out of his bed.
+
+'I want stuff for a place in the memory,' said Fleetwood; and the late
+hour, with the profitless talk, made it a stinging taunt.
+
+'You want me to flick your indecision.'
+
+'That's half a hit.'
+
+'I 'm to talk italics, for you to store a smart word or so.'
+
+'True, I swear!  And, please, begin.'
+
+'You hang for the Fates to settle which is to be smothered in you, the
+man or the lord--and it ends in the monk, if you hang much longer.'
+
+'A bit of a scorpion in his intention,' Fleetwood muttered on a stride.
+'I'll tell you this, Gower Woodseer; when you lay on in earnest, your
+diction is not so choice.  Do any of your remarks apply to Lady
+Fleetwood?'
+
+'All should.  I don't presume to allude to Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+'She has not charged you to complain?'
+
+' Lady Fleetwood is not the person to complain or condescend to speak of
+injuries.'
+
+'She insults me with her insane suspicion.'
+
+A swollen vein on the young nobleman's forehead went to confirm the idea
+at the Wythans' that he was capable of mischief.  They were right; he was
+as capable of villany as of nobility.  But he happened to be thanking
+Gower Woodseer's whip for the comfortable numbness he felt at Carinthia's
+behaviour, while detesting her for causing him to desire it and endure
+it, and exonerate his prosy castigator.
+
+He was ignorant of the revenge he had on Gower, whose diction had not
+been particularly estimable.  In the feebleness of a man vainly courting
+sleep, the disarmed philosopher tossed from one side to the other through
+the remaining hours of darkness, polishing sentences that were natural
+spouts of choicest diction; and still the earl's virulent small sneer
+rankled.  He understood why, after a time.  The fervour of advocacy,
+which inspires high diction, had been wanting.  He had sought more to
+lash the earl with his personal disgust and partly to parade his contempt
+of a lucrative dependency--than he had felt for the countess.  No wonder
+his diction was poor.  It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort of tongue
+of a Master Slender:--flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering its
+object: measured to be condemned by its poor achievement.  He had
+nevertheless a heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading for
+her, especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the sun-
+rays, from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.
+
+He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from
+his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans', in the
+front of an autumnal sunrise--grand where the country is shorn of surface
+decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human creature,
+whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER'S LESSONS
+
+Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could
+have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow's morning walk.  It
+concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an
+hour.  She might choose to come or choose to keep away.  The whims of
+animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers.
+Petty domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling
+singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners.  On the topic of wages,
+too, he was Gower's master, and could hold forth: by which he taught
+himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men,
+women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry,
+consequently, sheer nonsense.
+
+'I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,' he said.  'The
+countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases.  Drive with me to
+Cardiff--I miss you if you 're absent a week.  Or is it legs?  Drop me a
+line of your stages on the road, and don't loiter much.'
+
+Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey
+alone: and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and
+the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.
+
+'Yes,' the earl acquiesced jealously; 'we ought to have seen--tramped
+every foot of our own country.  That yacht of mine, there she is, and I
+said I would board her and have a fly with half a dozen fellows round the
+Scottish isles.  We're never free to do as we like.'
+
+'Legs are the only things that have a taste of freedom,' said Gower.
+
+They strolled down to Howell Edwards' office at nine, Kit Ines beside the
+luggage cart to the rear.
+
+Around the office and along to the street of the cottages crowds were
+chattering, gesticulating; Ines fancied the foreign jabberers inclined to
+threaten.  Howell Edwards at the door of his office watched them
+calculatingly.  The lord of their destinies passed in with him, leaving
+Gower to study the features of the men, and Ines to reckon the chance of
+a fray.
+
+Fleetwood came out presently, saying to Edwards:
+
+'That concession goes far enough.  Because I have a neighbour who yields
+at every step?  No, stick to the principle.  I've said my final word.
+And here's the carriage.  If the mines are closed, more's the pity: but
+I'm not responsible.  You can let them know if you like, before I drive
+off; it doesn't matter to me.'
+
+The carriage was ready.  Gower cast a glance up the hill.  Three female
+figures and a pannier-donkey were visible on the descent.  He nodded to
+Edwards, who took the words out of his mouth.  'Her ladyship, my lord.'
+
+She was distinctly seen, and looked formidable in definition against the
+cloud.  Madge and the nurse-maid Martha were the two other young women.
+On they came, and the, angry man seated in the carriage could not give
+the order to start.  Nor could he quite shape an idea of annoyance,
+though he hung to it and faced at Gower a battery of the promise to pay
+him for this.  Tattling observers were estimated at their small
+importance there, as everywhere, by one so high above them.  But the
+appearance of the woman of the burlesque name and burlesque actions, and
+odd ascension out of the ludicrous into a form to cast a spell, so that
+she commanded serious recollections of her, disturbed him.  He stepped
+from his carriage.  Again he had his incomprehensible fit of shyness;
+and a vision of the complacent, jowled, redundant, blue-coated monarch
+aswing in imbecile merriment on the signboard of the Royal Sovereign inn;
+constitutionally his total opposite, yet instigating the sensation.
+
+In that respect his countess and he had shifted characters.  Carinthia
+came on at her bold mountain stride to within hail of him.  Met by Gower,
+she talked, smiled, patted her donkey, clutched his ear, lifted a silken
+covering to show the child asleep; entirely at her ease and unhurried.
+These women get aid from their pride of maternity.  And when they can
+boast a parson behind them, they are indecorous up to insolent in their
+ostentation of it.
+
+She resumed her advance, with a slight abatement of her challengeing
+match, sedately; very collectedly erect; changed in the fulness of her
+figure and her poised calm bearing.
+
+He heard her voice addressing Gower: 'Yes, they do; we noticed the slate-
+roofs, looking down on them.  They do look like a council of rooks in the
+hollow; a parliament, you said.  They look exceedingly like, when a peep
+of sunshine falls.  Oh, no; not clergymen!'
+
+She laughed at the suggestion.
+
+She might be one of the actresses by nature.
+
+Is the man unsympathetic with women a hater of Nature deductively?  Most
+women are actresses.  As to worshipping Nature, we go back to the state
+of heathen beast, Mr. Philosopher Gower could be answered .  .  .  .
+
+Fleetwood drew in his argument.  She stood before him.  There was on
+his part an insular representation of old French court salute to the
+lady, and she replied to it in the exactest measure, as if an instructed
+proficient.
+
+She stood unshadowed.  'We have come to bid you adieu, my lord,' she
+said, and no trouble of the bosom shook her mellow tones.  Her face was
+not the chalk-quarry or the rosed rock; it was oddly individual, and,
+in a way, alluring, with some gentle contraction of her eyelids.  But
+evidently she stood in full repose, mistress of herself.
+
+Upon him, it appeared, the whole sensibility of the situation was to be
+thrown.  He hardened.
+
+'We have had to settle business here,' he said, speaking resonantly, to
+cover his gazing discomposedly, all but furtively.
+
+The child was shown, still asleep.  A cunning infant not a cry in him to
+excuse a father for preferring concord or silence or the bachelor's
+exemption.
+
+'He is a strong boy,' the mother said.  'Our doctor promises he will ride
+over all the illnesses.'
+
+Fleetwood's answer set off with an alarum of the throat, and dwindled to
+'We 'll hope so.  Seems to sleep well.'
+
+She had her rocky brows.  They were not barren crags, and her shape was
+Nature's ripeness, it was acknowledged: She stood like a lance in air-
+rather like an Amazon schooled by Athene, one might imagine.  Hues of
+some going or coming flush hinted the magical trick of her visage.  She
+spoke in modest manner, or it might be indifferently, without a flaunting
+of either.
+
+'I wish to consult you, my lord.  He is not baptized.  His Christian
+names?'
+
+'I have no choice.'
+
+'I should wish him to bear one of my brother's names.'
+
+'I have no knowledge of your brother's names.'
+
+'Chillon is one.'
+
+'Ah!  Is it, should you think, suitable to our climate?'
+
+'Another name of my brother's is John.'
+
+'Bull.'  The loutish derision passed her and rebounded on him.  'That
+would be quite at home.'
+
+'You will allow one of your own names, my lord?'
+
+'Oh, certainly, if you desire it, choose.  There are four names you will
+find in a book of the Peerage or Directory or so.  Up at the castle--or
+you might have written:--better than these questions on the public road.
+I don't demur.  Let it be as you like.'
+
+'I write empty letters to tell what I much want,' Carinthia said.
+
+'You have only to write your plain request.'
+
+'If, now I see you, I may speak another request, my lord.'
+
+'Pray,' he said, with courteous patience, and stepped forward down to the
+street of the miners' cottages.  She could there speak out-bawl the
+request, if it suited her to do so.
+
+On the point of speaking, she gazed round.
+
+'Perfectly safe!  no harm possible,' said he, fretful under the burden of
+this her maniacal maternal anxiety.
+
+'The men are all right, they would not hurt a child.  What can rationally
+be suspected!'
+
+'I know the men; they love their children,' she replied.  'I think my
+child would be precious to them.  Mr. Woodseer and Mr. Edwards and Madge
+are there.'
+
+'Is the one more request--I mean, a mother's anxiety does not run to the
+extent of suspecting everybody?'
+
+'Some of the children are very pretty,' said Carinthia, and eyed the
+bands of them at their games in the roadway and at the cottage doors.
+'Children of the poor have happy mothers.'
+
+Her eyes were homely, morning over her face.  They were open now to what
+that fellow Woodseer (who could speak to the point when he was not aiming
+at it) called the parlour, or social sitting-room; where we may have
+converse with the tame woman's mind, seeing the door to the clawing
+recesses temporarily shut.
+
+'Forgive me if I say you talk like the bigger child,' Fleetwood said
+lightly, not ungenially; for the features he looked on were museful,
+a picture in their one expression.
+
+Her answer chilled him.  'It is true, my lord.  I will not detain you.
+I would beg to be supplied with money.'
+
+He was like the leaves of a frosted plant, in his crisp curling inward:--
+he had been so genial.
+
+'You have come to say good-bye, that an opportunity to--as you put it--
+beg for money.  I am not sure of your having learnt yet the right
+disposal of money.'
+
+'I beg, my lord, to have two thousand pounds a year allowed me.'
+
+'Ten--and it's a task to spend the sum on a single household--shall be
+alloted to your expenditure at Esslemont;--stables, bills, et caetera.
+You can entertain.  My steward Leddings will undertake the management.
+You will not be troubled with payings.'
+
+Her head acknowledged the graciousness.--'I would have two thousand
+pounds and live where I please.'
+
+'Pardon me: the two, for a lady living where she pleases, exceeds the
+required amount.'
+
+'I will accept a smaller sum, my lord.'
+
+'Money!-it seems a singular demand when all supplies are furnished.'
+
+'I would have control of some money.'
+
+'You are thinking of charities.'
+
+'Not charities.'
+
+'Edwards here has a provision for the hospital needs of the people.  Mr.
+Woodseer applies to me in cases he can certify.  Leddings will do the
+same at Esslemont.'
+
+'I am glad, I am thankful.  The money I would have is for my own use.
+It is for me.'
+
+'Ah.  Scarcely that, I fancy.'
+
+The remark should have struck home.  He had a thirst for the sign of her
+confessing to it.  He looked.  Something like a petrifaction of her
+wildest face was shown.
+
+Carinthia's eyes were hard out on a scattered knot of children down the
+street.
+
+She gathered up her skirts.  Without a word to him, she ran, and running
+shouted to the little ones around and ahead: 'In! in! indoors, children!
+"Blant, i'r ty!"  Mothers, mothers, ho! get them in.  See the dog!  "Ci!
+Ci!"  In with them!  "Blant, i'r ty!  Vr ty!"'
+
+A big black mongrel appeared worrying at one of two petticoated urchins
+on the ground.
+
+She scurried her swiftest, with such warning Welsh as she had on the top
+of her mountain cry; and doors flew wide, there was a bang of doors when
+she darted by: first gust of terrible heavens that she seemed to the
+cottagers.
+
+Other shouts behind her rent the air, gathering to a roar, from the
+breasts of men and women.  'Mad dog about' had been for days the rumour,
+crossing the hills over the line of village, hamlet, farm, from Cardiff
+port.
+
+Dead hush succeeded the burst.  Men and women stood off.  The brute was
+at the lady.
+
+Her arms were straight above her head; her figure overhanging, on a bend
+of the knees.  Right and left, the fury of the slavering fangs shook her
+loose droop of gown; and a dull, prolonged growl, like the clamour of a
+far body of insurrectionary marching men, told of the rage.
+
+Fleetwood hovered helpless as a leaf on a bough.
+
+'Back--', I pray,' she said to him, and motioned it, her arms at high
+stretch.
+
+He held no weapon.  The sweat of his forehead half blinded him.  And she
+waved him behind her, beckoned to the crowd to keep wide way, used her
+lifted hands as flappers; she had all her wits.  There was not a wrinkle
+of a grimace.  Nothing but her locked lips betrayed her vision of
+imminent doom.  The shaking of her gown and the snarl in the undergrowl
+sounded insatiate.
+
+The brute dropped hold.  With a weariful jog of the head, it pursued its
+course at an awful even swinging pace: Death's own, Death's doer, his
+reaper,--he, the very Death of the Terrors.
+
+Carinthia's cry rang for clear way to be kept on either side, and that
+accursed went the path through a sharp-edged mob, as it poured pell-mell
+and shrank back, closing for the chase to rear of it.
+
+'Father taught me,' she said to the earl, not more discomposed than if
+she had taken a jump.
+
+'It's over!' he groaned, savagely white, and bellowed for guns, any
+weapons.  'Your father?  pray?' She was entreated to speak.
+
+'Yes, it must be shot; it will be merciful to kill it,' she said.  'They
+have carried the child indoors.  The others are safe.  Mr. Woodseer, run
+to my nurse-girl, Martha.  He goes,' she murmured, and resumed to the
+earl: 'Father told me women have a better chance than men with a biting
+dog.  He put me before him and drilled me.  He thought of everything.
+Usually the poor beast snaps--one angry bite, not more.  My dress teased
+it.'
+
+Fleetwood grinned civilly in his excitement; intending to yield patient
+hearing, to be interested by any mortal thing she might choose to say.
+
+She was advised by recollection to let her father rest.
+
+'No, dear girl, not hurt, no scratch,--only my gown torn,' she said to
+Madge; and Madge heaved and whimpered, and stooped to pin the frayed
+strips.  'Quite safe; you see it is easy for women to escape,
+Mr. Edwards.'
+
+Carinthia's voice hummed over the girl's head
+
+'Father made me practise it, in case.  He forethought.  Madge, you heard
+of this dog.  I told you how to act.  I was not feverish.  Our babe will
+not feel it.'
+
+She bade Madge open her hands.  'A scratch would kill.  Never mind the
+tearings; I will hold my dress.  Oh!  there is that one child bitten.
+Mr. Edwards, mount a man for the doctor.  I will go in to the child.
+He was bitten.  Lose not one minute, Mr. Edwards.  I see you go.'
+
+He bowed and hastened.
+
+The child's mother was red eyes at her door for ease of her heart to the
+lady.  Carinthia stepped into the room, where the little creature was
+fetching sobs after the spout of screams.
+
+'God in heaven! she can't be going to suck the bite?'  Fleetwood cried to
+Madge, whose answer was disquieting 'If it's to save life, my mistress
+won't stop at anything.'
+
+His heart sprang with a lighted comprehension of Gower Woodseer's
+meaning.  This girl's fervour opened portals to new views of her
+mistress, or opened eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE
+
+Pushing through a swarm into the cot, Fleetwood saw Carinthia on a knee
+beside a girl's lap, where the stripped child lay.  Its mother held a
+basin for the dabbing at raw red spots.
+
+A sting of pain touched the memory of its fright, and brought further
+screams, then the sobs.  Carinthia hummed a Styrian cradle-song as the
+wailing lulled.
+
+She glanced up; she said to the earl: 'The bite was deep; it was in the
+blood.  We may have time.  Get me an interpreter.  I must ask the mother.
+I know not many words.'
+
+'What now?' said he, at the looming of new vexations.
+
+'We have no choice.  Has a man gone?  Dr. Griffiths would hurry fast.
+An hour may be too late.  The poison travels: Father advised it:--Fifty
+years for one brave minute!  This child should be helped to live.'
+
+'We 'll do our best.  Why an interpreter?'
+
+'A poker in the fire.  The interpreter--whether the mother will bear to
+have it done.'
+
+'Burn, do you mean?'
+
+'It should be burnt.'
+
+'Not by you?'
+
+'Quick! Quick!'
+
+'But will you--could you?  No, I say!'
+
+'If there is no one else.'
+
+'You forget your own child.'
+
+'He is near the end of his mother.'
+
+'The doctor will soon arrive.'
+
+'The poison travels.  It cannot be overtaken unless we start nearly
+equal, father said.'
+
+'Work like that wants an experienced hand.'
+
+'A steady one.  I would not quake--not tremble.'
+
+'I cannot permit it.'
+
+'Mr. Wythan would know!--he would know!
+
+'Do you hear, Lady Fleetwood--the dog may not be mad!'
+
+'Signs!  He ran heavy, he foamed.'
+
+'Foam 's no sign.'
+
+'Go; order to me a speaker of English and Welsh.'
+
+The earl spun round, sensible of the novelty of his being commanded, and
+submitting; but no sooner had he turned than he fell into her view of the
+urgency, and he went, much like the boy we see at school, with a strong
+hand on his collar running him in.
+
+Madge entered, and said: 'Mr. Woodseer has seen baby and Martha and the
+donkey all safe.'
+
+'He is kind,' said Carinthia.  'Do we right to bathe the wound?  It seems
+right to wash it.  Little things that seem right may be exactly wrong
+after all, when we are ignorant.  I know burning the wound is right.'
+
+Madge asked: 'But, my lady, who is to do it?'
+
+'You would do it, dear, if I shrank,' her mistress replied.
+
+'Oh, my lady, I don't know, I can't say.  Burning a child!  And there's
+our baby.'
+
+'He has had me nearly his time.'
+
+'Oh, my dear lady!  Would the mother consent?'
+
+'My Madge!  I have so few of their words yet.  You would hold the child
+to save it from a dreadful end.'
+
+'God help me, my lady--I would, as long as I live I will .  .  .  .  Oh!
+poor infant, we do need our courage now.'
+
+Seeing that her mistress had not a tear or a tremor, the girl blinked and
+schooled her quailing heart, still under the wicked hope that the mother
+would not consent; in a wonderment at this lady, who was womanly, and who
+could hold the red iron at living flesh, to save the poor infant from a
+dreadful end.  Her flow of love to this dear lady felt the slicing of a
+cut; was half revulsion, half worship; uttermost worship in estrangement,
+with the further throbbing of her pulses.
+
+The cottage door was pushed open for Lord Fleetwood and Howell Edwards,
+whom his master had prepared to stand against immediate operations.  A
+mounted messenger had been despatched.  But it was true, the doctor might
+not be at home.  Assuming it to be a bite of rabies, minutes lost meant
+the terrible: Edwards bowed his head to that.  On the other hand, he
+foresaw the closest of personal reasons for hesitating to be in agreement
+with the lady wholly.  The countess was not so much a persuasive lady as
+she was, in her breath and gaze, a sweeping and a wafting power.  After
+a short argument, he had the sense of hanging like a bank detached to
+fatality of motion by the crack of a landslip, and that he would speedily
+be on his manhood to volunteer for the terrible work.
+
+He addressed the mother.  Her eyes whitened from their red at his first
+word of laying hot iron on the child: she ran out with the wild woman's
+howl to her neighbours.
+
+'Poor mother!' Carinthia sighed.  'It may last a year in the child's
+body, and one day he shudders at water.  Father saw a bitten man die.
+I could fear death with the thought of that poison in me.  I pray Dr.
+Griffiths may come.'
+
+Fleetwood shuffled a step.  'He will come, he will come.'
+
+The mother and some women now packed the room.
+
+A gabble arose between them and Edwards.  They fired sharp snatches of
+speech, and they darted looks at the lady and her lord.
+
+'They do not know!' said Carinthia.
+
+Gower brought her news that the dog had been killed; Martha and her
+precious burden were outside, a mob of men, too.  He was not alarmed; but
+she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women
+observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened.
+At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to
+the shrill vowels.
+
+Fleetwood's endurance broke short.  The packed small room, the caged-
+monkey lingo, the wailful child, and the past and apprehended debate upon
+the burning of flesh, composed an intolerable torture.  He said to
+Edwards: 'Go to the men; settle it with them.  We have to follow that man
+Wythan; no peace otherwise.  Tell the men the body of the dog must be
+secured for analysis.  Mad or not, it's the same.  These Welsh mothers
+and grandmothers won't allow cautery at any price.  Hark at them!'
+
+He turned to Carinthia: 'Your ladyship will let Mr. Edwards or Mr.
+Woodseer conduct you to the house where you are residing.  You don't know
+these excitable people.  I wish you to leave.'
+
+She replied softly: 'I stay for the doctor's coming.'
+
+'Impossible for me to wait, and I can't permit you to be here.'
+
+'It is life and death, and I must not be commanded.'
+
+'You may be proposing gratuitous agony.'
+
+'I would do it to my own child.'
+
+The earl attacked Gower: 'Add your voice to persuade Lady Fleetwood.'
+
+Gower said: 'What if I think with Lady Fleetwood?'
+
+'You would see her do it?'
+
+'Do it myself, if there was no one else'
+
+'This dog-all of you have gone mad,' the earl cried.
+
+'Griffiths may keep his head; it's the only chance.  Take my word, these
+Welshwomen just listen to them won't have it.  You 'll find yourself in a
+nest of Furies. It may be right to do, it's folly to propose it, madness
+to attempt it.  And I shall be bitten if I stop here a minute longer; I'm
+gone; I can neither command nor influence.  I should have thought Gower
+Woodseer would have kept his wits.'
+
+Fleetwood's look fell on Madge amid the group.  Gower's perception of her
+mistress through the girl's devotion to her moved him.  He took Madge by
+the hand, and the sensation came that it was the next thing to pressing
+his wife's.  'You're a loyal girl.  You have a mistress it 's an honour
+to serve.  You bind me.  By the way, Ines shall run down for a minute
+before I go.'
+
+'Let him stay where he is,'' Madge said, having bobbed her curtsey.
+
+'Oh, if he's not to get a welcome!' said the earl; and he could now fix a
+steadier look on his countess, who would have animated him with either a
+hostile face or a tender.  She had no expression of a feeling.  He bent
+to her formally.
+
+Carinthia's words were: 'Adieu, my lord.'
+
+'I have only to say, that Esslemont is ready to receive you,' he
+remarked, bowed more curtly, and walked out.  .  .
+
+Gower followed him.  They might as well have been silent, for any effect
+from what was uttered between them.  They spoke opinions held by each of
+them--adverse mainly; speaking for no other purpose than to hold their
+positions.
+
+'Oh, she has courage, no doubt; no one doubted it,' Fleetwood said, out
+of all relation to the foregoing.
+
+Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting in him.
+
+Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly
+indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the
+priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and
+withering in her allegiance.  He did allude to his personal sentiment.
+'One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute
+to our debts.'  But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present
+thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.
+
+'I pledged myself to that yacht,' said Fleetwood, by way of reply, 'or
+you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days!  I shall have
+you in mind.  Now turn back.  Do the best you can.'
+
+They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast
+of the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled,
+impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are
+mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights before
+vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.
+
+Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive
+smartly.  He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the
+having been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from
+these parts for him to regain his proper stature.  Had he misconducted
+himself at the moment of danger?  It is a ghastly thought, that the
+craven impulse may overcome us.  But no, he could reassure his repute for
+manliness.  He had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.
+
+At the same time, he had done less than the woman.
+
+Needed she to have gone so far?  Why precipitate herself into the jaws of
+the beast?
+
+Now she, proposes to burn the child's wound.  And she will do it if they
+let her.  One, sees her at the work,--pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the
+terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work.  All because her old
+father recommended it.  Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that
+is juster.  This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of
+duty.  She can be feminine, too,--there is one who knows.  She can be
+particularly distant, too.  If in timidity, she has a modest view of
+herself--or an enormous conception of the magi that married her.  Will
+she take the world's polish a little?
+
+Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will
+consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .
+
+But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort
+and pass it.  As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental
+creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and
+caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal
+and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of
+them, if it was not for their union.  She wrestled with him where the
+darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of
+the netherworld.  She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital
+heat, to bear unwithering beside her the test of light.  They flew, they
+chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the
+count of their deeds, compared them,--and name the one crushed!  It was
+the one weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own
+disgust, by his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the
+woman's frame would 'take polish a little.'
+
+Why should it be a contention between them?  For this reason: he was
+reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without
+respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced,
+he worshipped.  Therefore she had him at her feet.  At the feet of any
+woman, except for the trifling object!  But at the feet of 'It is my
+husband!'  That would be a reversal of things.
+
+Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of
+him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre's
+adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new
+morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the
+worshipper's posture?  Yes, and when Gower Woodseer's 'Malady of the
+Wealthy,' as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling
+world upon the favoured of Fortune's habits and tastes, promises to quit
+its fell clutch on him?
+
+Another voice in the young nobleman cried: Pooh, dolt and dupe!  and
+surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks
+of a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw.
+But it was not the ascendant' voice.  It growled underneath, much like
+the deadly beast at Carinthia's gown while she stood:--an image of her
+to dominate the princeliest of men.
+
+The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield
+other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his
+dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds
+only are the title.  Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not
+yet performed the deeds.
+
+Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed.  A man
+may outrun us; it is the fortune of war.  Eclipsed behind the skirts of a
+woman waving her upraised hands, with, 'Back, pray!'--no, that ignominy
+is too horribly abominable!  Be sure, the situation will certainly recur
+in some form; will constantly recur.  She will usurp the lead; she will
+play the man.
+
+Let matters go on as they are.  We know our personal worth.
+
+Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia
+had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of
+wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself.  He enjoyed repose; knowing
+it might be but a truce.  Matters might go on as they were.  Still, he
+wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont.  There she
+might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:--'the
+gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,'
+that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not
+exploring it.  Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive.  Fleetwood knew
+his large capacities; he had proved them and could again.  In case a
+certain half foreseen calamity should happen:--imagine it a fact, imagine
+him seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person!
+Why, then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character
+on her portion of understanding.  The battle for domination would then
+begin.
+
+Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young
+man's pride of being and his warmer feelings.  Had he been free of the
+dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the
+statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death
+that tore at her skirts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF
+FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
+
+A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of
+Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her,
+autocratically concealed her lord's impatience to have her there; and by
+the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked,
+as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find
+preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother's mind
+on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father's hatred,
+second to his hatred of the mother.  But the mother could defend herself,
+the child was prey.  the child of a detested wife was heir to his title
+and estates.  His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her
+innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his
+path.  His indifference to the child's Christian names pointed darkly
+over its future.
+
+The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her
+thoughts.  She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend
+Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her
+till breath was gone.  Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty
+of maltreating this woman of women.  'But when you do leave Wales,' he
+said, 'you shall be guarded up to your haven.'
+
+Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then.  She sent a short letter of
+reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was
+unable to leave Wales because of her friend's illness and her part as
+nurse.  Regrets were unmentioned.
+
+Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death.  Not cheerlessly, more and
+more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the
+drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for
+Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal
+wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
+he had wedded.  She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules
+and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-
+no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said;
+and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a
+promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes
+should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining
+one chance of happiness.  On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was
+verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the
+rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can
+find.  Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions
+when other people came under its light; she sketched them and their views
+in her brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous
+bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh.
+Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.
+
+Carinthia could not leave her.  Attendance upon this dying woman was a
+drinking at the springs of life.
+
+Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
+Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months old,
+--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had
+made provision.  Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
+conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.
+
+In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
+inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
+twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green
+coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of
+Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
+Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
+the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
+printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.
+of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on
+whispers.
+
+Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of
+Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
+could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give
+the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard.  London had intimations
+of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the
+interests of the national humour: which is the English way of exalting to
+criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore,
+ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an
+eccentric person, not devoid of merit.
+
+These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were
+furze-fires among the Welsh.  But where the latter heard Bardic strings
+inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their
+humorous conductor's baton for an outburst from the ribs or below.  And
+it was really funny to hear of Whitechapel's titled heroine roaming
+Taffyland at her old pranks.
+
+Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to
+the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a
+subject for steaks, that is no common feat.
+
+Her performances down mines were things of the underworld.  England
+clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for
+the picador's or matador's, before she seized the bull.  Wales adopted
+and was proud of her in any costume.  Welshmen North and South, united
+for the nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at
+the next Eisteddfod.  She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves
+and mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to
+clothe her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the
+dais; hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel
+Fluellen Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other.  A
+splendid scene; she might well insist to be present.
+
+There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious
+lord's capacity to stand.  Peremptory orders from England arrive,
+commanding her return.  She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to
+have the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod.  My lord's
+orders are imperatively repeated, and very blunt.  He will not have her
+'continue playing the fool down there.'  She holds her ground from August
+into February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process of
+her taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and
+Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of Owen
+Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her lord's
+responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine's person at
+the gates of Esslemont; ich dien  their trumpeted motto.
+
+Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion.
+But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique
+time.  There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about it for
+squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a glove or
+give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and tilt
+compliments with the Whitechapel Countess's green cavaliers, rally their
+sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of dignity,
+as exhibited by their 'haviour under something of a trial; and satisfy
+also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by (among other
+matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play upon the Saxon
+tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until their ready store
+of native pepper seasons it; which may require a corresponding English
+condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.
+
+Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen
+is declared to have not exceeded nine.  So much pretends to be historic,
+in opposition to the poetic version.  They would, we may be sure, have
+made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in
+precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of
+courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.
+Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,
+countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame's ballad authorities.
+She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may
+create in others an enjoyment of what has been called 'the Mackrell fry.'
+
+Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of
+feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied
+infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly
+antecedent steps.  The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in
+more than one of the ballads.  Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase;
+next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.
+
+The lady's lord is not a shining figure.  How can an undecided one be a
+dispenser of light?  Poetry could never allow him to say with her:
+
+                   'Where'er I go I make a name,
+                    And leave a song to follow.'
+
+Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power
+was his.  Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact)
+denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the
+position between the driven and the driver.  Poetry, however erratic,
+is less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History.
+The Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor
+the devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive
+matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.
+
+Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February
+morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of
+Fleetwood's intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose
+them to have gone at his bidding.  That they met the procession of the
+Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess's carriage, near the
+Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly
+acceptable.
+
+Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from
+the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from
+Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from
+Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine North-
+eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.
+
+Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman,
+clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood's livery, rode up
+to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the
+earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them.  England's
+hospitality was offered on a princely scale.  Cleverer fencing could not
+be.
+
+The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre
+meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious
+exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see powder-
+magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys.
+Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.
+
+Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic
+regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.
+
+Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of
+their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.
+
+Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for
+a word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently
+spacious meadow.  They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the
+channel of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim:  'His nob!'
+and all of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back,
+at the English party's cost.
+
+Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a
+common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it.  The
+Dame professes to believe that 'Carinthia Jane' had to intervene as
+peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont's dining-
+hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of
+veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us
+follow.  Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the
+point of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise
+from it.  Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English
+engaged, Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the
+fray.
+
+You may imagine!  says the Dame.  She cites the old butler at Esslemont,
+'as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative,
+Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the
+facts,'--and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh
+gentlemen and the English gentlemen, 'whatever their united number,'
+consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before
+they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five
+of the morning.
+
+Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, 'a much enfeebled old man,'
+retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best
+wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of
+elegiacal feelings.
+
+'They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,' she quotes him, after a
+minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black
+suit, pensioner though he had become.  He had grown, during the interval,
+to be more communicative as to particulars.  The wines were four.  Sherry
+led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne
+the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance
+for the enforced finish.  All these wines, except the sparkling, had
+their date of birth in the precedent century.  'They went like water.'
+
+Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial
+attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished.  They did not sit
+in blocks.  The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them.  Each
+English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm;
+both fell together.  The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the
+guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.
+All drank equally.  Often the voices were high, the talk was loud.  The
+gentlemen were too serious to sing.
+
+At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a
+'fracassy,' he said.  One of the foreign party--and they all spoke
+English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the
+English themselves--remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry, that
+'it had a Madeira flavour.'  He spoke it approvingly.  Thereupon Lord
+Simon Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him 'why Madeira had been
+supplied instead of Esslemont's renowned old Sherry?'  A second Welsh
+gentleman gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was
+Madeira.  But Lord Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a
+venerable Old Brown Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it.  Then
+another Welsh gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion, that
+the attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment.  At this,
+which smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the
+name of their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old
+Brown Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction.
+Chumley Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish
+blindfold at a single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old
+Brown or Pale.  'Single sip or smell!' Ambrose Mallard cried, either for
+himself or his comrade, Queeney could not say which.
+
+Of all Lord Fleetwood's following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the
+Dame informs us, Queeney's favourites, because they were so genial; and
+he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by 'poor
+young Mr. Mallard's melancholy end and Mr. Potts's grief!'
+
+The Welsh gentlemen, after paying their devoirs to the countess next
+morning, rode on in fresh health and spirits at mid-day to Barlings, the
+seat of Mr. Mason Fennell, a friend of Mr. Owain Wythan's.  They shouted,
+in an unseemly way, Queeney thought, at their breakfast-table, to hear
+that three of the English party, namely, Captain Abrane, Mr. Mallard, and
+Mr. Potts, had rung for tea and toast in bed.  Lord Simon Pitscrew, Lord
+Brailstone, and the rest of the English were sore about it; for it
+certainly wore a look of constitutional inferiority on the English side,
+which could boast of indubitably stouter muscles.  The frenzied spirits
+of the Welsh gentlemen, when riding off, let it be known what their
+opinion was.  Under the protection of the countess's presence, they were
+so cheery as to seem triumphantly ironical; they sent messages of
+condolence to the three in bed.
+
+With an undisguised reluctance, the countess, holding Mr. Owain Wythan's
+hand longer than was publicly decent, calling him by his Christian name,
+consented to their departure.  As they left, they defiled before her; the
+vow was uttered by each, that at the instant of her summons he would
+mount and devote himself to her service, individually or collectively.
+She waved her hand to them.  They ranged in line and saluted.  She kissed
+her hand.  Sweeping the cavaliers' obeisance, gallantest of bows, they
+rode away.
+
+A striking scene, Dame Gossip says; but raises a wind over the clipped
+adventure, and is for recounting what London believed about it.  Enough
+has been conceded for the stoppage of her intrusion; she is left in the
+likeness of a full-charged pistol capless to the clapping trigger.
+
+That which London believed, or affected to believe about it, would fill
+chapters.  There was during many months an impression of Lord Fleetwood's
+countess as of a tenacious, dread, prevailing young woman, both intrepid
+and astute, who had, by an exercise of various arts, legitimate in open
+war of husband and wife, gathered the pick of the Principality to storm
+and carry another of her husband's houses.  The certification that her
+cavaliers were Welsh gentlemen of wealth and position required a broader
+sneer at the Welsh than was warranted by later and more intimate
+acquaintance, if it could be made to redound to her discredit.  So,
+therefore, added to the national liking for a plucky woman, she gained
+the respect for power.  Whitechapel was round her like London's one
+street's length extension of smoky haze, reminder of the morning's fog
+under novel sunbeams.
+
+Simultaneously, strange to say, her connubial antagonist, far from being
+overshadowed, grew to be proportionately respected, and on the strength
+of his deserts, apart from his title and his wealth.  He defended
+himself, as he was bound to do, by welcoming the picked Welsh squires
+with hospitable embrace, providing ceremonies, receptions, and most
+comfortable arrangements for them, along the route.  But in thus gravely
+entering into the knightly burlesque of the procession, and assisting to
+swell the same, he not only drew the venom from it, he stood forth as
+England's deputed representative, equal to her invasive challengeing
+guests at all points, comic, tragic, or cordial.  He saw that it had to
+be treated as a national affair; and he parried the imputation which
+would have injured his country's name for courtly breeding, had they been
+ill-received, while he rescued his own good name from derision by joining
+the extravagance.
+
+He was well inspired.  It was popularly felt to be the supreme of clever-
+nay, noble-fencing.  Really noble, though the cleverness was conspicuous.
+A defensive stroke, protecting him against his fair one's violent charge
+of horse, warded off an implied attack upon Old England, in Old England's
+best-humoured easy manner.
+
+Supposing the earl to have acted otherwise, his countess would virtually
+have ridden over him, and wild Wales have cast a shadow on the chivalry
+of magisterial England.  He and his country stood to meet the issue
+together the moment the Countess of Fleetwood and her escort crossed the
+Welsh border; when it became a question between the hot-hearted, at their
+impetuous gallop, and the sedatively minded, in an unfortified camp of
+arm-chairs.  The earl's adroitness, averting a collision fatal or
+discomforting to both, disengaged him from an incumbent odium, of which,
+it need hardly be stated, neither the lady nor her attendant cavaliers
+had any notion at the hour of the assembly for the start for England on
+the bridge of Pont-y-pridd.  The hungry mother had the safety of her babe
+in thought.  The hotheaded Welshmen were sworn to guard their heroine.
+
+That is the case presented by the Dame's papers, when the incredible is
+excised.  She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding
+popular voracity with all her stores.  But the Old Buccaneer, no
+professed friend to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says:
+Deliver yourself by permit of your cheque on the 'Bank of Reason, and
+your account is increased instead of lessened.
+
+Our account with credulity, he would signify.
+
+The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting.  Romance, however, is
+not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it
+must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing
+indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency,
+which means her to-morrow's bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in
+the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as
+cruelly as it appals.  It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night
+for an entire generation.
+
+Surely the Countess of Fleetwood's drive from the Welsh borders to
+Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats
+of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of her
+progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing of surprises
+and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight, windings of a horn
+over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of the child, the
+pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of heroine
+performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry in a waste
+country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again: 'There's a
+farm I see for milk for him!' the Dame repeats, having begun with an
+admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not produced on
+authority.  The end in design is to win the ear by making a fuss, and
+roll event upon event for the braining of common intelligence, until her
+narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.
+
+Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.
+There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer
+breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as she
+clasped it or was in the room with it.  Walking behind the precious
+donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful
+name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she 'was not black to see, nor
+old.  No, she was very young.  But she did all the things that soldiers
+do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the
+Welsh land, and it had a raven's croak and a glow-worm's drapery and a
+goblin's origin.
+
+Something was hinted of her having agitated London once.  Somebody
+dropped word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge.  She
+stalked park and country at night.  Stories, one or two near the truth,
+were told of a restless and a very decided lady down these parts as well;
+and the earl her husband daren't come nigh in his dread of her, so that
+he runs as if to save his life out of every place she enters.  And he's
+not one to run for a trifle.  His pride is pretty well a match for
+princes and princesses.
+
+All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at
+Esslemont again while she's in occupation.  His managing gentleman comes
+down from him, and goes up from her; that's how they communicate.  One
+week she's quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.
+She 's the great lady entertaining then.  Yet they say it 's a fact, she
+has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar.  She 'll stock a
+cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she'll
+order the doctor in, and she'll call and see the right things done for
+illness.  'But no money; no one's to expect money of her.  The shots you
+hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always
+alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord
+Levellier's gunpowder out of his mill; and he's got no money either; not
+for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to
+blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account.  But he 's a known
+miser.  She's not that.  She's a pleasant-faced lady for the poor.  She
+has the voice poor people like.  It's only her enemy, maybe her husband,
+she can be terrible to.  She'd drive a hole through a robber stopping her
+on the road, as soon as look at him.
+
+This was Esslemont's atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very
+long after the establishment of his countess there.  She could lay hold
+of the English, too, it seemed.  Did she call any gentleman of the
+district by his Christian name?  Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing
+so in the case of one of the Welshmen.  Those Welshmen!  Apparently they
+are making a push for importance in the kingdom!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED
+
+Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately
+raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward:
+a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine
+off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his
+countenance and ostensibly his temper.  An idiot of a woman, incurable in
+her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done
+to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger
+blazing Tom Fool's show than any known or written romance gives word of!
+And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband's
+confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off
+and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole
+mind to ensure the child.  But what sheer animals these women are, if
+they take impressions in such a manner!  And Mr. Philosopher argues that
+the abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it 'the commonest
+insanity, and the deadliest,' and men are 'planted in the bog of their
+unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature
+makes the woman be.'  Oh, pish, sir!--as Meeson Corby had the habit of
+exclaiming when Abrane's 'fiddler' argues him into a corner.  The fellow
+can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:--'Men hating Nature
+are insane.  Women and Nature are close.  If it is rather general to hate
+Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.'
+That is the tune of the fiddler's fiddling.  As for him, something
+protects him.  He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard,
+Corby, St.  Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens.  He is now her master.
+Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she
+is 'not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding'?
+Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk
+up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat
+the frame, but cools the mind.  She stamped that idea on a thoughtful
+fellow.
+
+He's a Welshman.  They are all excitable,--have heads on hound's legs for
+a flying figure in front.  Still, they must have an object, definitely
+seen by them--definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will
+run in the poetic direction: and the woman to win them, win all classes
+of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary.  She is
+named Carinthia--suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession.  Or
+cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,--it sounds at home.
+
+She is a daughter of the mountains,--should never have left them.  She
+is also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer--no poor specimen of the fighting
+Englishman of his day.  According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old
+Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh
+mines into the family!  He would not be ashamed in spying through his
+nautical glass, up or down, at his daughter's doings.  She has not yet
+developed a taste for the mother's tricks:--the mother, said to have been
+a kindler.  That Countess of Cressett was a romantic little fly-away
+bird.  Both parents were brave: the daughter would inherit gallantry.
+She inherits a kind of thwarted beauty.  Or it needs the situation seen
+in Wales: her arms up and her unaffrighted eyes over the unappeasable
+growl.  She had then the beauty coming from the fathom depths, with the
+torch of Life in the jaws of Death to light her: beauty of the nether
+kingdom mounting to an upper place in the higher.  Her beauty recognized,
+the name of the man who married her is not Longears--not to himself,
+is the main point; nor will it be to the world when he shows that
+it is not so to himself.
+
+Suppose he went to her, would she be trying at domination?  The woman's
+pitch above woman's beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but
+so living as to take the stamp of permanence.  More than to say it was
+hers, it was she.  What a deadly peril brought into view was her
+character-soul, some call it: generally a thing rather distasteful in
+women, or chilling to the masculine temperament.  Here it attracts.
+Here, strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a
+splendid figure and a known softness.  By rights, she should have more
+understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to
+death in romances.  However, she is not a craven who compliments him by
+rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear.  But she
+would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement.  The bosom of
+these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard
+certain formal words, oaths to boot.  How speak them?
+
+His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for
+obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any
+temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority.  For there she
+is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled.  'It is my
+husband.'  The soul was in her voice when she said it.
+
+He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not endeared;
+was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless, imperfectly
+suited to our English clime.'  The tone of adorable utterances, however
+much desired, is never for repetition; nor is the cast of divine sweet
+looks; nor are the particular deeds-once pardonable, fitly pleaded.  A
+second scaling of her window--no, night's black hills girdle the scene
+with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of her clouds grimacing.  Even
+Fleetwood's devil, much addicted to cape and sword and ladder, the
+vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.
+
+For she had, by singular transformation since, and in spite of a deluging
+grotesque that was antecedently incredible, she had become a personage,
+counting her adherents; she could put half the world in motion on her
+side.  Yell those Welshmen to scorn, they were on a plane finding native
+ground with as large a body of these English.  His baser mind bowed to
+the fact.  Her aspect was entirely different; her attitude toward him as
+well: insomuch that he had to chain her to her original features by the
+conjuring of recollected phrases memorable for the vivid portraiture of
+her foregone simplicity and her devotion to 'my husband.'
+
+Yes, there she was at Essleinont, securely there, near him, to be seen
+any day; worth claiming, too; a combatant figure, provocative of the
+fight and the capture rather than repellent.  The respect enforced by
+her attitude awakened in him his inherited keen old relish for our
+intersexual strife and the indubitable victory of the stronger, with the
+prospect of slavish charms, fawning submission, marrowy spoil.  Or
+perhaps, preferably, a sullen submission, reluctant charms; far more
+marrowy.  Or who can say?--the creature is a rocket of the shot into the
+fiery garland of stars; she may personate any new marvel, be an
+unimagined terror, an overwhelming bewitchment: for she carries the
+unexpected in her bosom.  And does it look like such indubitable victory,
+when the man, the woman's husband, divided from her, toothsome to the
+sex, acknowledges within himself and lets the world know his utter
+dislike of other women's charms, to the degree that herbal anchorites
+positively could not be colder, could not be chaster: and he no forest
+bird, but having the garden of the variety of fairest flowers at nod and
+blush about him!  That was the truth.  Even Henrietta's beauty had the
+effect of a princess's birthday doll admired on show by a contemptuous
+boy.
+
+Wherefore, then, did the devil in him seek to pervert this loveliest of
+young women and feed on her humiliation for one flashing minute?  The
+taste had gone, the desire of the vengeance was extinct, personal
+gratification could not exist.  He spied into himself, and set it down to
+one among the many mysteries.
+
+Men uninstructed in analysis of motives arrive at this dangerous
+conclusion, which spares their pride and caresses their indolence, while
+it flatters the sense of internal vastness, and invites to headlong
+intoxication.  It allows them to think they are of such a compound, and
+must necessarily act in that manner.  They are not taught at the schools
+or by the books of the honoured places in the libraries, to examine and
+see the simplicity of these mysteries, which it would be here and there a
+saving grace for them to see; as the minstrel, dutifully inclining to the
+prosy in their behalf and morality's, should exhibit; he should arrest
+all the characters of his drama to spring it to vision and strike
+perchance the chord primarily if not continually moving them, that
+readers might learn the why and how of a germ of evil, its flourishing
+under rebuke, the persistency of it after the fell creative energy has
+expired and pleasure sunk to be a phlegmatic dislike, almost a loathing.
+
+This would here be done, but for signs of a barometric dead fall in Dame
+Gossip's chaps, already heavily pendent.  She would be off with us on one
+of her whirling cyclones or elemental mad waltzes, if a step were taken
+to the lecturing-desk.  We are so far in her hands that we have to keep
+her quiet.  She will not hear of the reasons and the change of reasons
+for one thing and the other.  Things were so: narrate them, and let
+readers do their reflections for themselves, she says, denouncing our
+conscientious method as the direct road downward to the dreadful modern
+appeal to the senses and assault on them for testimony to the veracity of
+everything described; to the extent that, at the mention of a vile smell,
+it shall be blown into the reader's nostrils, and corking-pins attack the
+comfortable seat of him simultaneously with a development of surprises.
+'Thither your conscientiousness leads.'
+
+It is not perfectly visible.  And she would gain information of the
+singular nature of the young of the male sex in listening to the wrangle
+between Lord Fleetwood and Gower Woodseer on the subject of pocket-money
+for the needs of the Countess Carinthia.  For it was a long and an angry
+one, and it brought out both of them, exposing, of course, the more
+complex creature the most.  They were near a rupture, so scathing was
+Gower's tone of irate professor to shirky scholar--or it might be put,
+German professor to English scuffleshoe.
+
+She is for the scene of 'Chillon John's' attempt to restore the
+respiration of his bank-book by wager; to wit, that he would walk a mile,
+run a mile, ride a mile, and jump ten hurdles, then score five rifle-
+shots at a three hundred yards' distant target within a count of minutes;
+twenty-five, she says; and vows it to have been one of the most exciting
+of scenes ever witnessed on green turf in the land of wagers; and that he
+was accomplishing it quite certainly when, at the first of the hurdles, a
+treacherous unfolding and waving of a white flag caused his horse to
+swerve and the loss of one minute, seven and twenty seconds, before he
+cleared the hurdles; after which, he had to fire his shots hurriedly, and
+the last counted blank, for being outside the circle of the stated time.
+
+So he was beaten.  But a terrific uproar over the field proclaimed the
+popular dissatisfaction.  Presently there was a cleavage of the mob, and
+behold a chase at the heels of the fellow to rival the very captain
+himself for fleetness.  He escaped, leaving his pole with the sheet
+nailed to it, by way of flag, in proof of foul play; or a proof, as the
+other side declared, of an innocently premature signalizing of the
+captain's victory.
+
+However that might be, he ran.  Seeing him spin his legs at a hound's
+pace, half a mile away, four countrymen attempted to stop him.  All four
+were laid on their backs in turn with stupefying celerity; and on rising
+to their feet, and for the remainder of their natural lives, they swore
+that no man but a Champion could have floored them so.  This again may
+have been due to the sturdy island pride of four good men knocked over by
+one.  We are unable to decide.  Wickedness there was, the Dame says; and
+she counsels the world to 'put and put together,' for, at any rate, 'a
+partial elucidation of a most mysterious incident.'  As to the wager-
+money, the umpires dissented; a famous quarrel, that does not concern us
+here, sprang out of the dispute; which was eventually, after great
+disturbance 'of the country, referred to three leading sportsmen in the
+metropolitan sphere, who pronounced the wager 'off,' being two to one.
+Hence arose the dissatisfied third party, and the letters of this
+minority to the newspapers, exciting, if not actually dividing, all
+England for several months.
+
+Now the month of December was the month of the Dame's mysterious
+incident.  From the date of January, as Madge Winch knew, Christopher
+Ines had ceased to be in the service of the Earl of Fleetwood.  At
+Esslemont Park gates, one winter afternoon of a North-east wind blowing
+'rum-shrub into men for a stand against rheumatics,' as he remarked,
+Ines met the girl by appointment, and informing her that he had money,
+and that Lord Fleetwood was 'a black nobleman,' he proposed immediate
+marriage.  The hymeneal invitation, wafted to her on the breath of rum-
+shrub, obtained no response from Madge until she had received evasive
+answers as to why the earl dismissed him, and whence the stock of money
+came.
+
+Lord Fleetwood, he repeated, was a black nobleman.  She brought him to
+say of his knowledge, that Lord Fleetwood hated, and had reason to hate,
+Captain Levellier.  'Shouldn't I hate the man took my sweetheart from me
+and popped me into the noose with his sister instead?'  Madge was now
+advised to be overcome by the smell of rum-shrub:--a mere fancy drink
+tossed off by heroes in their idle moments, before they settle down to
+the serious business of real drinking, Kit protested.  He simulated
+envious admiration of known heroes, who meant business, and scorned any
+of the weak stuff under brandy, and went at it till the bottles were the
+first to give in.  For why?  They had to stomach an injury from the world
+or their young woman, and half-way on they shoved that young person and
+all enemies aside, trampled 'em.  That was what Old O'Devy signified; and
+many's the man driven to his consolation by a cat of a girl, who's like
+the elements in their puffs and spits at a gallant ship, that rides the
+tighter and the tighter for all they can do to capsize.  'Tighter than
+ever I was tight I'll be to-night, if you can't behave.'
+
+They fell upon the smack of words.  Kit hitched and huffed away,
+threatening bottles.  Whatever he had done, it was to establish the
+petticoated hornet in the dignity of matron of a champion light-weight's
+wholesome retreat of a public-house.  A spell of his larkish hilarity was
+for the punishment of the girl devoted to his heroical performances,
+as he still considered her to be, though women are notoriously volatile,
+and her language was mounting a stage above the kitchen.
+
+Madge had little sorrow for him.  She was the girl of the fiery heart,
+not the large heart; she could never be devoted to more than one at a
+time, and her mistress had all her heart.  In relation to Kit, the
+thought of her having sacrificed her good name to him, flung her on her
+pride of chastity, without the reckoning of it as a merit.  It was the
+inward assurance of her independence: the young spinster's planting of
+the, standard of her proud secret knowledge of what she is, let it be a
+thing of worth or what you will, or the world think as it may.  That was
+her thought.
+
+Her feeling, the much livelier animation, was bitter grief, because her
+mistress, unlike herself, had been betrayed by her ignorance of the man
+into calling him husband.  Just some knowledge of the man!  The warning
+to the rescue might be there.  For nothing did the dear lady weep except
+for her brother's evil fortune.  The day when she had intelligence from
+Mrs. Levellier of her brother's defeat, she wept over the letter on her
+knees long hours.  'Me, my child, my brother!' she cried more than once.
+She had her suspicion of the earl then, and instantly, as her loving
+servant had.  The suspicion was now no dark light, but a clear day-beam
+to Madge.  She adopted Kit's word of Lord Fleetwood.  'A black nobleman
+he is! he is!'  Her mistress had written like a creature begging him for
+money.  He did not deign a reply.  To her!  When he had seen good proof
+she was the bravest woman on earth; and she rushed at death to save a
+child, a common child; as people say.  And who knows but she saved that
+husband of hers, too, from bites might have sent him out of the world
+barking, and all his wealth not able to stop him!
+
+They were in the month of March.  Her dear mistress had been begging my
+lord through Mr. Woodseer constantly of late for an allowance of money;
+on her knees to him, as it seemed; and Mr. Woodseer was expected at
+Esslemont.  Her mistress was looking for him eagerly.  Something her
+heart was in depended on it, and only her brother could be the object,
+for now she loved only him of these men; though a gentleman coming over
+from Barlings pretty often would pour mines of money into her lap for
+half a word.
+
+Carinthia had walked up to Croridge in the morning to meet her brother at
+Lekkatts.  Madge was left guardian of the child.  She liked a stroll any
+day round Esslemont Park, where her mistress was beginning to strike
+roots; as she soon did wherever she was planted, despite a tone of pity
+for artificial waters and gardeners' arts.  Madge respected them.  She
+knew nothing of the grandeur of wildness.  Her native English veneration
+for the smoothing hand of wealth led her to think Esslemont the home of
+all homes for a lady with her husband beside her.  And without him, too,
+if he were wafted over seas and away: if there would but come a wind to
+do that!
+
+The wild North-easter tore the budded beeches.  Master John Edward
+Russett lay in the cradling-basket drawn by his docile donkey, Martha and
+Madge to right and left of him; a speechless rustic, graduating in
+footman's livery, to rear.
+
+At slow march round by the wrinkled water, Madge saw the park gates flung
+wide.  A coach drove up the road along on the farther rim of the circle,
+direct for the house.  It stopped, the team turned leisurely and came at
+a smart pace toward the carriage-basket.  Lord Fleetwood was recognized.
+
+He alighted, bidding one of his grooms drive to stables.  Madge performed
+her reverence, aware that she did it in clumsy style; his presence had
+startled her instincts and set them travelling.
+
+'Coldish for the youngster,' he said.  'All well, Madge?'
+
+'Baby sleeps in the air, my lord,' she replied.  'My lady has gone to
+Croridge.'
+
+'Sharp air for a child, isn't it?'
+
+'My lady teaches him to breathe with his mouth shut, like her father
+taught her when she was little.  Our baby never catches colds.'
+
+Madge displayed the child's face.
+
+The father dropped a glance on it from the height of skies.
+
+'Croridge, you said?'
+
+'Her uncle, Lord Levellier's.'
+
+'You say, never catches cold?'
+
+'Not our baby, my lord.'
+
+Probably good management on the part of the mother.  But the wife's
+absence disappointed the husband strung to meet her, and an obtrusion of
+her practical motherhood blurred the prospect demanded by his present
+step.
+
+'When do you expect her to return, Madge?'
+
+'Before nightfall, my lord.'
+
+'She walks?'
+
+'Oh yes, my lady is fond of walking.'
+
+'I suppose she could defend herself?'
+
+'My lady walks with a good stick.'
+
+Fleetwood weighed the chances; beheld her figure attacked, Amazonian.
+
+'And tell me, my dear--Kit?'
+
+I don't see more of Kit Ines.'
+
+'What has the fellow done?'
+
+'I'd like him to let me know why he was dismissed.'
+
+'Ah.  He kept silent on that point.'
+
+'He let out enough.'
+
+'You've punished him, if he's to lose a bonny sweetheart, poor devil!
+Your sister Sally sends you messages?'
+
+'We're both of us grateful, my lord.'
+
+He lifted the thin veil from John Edward Russett's face with a loveless
+hand.
+
+'You remember the child bitten by a dog down in Wales.  I have word from
+my manager there.  Poor little wretch has died--died raving.'
+
+Madge's bosom went shivering up and sank.  'My lady was right.  She's not
+often wrong.'
+
+'She's looking well?' said the earl, impatient with her moral merits:--
+and this communication from Wales had been the decisive motive agent in
+hurrying him at last to Esslemont.  The next moment he heard coolly of
+the lady's looking well.  He wanted fervid eulogy of his wife's looks, if
+he was to hear any.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE
+
+The girl was counselled by the tremor of her instincts to forbear to
+speak of the minor circumstance, that her mistress had, besides a good
+stick, a good companion on the road to Croridge: and she rejoiced to
+think her mistress had him, because it seemed an intimation of justice
+returning upon earth.  She was combative, a born rebel against tyranny.
+She weighed the powers, she felt to the worth of the persons coming into
+her range of touch: she set her mistress and my lord fronting for a
+wrestle, and my lord's wealth went to thin vapour, and her mistress's
+character threw him.  More dimly, my lord and the Welsh gentleman were
+put to the trial: a tough one for these two men.  She did not proclaim
+the winner, but a momentary flutter of pity in the direction of Lord
+Fleetwood did as much.  She pitied him; for his presence at Esslemont
+betrayed an inclination; he was ignorant of his lady's character, of how
+firm she could be to defy him and all the world, in her gratitude to the
+gentleman she thought of as her true friend, smiled at for his open
+nature,--called by his Christian name.
+
+The idea of a piece of information stinging Lord Fleetwood, the desire to
+sting, so as to be an instrument of retribution (one of female human
+nature's ecstasies); and her, abstaining, that she, might not pain the
+lord who had been generous to her sister Sally, made the force in Madge's
+breast which urges to the gambling for the undeveloped, entitled
+prophecy.  She kept it low and felt it thrill.
+
+Lord Fleetwood, chatted; Madge had him wincing.  He might pull the cover
+off the child's face carelessly--he looked at the child.  His look at the
+child was a thought of the mother.  If he thought of the mother, he would
+be wanting to see her.  If he heard her call a gentleman by his Christian
+name, and heard the gentleman say 'Carinthia' my lord would begin to
+shiver at changes.  Women have to do unusual things when they would bring
+that outer set to human behaviour.  Perhaps my lord would mount the
+coach-box and whip his horses away, adieu forever.  His lady would not
+weep.  He might, perhaps, command her to keep her mouth shut from
+gentlemen's Christian names, all except his own.  His lady would not
+obey.  He had to learn something of changes that had come to others as
+well as to himself.  Ah, and then would he dare hint, as base men will?
+He may blow foul smoke on her, she will shine out of it.  He has to learn
+what she is, that is his lesson; and let him pray all night and work hard
+all day for it not to be too late.  Let him try to be a little like Mr.
+Woodseer, who worships the countess, and is hearty with the gentleman she
+treats as her best of friends.  There is the real nobleman.
+
+Fleetwood chatted on airily.  His instincts were duller than those of the
+black-browed girl, at whom he gazed for idle satisfaction of eye from
+time to time while she replied demurely and maintained her drama of, the
+featureless but well-distinguished actors within her bosom,--a round,
+plump bust, good wharfage and harbourage, he was thinking.  Excellent
+harbourage, supposing the arms out in pure good-will.  A girl to hold her
+voyager fast and safe!  Men of her class had really a capital choice in a
+girl like this.  Men of another class as well, possibly, for temporary
+anchorage out midchannel.  No?--possibly not.  Here and there a girl is a
+Tartar.  Ines talked of her as if she were a kind of religious edifice
+and a doubt were sacrilege.  She could impress the rascal: girls have
+their arts for reaching the holy end, and still they may have a welcome
+for a foreign ship.
+
+The earl said humorously: 'You will grant me permission to lunch at your
+mistress's table in her absence?'  And she said: 'My lord!'  And he
+resumed, to waken her interest with a personal question: 'You like our
+quiet country round Esslemont?'  She said: 'I do,' and gave him plain
+look for look.  Her eye was undefended: he went into it, finding neither
+shallow nor depth, simply the look, always the look; whereby he knew that
+no story of man was there, and not the shyest of remote responsive
+invitations from Nature's wakened and detected rogue.  The bed of an
+unmarried young woman's eye yields her secret of past and present to the
+intrepid diver, if he can get his plunge; he holds her for the tenth of a
+minute, that is the revealment.  Jewel or oyster-shell, it is ours.  She
+cannot withhold it, he knew right well.  This girl, then, was, he could
+believe, one of the rarely exampled innocent in knowledge.  He was
+practised to judge.
+
+Invitation or challenge or response from the handsomest he would have
+scorned just then.  His native devilry suffered a stir at sight of an
+innocent in knowledge and spotless after experiences.  By a sudden
+singular twist, rather unfairly, naturally, as it happened, he attributed
+it to an influence issuing from her mistress, to whom the girl was
+devoted, whom consequently she copied; might physically, and also
+morally, at a distance, resemble.
+
+'Well, you've been a faithful servant to your lady, my dear; I hope
+you'll be comfortable here,' he said.  'She likes the mountains.'
+
+'My lady would be quite contented if she could pass two months of the
+year in the mountains,' Madge answered.
+
+'Look at me.  They say people living together get a likeness to one
+another.  What's your opinion?  Upon my word, your eyebrows remind me,
+though they're not the colour--they have a bend!'
+
+'You've seen my lady in danger, my lord.'
+
+'Yes; well, there 's no one to resemble her there, she has her mark--kind
+of superhuman business.  We're none of us "fifty feet high, with
+phosphorus heads," as your friend Mr. Gower Woodseer says of the
+prodigiosities.  Lady Fleetwood is back--when?'
+
+'Before dark, she should be.'
+
+He ran up the steps to the house.
+
+At Lekkatts beneath Croridge a lean midday meal was being finished hard
+on the commencement by a silent company of three.  When eating is choking
+to the younger members of the repast, bread and cold mutton-bone serve
+the turn as conclusively as the Frenchman's buffet-dishes.  Carinthia's
+face of unshed tears dashed what small appetite Chillon had.  Lord
+Levellier plied his fork in his right hand ruminating, his back an arch
+across his plate.
+
+Riddles to the thwarted young, these old people will not consent to be
+read by sensations.  Carinthia watched his jaws at their work of eating
+under his victim's eye-knowing Chillon to be no longer an officer in the
+English service; knowing that her beloved had sold out for the mere money
+to pay debts and support his Henrietta; knowing, as he must know, that
+Chillon's act struck a knife to pierce his mother's breast through her
+coffin-boards!  This old man could eat, and he could withhold the means
+due to his dead sister's son.  Could he look on Chillon and not feel that
+the mother's heart was beating in her son's fortunes?  Half the money due
+to Chillon would have saved him from ruin.
+
+Lord Levellier laid his fork on the plate.  He munched his grievance with
+his bit of meat.  The nephew and niece here present feeding on him were
+not so considerate as the Welsh gentleman, a total stranger, who had
+walked up to Lekkatts with the Countess of Fleetwood, and expressed the
+preference to feed at an inn.  Relatives are cormorants.
+
+His fork on his plate released the couple.  Barely half a dozen words,
+before the sitting to that niggard restoration, had informed Carinthia of
+the step taken by her brother.  She beckoned him to follow her.
+
+'The worst is done now, Chillon.  I am silent.  Uncle is a rock.  You say
+we must not offend.  I have given him my whole mind.  Say where Riette is
+to live.'
+
+'Her headquarters will be here, at a furnished house.  She's, with her
+cousin, the Dowager.'
+
+'Yes.  She should be with me.'
+
+'She wants music.  She wants--poor girl!  let her have what comes to
+her.'
+
+Their thoughts beneath their speech were like fish darting under shadow
+of the traffic bridge.
+
+'She loves music,' said Carinthia; 'it is almost life to her, like fresh
+air to me.  Next month I am in London; Lady Arpington is kind.  She will
+give me as much of their polish as I can take.  I dare say I should feel
+the need of it if I were an enlightened person.'
+
+'For instance, did I hear "Owain," when your Welsh friend was leaving?'
+Chillon asked.
+
+'It was his dying wife's wish, brother.'
+
+'Keep to the rules, dear.'
+
+'They have been broken, Chillon.'
+
+'Mend them.'
+
+'That would be a step backward.'
+
+'"The right one for defence!"  father says.'
+
+'Father says, "The habit of the defensive paralyzes will."'
+
+'"Womanizes," he says, Carin.  You quote him falsely, to shield the sex.
+Quite right.  But my sister must not be tricky.  Keep to the rules.
+You're an exceptional woman, and it would be a good argument, if you were
+not in an exceptional position.'
+
+'Owain is the exceptional man, brother.'
+
+'My dear, after all, you have a husband.'
+
+'I have a brother, I have a friend, I have no--I am a man's wife and the
+mother of his child; I am free, or husband would mean dungeon.  Does my
+brother want an oath from me?  That I can give him.'
+
+'Conduct, yes; I couldn't doubt you,' said Chillon.  'But "the world's a
+flood at a dyke for women, and they must keep watch," you've read.'
+
+'But Owain is not our enemy,' said Carinthia, in her deeper tones,
+expressive of conviction, and not thereby assuring to hear.  'He is a man
+with men, a child with women.  His Rebecca could describe him; I laugh
+now at some of her sayings of him; I see her mouth, so tenderly comical
+over her big "simpleton," she called him, and loved him so.'
+
+The gentleman appeared on the waste land above the house.  His very loose
+black suit and a peculiar roll of his gait likened him to a mourning
+boatswain who was jolly.  In Lord Levellier's workshop his remarks were
+to the point.  Chillon's powders for guns and blasting interested him,
+and he proposed to ride over from Barlings to witness a test of them.
+
+'You are staying at Barlings?' Chillon said.
+
+'Yes; now Carinthia is at Esslemont,' he replied, astoundingly the
+simpleton.
+
+His conversation was practical and shrewd on the walk with Chillon
+and Carinthia down to Esslemont evidently he was a man well armed
+to encounter the world; social usages might be taught him.  Chillon
+gained a round view of the worthy simple fellow, unlikely to turn out
+impracticable, for he talked such good sense upon matters of business.
+
+Carinthia saw her brother tickled and interested.  A feather moved her.
+Full of tears though she was, her, heart lay open to the heavens and
+their kind, small, wholesome gifts.  Her happiness in the walk with her
+brother and her friend--the pair of them united by her companionship,
+both of them showing they counted her their comrade--was the nearest to
+the radiant day before she landed on an island, and imagined happiness
+grew here, and found it to be gilt thorns, loud mockery.  A shaving
+North-easter tore the scream from hedges and the roar from copses under a
+faceless breadth of sky, and she said, as they turned into Esslemont Park
+lane: 'We have had one of our old walks to-day, Chillon!'
+
+'You used to walk together long walks over in your own country,' said Mr.
+Wythan.
+
+'Yes, Owain, we did, and my brother never knew me tired.'
+
+'Never knew you confess to it,' said Chillon, as he swallowed the name on
+her lips.
+
+'Walking was flying over there, brother.'
+
+'Say once or twice in Wales, too,' Mr. Wythan begged of her.
+
+'Wales reminded.  Yes, ..Owain, I shall not forget Wales, Welsh people.
+Mr. Woodseer says they have the three-stringed harp in their breasts, and
+one string is always humming, whether you pull it or no.'
+
+'That 's love of country!  that 's their love of wild Wales, Carinthia.'
+
+There was a quiet interrogation in Chillon's turn of the head at this
+fervent simpleton.
+
+'I love them for that hum,' said she.  'It joins one in me.'
+
+'Call to them any day, they are up, ready to march!'
+
+'Oh, dear souls!' Carinthia said.
+
+Her breath drew in.
+
+The three were dumb.  They saw Lord Fleetwood standing in the park
+gateway.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER LORD
+
+The earl's easy grace of manner was a ceremonial mantle on him as he
+grasped the situation in a look.  He bent with deferential familiarity to
+his countess, exactly toning the degree of difference which befitted a
+salute to the two gentlemen, amiable or hostile.
+
+'There and back?' he said, and conveyed a compliment to Carinthia's
+pedestrian vigour in the wary smile which can be recalled for a snub.
+
+She replied: 'We have walked the distance, my lord.'
+
+Her smile was the braced one of an untired stepper.
+
+'A cold wind for you.'
+
+'We walked fast.'
+
+She compelled him to take her in the plural, though he addressed her
+separately, but her tones had their music.
+
+'Your brother, Captain Kirby-Levellier, I believe?'
+
+'My brother is not of the army now, my lord.'
+
+She waved her hand for Madge to conduct donkey and baby to the house.  He
+noticed.  He was unruffled.
+
+The form of amenity expected from her, in relation to her brother, was
+not exhibited.  She might perhaps be feeling herself awkward at
+introductions, and had to be excused.
+
+'I beg,' he said, and motioned to Chillon the way of welcome into the
+park, saw the fixed figure, and passed over the unspoken refusal, with a
+remark to Mr. Wythan: 'At Barlings, I presume?'
+
+'My tent is pitched there,' was the answer.
+
+'Good-bye, my brother,' said Carinthia.
+
+Chillon folded his arms round her.  'God bless you, dear love.  Let me
+see you soon.'  He murmured:
+
+'You can protect yourself.'
+
+'Fear nothing for me, dearest.'
+
+She kissed her brother's cheek.  The strain of her spread fingers on his
+shoulder signified no dread at her being left behind.
+
+Strangers observing their embrace would have vowed that the pair were
+brother and sister, and of a notable stock.
+
+'I will walk with you to Croridge again when you send word you are
+willing to go; and so, good-bye, Owain,' she said.
+
+She gave her hand; frankly she pressed the Welshman's, he not a whit
+behind her in frankness.
+
+Fleetwood had a skimming sense of a drop upon a funny, whirly world.  He
+kept from giddiness, though the whirl had lasted since he beheld the form
+of a wild forest girl, dancing, as it struck him now, over an abyss, on
+the plumed shoot of a stumpy tree.
+
+Ay, and she danced at the ducal schloss;--she mounted his coach like a
+witch of the Alps up crags;--she was beside him pelting to the vale under
+a leaden Southwester;--she sat solitary by the fireside in the room of
+the inn.
+
+Veil it.  He consented to the veil he could not lift.  He had not even
+power to try, and his heart thumped.
+
+London's Whitechapel Countess glided before him like a candle in the fog.
+
+He had accused her as the creature destroying Romance.  Was it gold in
+place of gilding, absolute upper human life that the ridiculous object at
+his heels over London proposed instead of delirious brilliancies, drunken
+gallops, poison-syrups,--puffs of a young man's vapours?
+
+There was Madge and the donkey basket-trap ahead on the road to the
+house, bearing proof of the veiled had-been: signification of a might-
+have-been.  Why not a possible might-be?  Still the might-be might be.
+Looking on this shaven earth and sky of March with the wrathful wind at
+work, we know that it is not the end: a day follows for the world.  But
+looking on those blown black funeral sprays, and the wrinkled chill
+waters, and the stare of the Esslemont house-windows, it has an
+appearance of the last lines of our written volume: dead Finis.  Not
+death; fouler, the man alive seeing himself stretched helpless for the
+altering of his deeds; a coffin carrying him; the fatal whiteheaded
+sacerdotal official intoning his aims on the march to front, the drear
+craped files of the liveried, salaried mourners over his failure,
+trooping at his heels.
+
+Frontward was the small lake's grey water, rearward an avenue of limes.
+
+But the man alive, if but an inch alive, can so take his life in his
+clutch, that he does alter, cleanse, recast his deeds:--it is known;
+priests proclaim it, philosophers admit it.
+
+Can he lay his clutch on another's life, and wring out the tears shed,
+the stains of the bruises, recollection of the wrongs?
+
+Contemplate the wounded creature as a woman.  Then, what sort of woman is
+she?  She was once under a fascination--ludicrously, painfully, intensely
+like a sort of tipsy poor puss, the trapped hare tossed to her serpent;
+and thoroughly reassured for a few caresses, quite at home, caged and at
+home; and all abloom with pretty ways, modest pranks, innocent fondlings.
+Gobbled, my dear!
+
+It is the doom of the innocents, a natural fate.  Smother the creature
+with kindness again, show we are a point in the scale above that old
+coiler snake--which broke no bones, bit not so very deep;--she will be,
+she ought to be, the woman she was.  That is, if she was then sincere,
+a dose of kindness should operate happily to restore the honeymoony
+fancies, hopes, trusts, dreams, all back, as before the honeymoon showed
+the silver crook and shadowy hag's back of a decaying crescent.  And true
+enough, the poor girl's young crescent of a honeymoon went down sickly-
+yellow rather early.  It can be renewed.  She really was at that time
+rather romantic.  She became absurd.  Romance is in her, nevertheless.
+She is a woman of mettle: she is probably expecting to be wooed.  One
+makes a hash of yesterday's left dish, but she may know no better.  'Add
+a pickle,' as Chummy Potts used to say.  The dish is rendered savoury by
+a slight expenditure of attentions, just a dab of intimated soft stuff.
+
+'Pleasant to see you established here, if you find the place agreeable,'
+he said.
+
+She was kissing her hand to her brother, all her eyes for him--or for the
+couple; and they were hidden by the park lodge before she replied: 'It is
+an admired, beautiful place.'
+
+'I came,' said he, 'to have your assurance that it suits you.'
+
+'I thank you, my lord.'
+
+'"My lord" would like a short rest, Carinthia.'
+
+She seemed placidly acquiescing.  'You have seen the boy?'
+
+'Twice to-day.  We were having a conversation just now.'
+
+'We think him very intelligent.'
+
+'Lady Arpington tells me you do the honours here excellently.'
+
+'She is good to me.'
+
+'Praises the mother's management of the young one.  John Edward: Edward
+for call-name.  Madge boasts his power for sleeping.'
+
+'He gives little trouble.'
+
+'And babes repay us!  We learn from small things.  Out of the mouth of
+babes wisdom?  Well, their habits show the wisdom of the mother.  A good
+mother!  There's no higher title.  A lady of my acquaintance bids fair to
+win it, they say.'
+
+Carinthia looked in simplicity, saw herself, and said 'If a mother may
+rear her boy till he must go to school, she is rewarded for all she
+does.'
+
+'Ah,' said he, nodding over her mania of the perpetual suspicion.
+'Leddings, Queeney, the servants here, run smoothly?'
+
+'They do: they are happy in serving.'
+
+'You see, we English are not such bad fellows when we're known.  The
+climate to-day, for example, is rather trying.'
+
+'I miss colours most in England,' said Carinthia.  'I like the winds.
+Now and then we have a day to remember.'
+
+'We 're to be "the artist of the day," Gower Woodseer says, and we get
+an attachment to the dreariest; we are to study "small variations of the
+commonplace"--dear me!  But he may be right.  The "sky of lead and
+scraped lead" over those lines, he points out; and it's not a bad trick
+for reconciling us to gloomy English weather.  You take lessons from
+him?'
+
+'I can always learn from him,' said Carinthia.
+
+Fleetwood depicted his plodding Gower at the tussle with account-books.
+She was earnest in sympathy; not awake to the comical; dull as the
+clouds, dull as the discourse.  Yet he throbbed for being near her
+took impression of her figure, the play of her features, the carriage of
+her body.
+
+He was shut from her eyes.  The clear brown eyes gave exchange of looks;
+less of admission than her honest maid's.
+
+Madge and the miracle infant awaited them on the terrace.  For so foreign
+did the mother make herself to him, that the appearance of the child,
+their own child, here between them, was next to miraculous; and the
+mother, who might well have been the most astonished, had transparently
+not an idea beyond the verified palpable lump of young life she lifted in
+her arms out of the arms of Madge, maternally at home with its presence
+on earth.
+
+Demonstrably a fine specimen, a promising youngster.  The father was
+allowed to inspect him.  This was his heir: a little fellow of smiles,
+features, puckered brows of inquiry; seeming a thing made already, and
+active on his own account.
+
+'Do people see likenesses?' he asked.
+
+'Some do,' said the mother.
+
+'You?'
+
+She was constrained to give answer.  'There is a likeness to my father, I
+have thought.'
+
+There's a dotage of idolatrous daughters, he could have retorted; and his
+gaze was a polite offer to humdrum reconcilement, if it pleased her.
+
+She sent the child up the steps.
+
+'Do you come in, my lord?'
+
+'The house is yours, my lady.'
+
+'I cannot feel it mine.'
+
+'You are the mistress to invite or exclude.'
+
+'I am ready to go in a few hours for a small income of money, for my
+child and me.'
+
+'--Our child.'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'It is our child.'
+
+'It is.'
+
+'Any sum you choose to name.  But where would you live?'
+
+'Near my brother I would live.'
+
+'Three thousand a year for pin-money, or more, are at your disposal.
+Stay here, I beg.  You have only to notify your wants.  And we'll talk
+familiarly now, as we're together.  Can I be of aid to your brother?
+Tell me, pray.  I am disposed in every way to subscribe to your wishes.
+Pray, speak, speak out.'
+
+So the earl said.  He had to force his familiar tone against the rebuke
+of her grandeur of stature; and he was for inducing her to deliver her
+mind, that the mountain girl's feebleness in speech might reinstate him.
+She rejoined unhesitatingly: 'My brother would not accept aid from you,
+my lord.  I will take no money more than for my needs.'
+
+'You spoke of certain sums down in Wales.'
+
+'I did then.'  Her voice was dead.
+
+'Ah!  You must be feeling the cold North-wind here.'
+
+'I do not.  You may feel the cold, my lord.  Will you enter the house?'
+
+' Do you invite me?'
+
+
+'The house is your own.'
+
+'Will the mistress of the house honour me so far?'
+
+'I am not the mistress of the house, my lord.'
+
+'You refuse, Carinthia?'
+
+'I would keep from using those words.  I have no right to refuse the
+entry of the house to you.'
+
+'If I come in?'
+
+'I guard my rooms.'
+
+She had been awake, then, to the thrusting and parrying behind masked
+language.
+
+'Good.  You are quite decided, I may suppose.'
+
+'I will leave them when I have a little money, or when I know of how I
+may earn some.'
+
+'The Countess of Fleetwood earning a little money?'
+
+'I can put aside your title, my lord.'
+
+'No, you can't put it aside while the man with the title lives, not even
+if you're running off in earnest, under a dozen Welsh names.  Why should
+you desire to do it?  The title entitles you to the command of half my
+possessions.  As to the house; don't be alarmed; you will not have to
+guard your rooms.  The extraordinary wild animal you--the impression may
+have been produced; I see, I see.  If I were in the house, I should not
+be rageing at your doors; and it is not my intention to enter the house.
+That is, not by right of ownership.  You have my word.'
+
+He bowed to her, and walked to the stables.
+
+She had the art of extracting his word from him.  The word given, she
+went off with it, disengaged mistress of Esslemont.  And she might have
+the place for residence, but a decent courtesy required that she should
+remain at the portico until he was out of sight.  She was the first out
+of sight, rather insolently.
+
+She returned him without comment the spell he had cast on her, and he
+was left to estimate the value of a dirited piece of metal not in the
+currency, stamped false coin.  An odd sense of impoverishment chilled
+him.  Chilly weather was afflicting the whole country, he was reminded,
+and he paced about hurriedly until his horses were in the shafts.  After
+all, his driving away would be much more expected of him than a stay at
+the house where the Whitechapel Countess resided, chill, dry, talking the
+language of early Exercises in English, suitable to her Welshmen.  Did
+she 'Owain' them every one?
+
+As he whipped along the drive and left that glassy stare of Esslemont
+behind him, there came a slap of a reflection:--here, on the box of this
+coach, the bride just bursting her sheath sat, and was like warm wax to
+take impressions.  She was like hard stone to retain them, pretty
+evidently.  Like women the world over, she thinks only of her side of the
+case.  Men disdain to plead theirs.  Now money is offered her, she
+declines it.  Formerly, she made it the principal subject of her
+conversation.
+
+Turn the mind to something brighter.  Fleetwood strung himself to do so,
+and became agitated by the question whether the bride sat to left or to
+right of him when the South-wester blew-a wind altogether preferable to
+the chill North-east.  Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder
+than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands.  Of course
+she sat to left of him.  In the line of the main road, he remembered a
+look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.
+
+She never had a wooing: she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the
+show of it.  How to begin?  But was she worth an effort?  Turn to
+something brighter.  Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says:
+his Roman Catholic recipe.  The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women
+into his religion, and purifies them by the process,--fancies he does.
+He gets them to wear an air.  Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature,
+with free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away
+from them, leering sheepishly.  No, Feltre's' rigid monastic system is
+the sole haven.  And what a world, where we have no safety except in
+renouncing it!  The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure
+their sex before they gain 'The Peace,' as Feltre says, impressively, if
+absurdly.  He will end a monk if he has the courage of his logic.  A
+queer spectacle--an English nobleman a shaven monk!
+
+Fleetwood shuddered.  We are twisted face about to discover our being
+saved by women from that horror--the joining the ranks of the nasal
+friars.  By what women?  Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a
+North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.
+
+He was hungry; he waxed furious with the woman who had flung him out upon
+the roads.  He was thirsty as well.  The brightest something to refresh
+his thoughts grew and glowed in the form of a shiny table, bearing tasty
+dishes, old wines; at an inn or anywhere.  But, out of London, an English
+inn to furnish the dishes and the wines for a civilized and self-
+respecting man is hard to seek, as difficult to find as a perfect
+skeleton of an extinct species.  The earl's breast howled derision of
+his pursuit when he drew up at the; sign of the Royal Sovereign, in the
+dusky hour, and handed himself desperately to Mrs. Rundles' mercy.
+
+He could not wait for a dinner, so his eating was cold meat.  Warned by a
+sip, that his drinking, if he drank, was to be an excursion in chemical
+acids, the virtues of an abstainer served for his consolation.  Tolerant
+of tobacco, although he did not smoke, he fronted the fire, envying Gower
+Woodseer the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs wafted him
+to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways with the
+swallow thoughts above him, down the Past, into the Future.  A pipe is
+pleasant dreams at command.  A pipe is the concrete form of philosophy.
+Why, then, a pipe is the alternative of a friar's frock for an escape
+from women.  But if one does not smoke!  .  .  .  Here and there a man is
+visibly in the eyes of all men cursed: let him be blest by Fortune; let
+him be handsome, healthy, wealthy, courted, he is cursed.
+
+Fleetwood lay that night beneath the roof of the Royal Sovereign.  Sleep
+is life's legitimate mate.  It will treat us at times as the faithless
+wife, who becomes a harrying beast, behaves to her lord.  He had no
+sleep.  Having put out his candle, an idea took hold of him, and he
+jumped up to light it again and verify the idea that this room .  .  .
+He left the bed and strode round it, going in the guise of an urgent
+somnambulist, or ghost bearing burden of an imperfectly remembered
+mission.  This was the room.
+
+Reason and cold together overcame his illogical scruples to lie down on
+that bed soliciting the sleep desired.  He lay and groaned, lay and
+rolled.  All night the Naval Monarch with the loose cheeks and jelly
+smile of the swinging sign-board creaked.  Flaws of the North-easter
+swung and banged him.  He creaked high, in complaint,--low, in some
+partial contentment.  There was piping of his boatswain, shrill piping
+--shrieks of the whistle.  How many nights had that most ill-fated of
+brides lain listening to the idiotic uproar!  It excused a touch of
+craziness.  But how many?  Not one, not two, ten, twenty:--count, count
+to the exact number of nights the unhappy girl must have heard those mad
+colloquies of the hurricane boatswain and the chirpy king.  By heaven!
+Whitechapel, after one night of it, beckons as a haven of grace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+A DIP INTO THE SPRING'S WATERS
+
+The night Lord Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia
+dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman.  Seated on his
+coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and
+saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of
+parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under his
+eye.  She had never been courted: she deserved a siege.  She was a
+daughter of the racy highlands.  And she, who could say to her husband,
+'I guard my rooms,' without sign of the stage-face of scorn or defiance
+or flinging of the glove, she would have to be captured by siege, it was
+clear.  She wore an aspect of the confident fortress, which neither
+challenges nor cries to treat, but commands respect.  How did she
+accomplish this miracle of commanding respect after such a string of
+somersaults before the London world?
+
+He had to drive North-westward: his word was pledged to one of his donkey
+Ixionides--Abrane, he recollected--to be a witness at some contemptible
+exhibition of the fellow's muscular skill: a match to punt against a
+Thames waterman: this time.  Odd how it should come about that the giving
+of his word forced him now to drive away from the woman once causing him
+to curse his luck as the prisoner of his word!  However, there was to be
+an end of it soon--a change; change as remarkable as Harry Monmouth's at
+the touching of his crown.  Though in these days, in our jog-trot Old
+England, half a step on the road to greatness is the utmost we can hop;
+and all England jeers at the man attempting it.  He caps himself with
+this or that one of their titles.  For it is not the popular thing among
+Englishmen.  Their hero, when they have done their fighting, is the
+wealthy patron of Sport.  What sort of creatures are his comrades?  But
+he cannot have comrades unless he is on the level of them.  Yet let him
+be never so high above them, they charge him and point him as a piece of
+cannon; assenting to the flatteries they puff into him, he is their
+engine.  'The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet, and the doing
+of the popular thing seed of no harvest,' Gower Woodseer says, moderately
+well, snuffing incense of his happy delivery.  Not to be the idol, to
+have an aim of our own, there lies the truer pride, if we intend respect
+of ourselves.
+
+The Mr. Pulpit young men have in them, until their habits have fretted
+him out, was directing Lord Fleetwood's meditations upon the errors of
+the general man, as a cover for lateral references to his hitherto
+erratic career: not much worse than a swerving from the right line,
+which now seemed the desirable road for him, and had previously seemed
+so stale, so repulsive.  He was, of course, only half-conscious of his
+pulpitizing; he fancied the serious vein of his thoughts attributable to
+a tumbled night.  Nevertheless, he had the question whether that woman--
+poor girl!--was influencing his thoughts.  For in a moment, the very word
+'respect' pitched him upon her character; to see it a character that
+emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won suffrages, won a
+reluctant husband's admiration, pricked him from distaste to what might
+really be taste for her companionship, or something more alarming to
+contemplate in the possibilities,--thirst for it.  He was driving away,
+and he longed to turn back.  He did respect her character: a character
+angular as her features were, and similarly harmonious, splendid in
+action.
+
+Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires.  He had
+to say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women.  Have they all the
+poetry?  Know them well, and where is it?
+
+The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry of woman.
+She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men acknowledge it;
+and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of beauty.  She has more
+of it than we have.  Then name it.
+
+Well, the flowers of the field are frail things.  Pluck one, and you have
+in your hand the frailest of things.  But reach through the charm of
+colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the
+flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than
+does that poetry of your little flower.  Lord Feltre, at the heels of St.
+Francis, agrees in that.
+
+Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet.  We do
+homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no
+longer courted, are the test of men.  When the embraced woman breathes
+respect into us, she wings a beast.  We have from her the poetry of the
+tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth
+by purest early bloom.  Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her
+character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young
+man's needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so
+fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot
+be for our nerving contentment.  She brings us to the union of body and
+soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven.  Secret of all human
+aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for
+the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected
+woman.
+
+Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this end;
+accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across the
+varied scenes.  Ridicule vanished.  Could it ever have existed?  If
+London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would
+laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.
+
+He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views,
+on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your
+sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled
+conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within
+him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested
+titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the
+excesses of their higher moods.  But, reflection telling him that he had
+done injury to Carinthia--had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young
+woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of
+misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.
+
+As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against
+our native prosiness.  Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically
+sincere?  Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering!  Extracts of
+poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a
+lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein.  Gower Woodseer would
+have any number handy to spout.  Or Felter:--your convinced and fervent
+Catholic has quotations of images and Latin hymns to his Madonna or one
+of his Catherines, by the dozen, to suit an enthusiastic fit of the
+worship of some fair woman, and elude the prosy in commending her.
+Feltre is enviable there.  As he says, it is natural to worship, and only
+the Catholics can prostrate themselves with dignity.  That is matter for
+thought.  Stir us to the depths, it will be found that we are poor soupy
+stuff.  For estimable language, and the preservation of self-respect in
+prostration, we want ritual, ceremonial elevation of the visible object
+for the soul's adoring through the eye.  So may we escape our foul or
+empty selves.
+
+Lord Feltre seemed to Fleetwood at the moment a more serviceable friend
+than Gower Woodseer preaching 'Nature'--an abstraction, not inspiring to
+the devout poetic or giving us the tongue above our native prosy.  He was
+raised and refreshed by recollected lines of a Gregorian chant he and
+Feltre had heard together under the roof of that Alpine monastery.
+
+The Dame collapses.  There is little doubt of her having the world to
+back her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a
+young man's intricacies or cavities.  Let her not forget the fact she has
+frequently impressed upon us, that he was 'the very wealthiest nobleman
+of his time,' instructive to touch inside as well as out.  He had his
+share of brains, too.  And also she should be mindful of an alteration of
+English taste likely of occurrence in the remote posterity she vows she
+is for addressing after she has exhausted our present hungry generation.
+The posterity signified will, it is calculable, it is next to certain,
+have studied a developed human nature so far as to know the composition
+of it a not unequal mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and that
+credible realism is to be produced solely by an involvement of those two
+elements.  Or else, she may be sure, her story once out of the mouth,
+goes off dead as the spirits of a vapour that has performed the stroke of
+energy.  She holds a surprising event in the history of 'the wealthiest
+nobleman of his time,' and she would launch it upon readers unprepared,
+with the reference to our mysterious and unfathomable nature for an
+explanation of the stunning crack on the skull.
+
+This may do now.  It will not do ten centuries hence.  For the English,
+too, are a changeable people in the sight of ulterior Time.
+
+One of the good pieces of work Lord Fleetwood could suppose he had
+performed was recalled to him near the turning to his mews by the
+handsome Piccadilly fruit-shop.  He jumped to the pavement, merely to
+gratify.  Sarah Winch with a word of Madge; and being emotional just
+then, he spoke of Lady Fleetwood's attachment to Madge; and he looked at
+Sarah straight, he dropped his voice: 'She said, you remember, you were
+sisters to her.'
+
+Sarah remembered that he had spoken of it before.  Two brilliant
+drops from the deepest of woman's ready well stood in her eyes.
+
+He carried the light of them away.  They were such pure jewels of tribute
+to the Carinthia now seen by him as worshipping souls of devotees offer
+to their Madonna for her most glorious adornment.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Be the woman and have the last word!
+Charity that supplied the place of justice was not thanked
+Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting
+Deeds only are the title
+Detested titles, invented by the English
+He did not vastly respect beautiful women
+Look backward only to correct an error of conduct in future
+Meditations upon the errors of the general man, as a cover
+Not to be the idol, to have an aim of our own
+Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism
+One idea is a bullet
+Quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding
+Religion is the one refuge from women
+Scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices
+The divinely damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments
+The embraced respected woman
+The habit of the defensive paralyzes will
+The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet
+Their sneer withers
+Tighter than ever I was tight I'll be to-night
+With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself
+You want me to flick your indecision
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+***************************************************************************
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Marriage, v4, by George Meredith
+************This file should be named gm92v10.txt or gm92v10.zip***********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gm92v11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gm92v10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+More information about this book is at the top of this file.
+
+We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+The most recent list of states, along with all methods for donations
+(including credit card donations and international donations), may be
+found online at https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Amazing Marriage, v4
+by George Meredith
+
diff --git a/old/4486.zip b/old/4486.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f12a574
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4486.zip