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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Entire Short Works of George Meredith
+by George Meredith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Short Works of George Meredith
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #4499]
+Last Updated: August 25, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT WORKS OF MEREDITH ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTIRE SHORT WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+   Farina
+   Case of General Ople
+   The Tale of Chloe
+   The House on the Beach
+   The Gentleman of Fifty
+   The Sentimentalists
+   Miscellaneous Prose
+
+
+
+
+
+FARINA
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE ROSE CLUB
+
+In those lusty ages when the Kaisers lifted high the golden goblet of
+Aachen, and drank, elbow upward, the green-eyed wine of old romance,
+there lived, a bow-shot from the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins
+and the Three Holy Kings, a prosperous Rhinelander, by name Gottlieb
+Groschen, or, as it was sometimes ennobled, Gottlieb von Groschen;
+than whom no wealthier merchant bartered for the glory of his ancient
+mother-city, nor more honoured burgess swallowed impartially red juice
+and white under the shadow of his own fig-tree.
+
+Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened
+in the roll of Gottlieb’s possessions; corn-acres below Cologne;
+basalt-quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the
+Romans to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He
+could have bought up every hawking crag, owner and all, from Hatto’s
+Tower to Rheineck. Lore-ley, combing her yellow locks against the
+night-cloud, beheld old Gottlieb’s rafts endlessly stealing on the
+moonlight through the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful
+host were the wives of his raftsmen widowed there by her watery music!
+
+This worthy citizen of Cologne held vasty manuscript letters of the
+Kaiser addressed to him:
+
+‘Dear Well-born son and Subject of mine, Gottlieb!’ and he was easy
+with the proudest princes of the Holy German Realm. For Gottlieb was
+a money-lender and an honest man in one body. He laid out for the
+plenteous harvests of usury, not pressing the seasons with too much
+rigour. ‘I sow my seed in winter,’ said he, ‘and hope to reap good
+profit in autumn; but if the crop be scanty, better let it lie and
+fatten the soil.’
+
+‘Old earth’s the wisest creditor,’ he would add; ‘she never squeezes the
+sun, but just takes what he can give her year by year, and so makes sure
+of good annual interest.’
+
+Therefore when people asked Gottlieb how he had risen to such a pinnacle
+of fortune, the old merchant screwed his eye into its wisest corner,
+and answered slyly, ‘Because I ‘ve always been a student of the heavenly
+bodies’; a communication which failed not to make the orbs and systems
+objects of ardent popular worship in Cologne, where the science was long
+since considered alchymic, and still may be.
+
+Seldom could the Kaiser go to war on Welschland without first taking
+earnest counsel of his Well-born son and Subject Gottlieb, and
+lightening his chests. Indeed the imperial pastime must have ceased, and
+the Kaiser had languished but for him. Cologne counted its illustrious
+citizen something more than man. The burghers doffed when he passed; and
+scampish leather-draggled urchins gazed after him with praeternatural
+respect on their hanging chins, as if a gold-mine of great girth had
+walked through the awe-struck game.
+
+But, for the young men of Cologne he had a higher claim to reverence as
+father of the fair Margarita, the White Rose of Germany; a noble maiden,
+peerless, and a jewel for princes.
+
+The devotion of these youths should give them a name in chivalry. In her
+honour, daily and nightly, they earned among themselves black bruises
+and paraded discoloured countenances, with the humble hope to find it
+pleasing in her sight. The tender fanatics went in bands up and down
+Rhineland, challenging wayfarers and the peasantry with staff and beaker
+to acknowledge the supremacy of their mistress. Whoso of them journeyed
+into foreign parts, wrote home boasting how many times his head had been
+broken on behalf of the fair Margarita; and if this happened very often,
+a spirit of envy was created, which compelled him, when he returned, to
+verify his prowess on no less than a score of his rivals. Not to possess
+a beauty-scar, as the wounds received in these endless combats were
+called, became the sign of inferiority, so that much voluntary maiming
+was conjectured to be going on; and to obviate this piece of treachery,
+minutes of fights were taken and attested, setting forth that a
+certain glorious cut or crack was honourably won in fair field; on what
+occasion; and from whom; every member of the White Rose Club keeping
+his particular scroll, and, on days of festival and holiday, wearing it
+haughtily in his helm. Strangers entering Cologne were astonished at
+the hideous appearance of the striplings, and thought they never
+had observed so ugly a race; but they were forced to admit the fine
+influence of beauty on commerce, seeing that the consumption of beer
+increased almost hourly. All Bavaria could not equal Cologne for
+quantity made away with.
+
+The chief members of the White Rose Club were Berthold Schmidt, the rich
+goldsmith’s son; Dietrich Schill, son of the imperial saddler; Heinrich
+Abt, Franz Endermann, and Ernst Geller, sons of chief burghers, each of
+whom carried a yard-long scroll in his cap, and was too disfigured
+in person for men to require an inspection of the document. They were
+dangerous youths to meet, for the oaths, ceremonies, and recantations
+they demanded from every wayfarer, under the rank of baron, were what
+few might satisfactorily perform, if lovers of woman other than the
+fair Margarita, or loyal husbands; and what none save trained heads and
+stomachs could withstand, however naturally manful. The captain of the
+Club was he who could drink most beer without intermediate sighing,
+and whose face reckoned the proudest number of slices and mixture of
+colours. The captaincy was most in dispute between Dietrich Schill and
+Berthold Schmidt, who, in the heat and constancy of contention, were
+gradually losing likeness to man. ‘Good coin,’ they gloried to reflect,
+‘needs no stamp.’
+
+One youth in Cologne held out against the standing tyranny, and chose to
+do beauty homage in his own fashion, and at his leisure. It was Farina,
+and oaths were registered against him over empty beer-barrels. An axiom
+of the White Rose Club laid it down that everybody must be enamoured of
+Margarita, and the conscience of the Club made them trebly suspicious
+of those who were not members. They had the consolation of knowing that
+Farina was poor, but then he was affirmed a student of Black Arts, and
+from such a one the worst might reasonably be feared. He might bewitch
+Margarita!
+
+Dietrich Schill was deputed by the Club to sound the White Rose herself
+on the subject of Farina, and one afternoon in the vintage season,
+when she sat under the hot vine-poles among maiden friends, eating ripe
+grapes, up sauntered Dietrich, smirking, cap in hand, with his scroll
+trailed behind him.
+
+‘Wilt thou?’ said Margarita, offering him a bunch.
+
+‘Unhappy villain that I am!’ replied Dietrich, gesticulating fox-like
+refusal; ‘if I but accept a favour, I break faith with the Club.’
+
+‘Break it to pleasure me,’ said Margarita, smiling wickedly.
+
+Dietrich gasped. He stood on tiptoe to see if any of the Club were by,
+and half-stretched out his hand. A mocking laugh caused him to draw
+it back as if stung. The grapes fell. Farina was at Margarita’s feet
+offering them in return.
+
+‘Wilt thou?’ said Margarita, with softer stress, and slight excess of
+bloom in her cheeks.
+
+Farina put the purple cluster to his breast, and clutched them hard on
+his heart, still kneeling.
+
+Margarita’s brow and bosom seemed to be reflections of the streaming
+crimson there. She shook her face to the sky, and affected laughter at
+the symbol. Her companions clapped hands. Farina’s eyes yearned to her
+once, and then he rose and joined in the pleasantry.
+
+Fury helped Dietrich to forget his awkwardness. He touched Farina on the
+shoulder with two fingers, and muttered huskily: ‘The Club never allow
+that.’
+
+Farina bowed, as to thank him deeply for the rules of the Club. ‘I
+am not a member, you know,’ said he, and strolled to a seat close by
+Margarita.
+
+Dietrich glared after him. As head of a Club he understood the use of
+symbols. He had lost a splendid opportunity, and Farina had seized it.
+Farina had robbed him.
+
+‘May I speak with Mistress Margarita?’ inquired the White Rose chief, in
+a ragged voice.
+
+‘Surely, Dietrich! do speak,’ said Margarita.
+
+‘Alone?’ he continued.
+
+‘Is that allowed by the Club?’ said one of the young girls, with a saucy
+glance.
+
+Dietrich deigned no reply, but awaited Margarita’s decision. She
+hesitated a second; then stood up her full height before him; faced him
+steadily, and beckoned him some steps up the vine-path. Dietrich bowed,
+and passing Farina, informed him that the Club would wring satisfaction
+out of him for the insult.
+
+Farina laughed, but answered, ‘Look, you of the Club! beer-swilling has
+improved your manners as much as fighting has beautified your faces. Go
+on; drink and fight! but remember that the Kaiser’s coming, and fellows
+with him who will not be bullied.’
+
+‘What mean you?’ cried Dietrich, lurching round on his enemy.
+
+‘Not so loud, friend,’ returned Farina. ‘Or do you wish to frighten the
+maidens? I mean this, that the Club had better give as little offence as
+possible, and keep their eyes as wide as they can, if they want to be of
+service to Mistress Margarita.’
+
+Dietrich turned off with a grunt.
+
+‘Now!’ said Margarita.
+
+She was tapping her foot. Dietrich grew unfaithful to the Club, and
+looked at her longer than his mission warranted. She was bright as the
+sunset gardens of the Golden Apples. The braids of her yellow hair were
+bound in wreaths, and on one side of her head a saffron crocus was
+stuck with the bell downward. Sweetness, song, and wit hung like dews of
+morning on her grape-stained lips. She wore a scarlet corset with bands
+of black velvet across her shoulders. The girlish gown was thin blue
+stuff, and fell short over her firm-set feet, neatly cased in white
+leather with buckles. There was witness in her limbs and the way
+she carried her neck of an amiable, but capable, dragon, ready, when
+aroused, to bristle up and guard the Golden Apples against all save the
+rightful claimant. Yet her nether lip and little white chin-ball had a
+dreamy droop; her frank blue eyes went straight into the speaker: the
+dragon slept. It was a dangerous charm. ‘For,’ says the minnesinger,
+‘what ornament more enchants us on a young beauty than the soft slumber
+of a strength never yet called forth, and that herself knows not of!
+It sings double things to the heart of knighthood; lures, and warns us;
+woos, and threatens. ‘Tis as nature, shining peace, yet the mother of
+storm.’
+
+‘There is no man,’ rapturously exclaims Heinrich von der Jungferweide,
+‘can resist the desire to win a sweet treasure before which lies a
+dragon sleeping. The very danger prattles promise.’
+
+But the dragon must really sleep, as with Margarita.
+
+‘A sham dragon, shamming sleep, has destroyed more virgins than all the
+heathen emperors,’ says old Hans Aepfelmann of Duesseldorf.
+
+Margarita’s foot was tapping quicker.
+
+‘Speak, Dietrich!’ she said.
+
+Dietrich declared to the Club that at this point he muttered, ‘We love
+you.’ Margarita was glad to believe he had not spoken of himself. He
+then informed her of the fears entertained by the Club, sworn to watch
+over and protect her, regarding Farina’s arts.
+
+‘And what fear you?’ said Margarita.
+
+‘We fear, sweet mistress, he may be in league with Sathanas,’ replied
+Dietrich.
+
+‘Truly, then,’ said Margarita, ‘of all the youths in Cologne he is the
+least like his confederate.’
+
+Dietrich gulped and winked, like a patient recovering wry-faced from an
+abhorred potion.
+
+‘We have warned you, Fraulein Groschen!’ he exclaimed. ‘It now becomes
+our duty to see that you are not snared.’
+
+Margarita reddened, and returned: ‘You are kind. But I am a Christian
+maiden and not a Pagan soldan, and I do not require a body of tawny
+guards at my heels.’
+
+Thereat she flung back to her companions, and began staining her pretty
+mouth with grapes anew.
+
+
+
+
+THE TAPESTRY WORD
+
+Fair maids will have their hero in history. Siegfried was Margarita’s
+chosen. She sang of Siegfried all over the house. ‘O the old days of
+Germany, when such a hero walked!’ she sang.
+
+‘And who wins Margarita,’ mused Farina, ‘happier than Siegfried, has in
+his arms Brunhild and Chrimhild together!’
+
+Crowning the young girl’s breast was a cameo, and the skill of some
+cunning artist out of Welschland had wrought on it the story of the
+Drachenfels. Her bosom heaved the battle up and down.
+
+This cameo was a north star to German manhood, but caused many chaste
+expressions of abhorrence from Aunt Lisbeth, Gottlieb’s unmarried
+sister, who seemed instinctively to take part with the Dragon. She was a
+frail-fashioned little lady, with a face betokening the perpetual smack
+of lemon, and who reigned in her brother’s household when the good wife
+was gone. Margarita’s robustness was beginning to alarm and shock Aunt
+Lisbeth’s sealed stock of virtue.
+
+‘She must be watched, such a madl as that,’ said Aunt Lisbeth. ‘Ursula!
+what limbs she has!’
+
+Margarita was watched; but the spy being neither foe nor friend, nothing
+was discovered against her. This did not satisfy Aunt Lisbeth, whose own
+suspicion was her best witness. She allowed that Margarita dissembled
+well.
+
+‘But,’ said she to her niece, ‘though it is good in a girl not to
+flaunt these naughtinesses in effrontery, I care for you too much not to
+say--Be what you seem, my little one!’
+
+‘And that am I!’ exclaimed Margarita, starting up and towering.
+
+‘Right good, my niece,’ Lisbeth squealed; ‘but now Frau Groschen lies in
+God’s acre, you owe your duty to me, mind! Did you confess last week?’
+
+‘From beginning to end,’ replied Margarita.
+
+Aunt Lisbeth fixed pious reproach on Margarita’s cameo.
+
+‘And still you wear that thing?’
+
+‘Why not?’ said Margarita.
+
+‘Girl! who would bid you set it in such a place save Satan? Oh, thou
+poor lost child! that the eyes of the idle youths may be drawn there!
+and thou become his snare to others, Margarita! What was that Welsh
+wandering juggler but the foul fiend himself, mayhap, thou maiden of
+sin! They say he has been seen in Cologne lately. He was swarthy as
+Satan and limped of one leg. Good Master in heaven, protect us! it was
+Satan himself I could swear!’
+
+Aunt Lisbeth crossed brow and breast.
+
+Margarita had commenced fingering the cameo, as if to tear it away; but
+Aunt Lisbeth’s finish made her laugh outright.
+
+‘Where I see no harm, aunty, I shall think the good God is,’ she
+answered; ‘and where I see there’s harm, I shall think Satan lurks.’
+
+A simper of sour despair passed over Aunt Lisbeth. She sighed, and was
+silent, being one of those very weak reeds who are easily vanquished and
+never overcome.
+
+‘Let us go on with the Tapestry, child,’ said she.
+
+Now, Margarita was ambitious of completing a certain Tapestry for
+presentation to Kaiser Heinrich on his entry into Cologne after his
+last campaign on the turbaned Danube. The subject was again her beloved
+Siegfried slaying the Dragon on Drachenfels. Whenever Aunt Lisbeth
+indulged in any bitter virginity, and was overmatched by Margarita’s
+frank maidenhood, she hung out this tapestry as a flag of truce. They
+were working it in bits, not having contrivances to do it in a piece.
+Margarita took Siegfried and Aunt Lisbeth the Dragon. They shared the
+crag between them. A roguish gleam of the Rhine toward Nonnenwerth could
+be already made out, Roland’s Corner hanging like a sentinel across the
+chanting island, as one top-heavy with long watch.
+
+Aunt Lisbeth was a great proficient in the art, and had taught
+Margarita. The little lady learnt it, with many other gruesome matters,
+in the Palatine of Bohemia’s family. She usually talked of the spectres
+of Hollenbogenblitz Castle in the passing of the threads. Those were
+dismal spectres in Bohemia, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath
+of midnight. They uttered noises that wintered the blood, and revealed
+sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff!
+
+Margarita placed herself on a settle by the low-arched window, and Aunt
+Lisbeth sat facing her. An evening sun blazoned the buttresses of the
+Cathedral, and shadowed the workframes of the peaceful couple to a
+temperate light. Margarita unrolled a sampler sheathed with twists of
+divers coloured threads, and was soon busy silver-threading Siegfried’s
+helm and horns.
+
+‘I told you of the steward, poor Kraut, did I not, child?’ inquired Aunt
+Lisbeth, quietly clearing her throat.
+
+‘Many times!’ said Margarita, and went on humming over her knee
+
+             ‘Her love was a Baron,
+              A Baron so bold;
+             She loved him for love,
+              He loved her for gold.’
+
+‘He must see for himself, and be satisfied,’ continued Aunt Lisbeth;
+‘and Holy Thomas to warn him for an example! Poor Kraut!’
+
+‘Poor Kraut!’ echoed Margarita.
+
+       ‘The King loved wine, and the Knight loved wine,
+         And they loved the summer weather:
+        They might have loved each other well,
+         But for one they loved together.’
+
+‘You may say, poor Kraut, child!’ said Aunt Lisbeth. ‘Well! his face was
+before that as red as this dragon’s jaw, and ever after he went about as
+white as a pullet’s egg. That was something wonderful!’ ‘That was it!’
+chimed Margarita.
+
+          ‘O the King he loved his lawful wife,
+            The Knight a lawless lady:
+          And ten on one-made ringing strife,
+            Beneath the forest shady.’
+
+‘Fifty to one, child!’ said Aunt Lisbeth: ‘You forget the story. They
+made Kraut sit with them at the jabbering feast, the only mortal there.
+The walls were full of eye-sockets without eyes, but phosphorus instead,
+burning blue and damp.’
+
+‘Not to-night, aunty dear! It frightens me so,’ pleaded Margarita, for
+she saw the dolor coming.
+
+‘Night! when it’s broad mid-day, thou timid one! Good heaven take pity
+on such as thou! The dish was seven feet in length by four broad.
+Kraut measured it with his eye, and never forgot it. Not he! When the
+dish-cover was lifted, there he saw himself lying, boiled!
+
+“‘I did not feel uncomfortable then,” Kraut told us. “It seemed
+natural.”
+
+‘His face, as it lay there, he says, was quite calm, only a little
+wrinkled, and piggish-looking-like. There was the mole on his chin, and
+the pucker under his left eyelid. Well! the Baron carved. All the guests
+were greedy for a piece of him. Some cried out for breast; some for
+toes. It was shuddering cold to sit and hear that! The Baroness said,
+“Cheek!”’
+
+‘Ah!’ shrieked Margarita, ‘that can I not bear! I will not hear it,
+aunt; I will not!’
+
+‘Cheek!’ Aunt Lisbeth reiterated, nodding to the floor.
+
+Margarita put her fingers to her ears.
+
+‘Still, Kraut says, even then he felt nothing odd. Of course he was
+horrified to be sitting with spectres as you and I should be; but the
+first tremble of it was over. He had plunged into the bath of horrors,
+and there he was. I ‘ve heard that you must pronounce the names of the
+Virgin and Trinity, sprinkling water round you all the while for three
+minutes; and if you do this without interruption, everything shall
+disappear. So they say. “Oh! dear heaven of mercy!” says Kraut, “what I
+felt when the Baron laid his long hunting-knife across my left cheek!”’
+
+Here Aunt Lisbeth lifted her eyes to dote upon Margarita’s fright. She
+was very displeased to find her niece, with elbows on the window-sill
+and hands round her head, quietly gazing into the street.
+
+She said severely, ‘Where did you learn that song you were last singing,
+Margarita? Speak, thou girl!’
+
+Margarita laughed.
+
+       ‘The thrush, and the lark, and the blackbird,
+         They taught me how to sing:
+        And O that the hawk would lend his eye,
+         And the eagle lend his wing.’
+
+‘I will not hear these shameless songs,’ exclaimed Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+       ‘For I would view the lands they view,
+         And be where they have been:
+        It is not enough to be singing
+         For ever in dells unseen!’
+
+A voice was heard applauding her. ‘Good! right good! Carol again,
+Gretelchen! my birdie!’
+
+Margarita turned, and beheld her father in the doorway. She tripped
+toward him, and heartily gave him their kiss of meeting. Gottlieb
+glanced at the helm of Siegfried.
+
+‘Guessed the work was going well; you sing so lightsomely to-day, Grete!
+Very pretty! And that’s Drachenfels? Bones of the Virgins! what a
+bold fellow was Siegfried, and a lucky, to have the neatest lass in
+Deutschland in love with him. Well, we must marry her to Siegfried after
+all, I believe! Aha? or somebody as good as Siegfried. So chirrup on, my
+darling!’
+
+‘Aunt Lisbeth does not approve of my songs,’ replied Margarita,
+untwisting some silver threads.
+
+‘Do thy father’s command, girl!’ said Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+          ‘And doing his command,
+            Should I do a thing of ill,
+          I’d rather die to his lovely face,
+            Than wanton at his will.’
+
+‘There--there,’ said Aunt Lisbeth, straining out her fingers; ‘you
+see, Gottlieb, what over-indulgence brings her to. Not another girl in
+blessed Rhineland, and Bohemia to boot, dared say such words!--than--I
+can’t repeat them!--don’t ask me!--She’s becoming a Frankish girl!’
+
+‘What ballad’s that?’ said Gottlieb, smiling.
+
+‘The Ballad of Holy Ottilia; and her lover was sold to darkness. And she
+loved him--loved him----’
+
+‘As you love Siegfried, you little one?’
+
+‘More, my father; for she saw Winkried, and I never saw Siegfried. Ah!
+if I had seen Siegfried! Never mind. She loved him; but she loved Virtue
+more. And Virtue is the child of God, and the good God forgave her for
+loving Winkried, the Devil’s son, because she loved Virtue more, and
+He rescued her as she was being dragged down--down--down, and was half
+fainting with the smell of brimstone--rescued her and had her carried
+into His Glory, head and feet, on the wings of angels, before all men,
+as a hope to little maidens.
+
+          ‘And when I thought that I was lost
+            I found that I was saved,
+          And I was borne through blessed clouds,
+            Where the banners of bliss were waved.’
+
+‘And so you think you, too, may fall in, love with Devils’ sons, girl?’
+was Aunt Lisbeth’s comment.
+
+‘Do look at Lisbeth’s Dragon, little Heart! it’s so like!’ said
+Margarita to her father.
+
+Old Gottlieb twitted his hose, and chuckled.
+
+‘She’s my girl! that may be seen,’ said he, patting her, and wheezed up
+from his chair to waddle across to the Dragon. But Aunt Lisbeth tartly
+turned the Dragon to the wall.
+
+‘It is not yet finished, Gottlieb, and must not be looked at,’ she
+interposed. ‘I will call for wood, and see to a fire: these evenings of
+Spring wax cold’: and away whimpered Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+Margarita sang:
+
+          ‘I with my playmates,
+            In riot and disorder,
+          Were gathering herb and blossom
+            Along the forest border.’
+
+‘Thy mother’s song, child of my heart!’ said Gottlieb; ‘but vex not good
+Lisbeth: she loves thee!’
+
+          ‘And do you think she loves me?
+            And will you say ‘tis true?
+          O, and will she have me,
+            When I come up to woo?’
+
+‘Thou leaping doe! thou chattering pie!’ said Gottlieb.
+
+          ‘She shall have ribbons and trinkets,
+            And shine like a morn of May,
+          When we are off to the little hill-church,
+            Our flowery bridal way.’
+
+‘That she shall; and something more!’ cried Gottlieb. ‘But, hark thee,
+Gretelchen; the Kaiser will be here in three days. Thou dear one! had
+I not stored and hoarded all for thee, I should now have my feet on a
+hearthstone where even he might warm his boot. So get thy best dresses
+and jewels in order, and look thyself; proud as any in the land. A
+simple burgher’s daughter now, Grete; but so shalt thou not end, my
+butterfly, or there’s neither worth nor wit in Gottlieb Groschen!’
+
+‘Three days!’ Margarita exclaimed; ‘and the helm not finished, and the
+tapestry-pieces not sewed and joined, and the water not shaded off.--Oh!
+I must work night and day.’
+
+‘Child! I’ll have no working at night! Your rosy cheeks will soon be
+sucked out by oil-light, and you look no better than poor tallow Court
+beauties--to say nothing of the danger. This old house saw Charles the
+Great embracing the chief magistrate of his liege city yonder. Some
+swear he slept in it. He did not sneeze at smaller chambers than our
+Kaisers abide. No gold ceilings with cornice carvings, but plain wooden
+beams.’
+
+          ‘Know that the men of great renown,
+            Were men of simple needs:
+          Bare to the Lord they laid them down,
+            And slept on mighty deeds.’
+
+‘God wot, there’s no emptying thy store of ballads, Grete: so much shall
+be said of thee. Yes; times are changeing: We’re growing degenerate.
+Look at the men of Linz now to what they were! Would they have let the
+lads of Andernach float down cabbage-stalks to them without a shy back?
+And why? All because they funk that brigand-beast Werner, who gets
+redemption from Laach, hard by his hold, whenever he commits a crime
+worth paying for. As for me, my timber and stuffs must come down
+stream, and are too good for the nixen under Rhine, or think you I would
+acknowledge him with a toll, the hell-dog? Thunder and lightning! if old
+scores could be rubbed out on his hide!’
+
+Gottlieb whirled a thong-lashing arm in air, and groaned of law and
+justice. What were they coming to!
+
+Margarita softened the theme with a verse:
+
+          ‘And tho’ to sting his enemy,
+          Is sweetness to the angry bee,
+          The angry bee must busy be,
+          Ere sweet of sweetness hiveth he.
+
+The arch thrill of his daughter’s voice tickled Gottlieb. ‘That’s it,
+birdie! You and the proverb are right. I don’t know which is best,
+
+            ‘Better hive
+             And keep alive
+             Than vengeance wake
+             With that you take.’
+
+A clatter in the cathedral square brought Gottlieb on his legs to the
+window. It was a company of horsemen sparkling in harness. One trumpeter
+rode at the side of the troop, and in front a standard-bearer, matted
+down the chest with ochre beard, displayed aloft to the good citizens
+of Cologne, three brown hawks, with birds in their beaks, on an azure
+stardotted field.
+
+‘Holy Cross!’ exclaimed Gottlieb, low in his throat; ‘the arms of
+Werner! Where got he money to mount his men? Why, this is daring all
+Cologne in our very teeth! ‘Fend that he visit me now! Ruin smokes in
+that ruffian’s track. I ‘ve felt hot and cold by turns all day.’
+
+The horsemen came jingling carelessly along the street in scattered
+twos and threes, laughing together, and singling out the maidens at the
+gable-shadowed windows with hawking eyes. The good citizens of Cologne
+did not look on them favourably. Some showed their backs and gruffly
+banged their doors: others scowled and pocketed their fists: not a few
+slunk into the side alleys like well-licked curs, and scurried off
+with forebent knees. They were in truth ferocious-looking fellows these
+trusty servants of the robber Baron Werner, of Werner’s Eck, behind
+Andernach. Leather, steel, and dust, clad them from head to foot; big
+and black as bears; wolf-eyed, fox-nosed. They glistened bravely in the
+falling beams of the sun, and Margarita thrust her fair braided yellow
+head a little forward over her father’s shoulder to catch the whole
+length of the grim cavalcade. One of the troop was not long in
+discerning the young beauty. He pointed her boldly out to a comrade, who
+approved his appetite, and referred her to a third. The rest followed
+lead, and Margarita was as one spell-struck when she became aware that
+all those hungry eyes were preying on hers. Old Gottlieb was too full
+of his own fears to think for her, and when he drew in his head rather
+suddenly, it was with a dismal foreboding that Werner’s destination in
+Cologne was direct to the house of Gottlieb Groschen, for purposes only
+too well to be divined.
+
+‘Devil’s breeches!’ muttered Gottlieb; ‘look again, Grete, and see if
+that hell-troop stop the way outside.’
+
+Margarita’s cheeks were overflowing with the offended rose.
+
+‘I will not look at them again, father.’
+
+Gottlieb stared, and then patted her.
+
+‘I would I were a man, father!’
+
+Gottlieb smiled, and stroked his beard.
+
+‘Oh! how I burn!’
+
+And the girl shivered visibly.
+
+‘Grete! mind to be as much of a woman as you can, and soon such raff as
+this you may sweep away, like cobwebs, and no harm done.’
+
+He was startled by a violent thumping at the streetdoor, and as brazen
+a blast as if the dead were being summoned. Aunt Lisbeth entered, and
+flitted duskily round the room, crying:
+
+‘We are lost: they are upon us! better death with a bodkin! Never shall
+it be said of me; never! the monsters!’
+
+Then admonishing them to lock, bar, bolt, and block up every room in the
+house, Aunt Lisbeth perched herself on the edge of a chair, and reversed
+the habits of the screech-owl, by being silent when stationary.
+
+‘There’s nothing to fear for you, Lisbeth,’ said Gottlieb, with
+discourteous emphasis.
+
+‘Gottlieb! do you remember what happened at the siege of Mainz? and
+poor Marthe Herbstblum, who had hoped to die as she was; and Dame
+Altknopfchen, and Frau Kaltblut, and the old baker, Hans Topf’s sister,
+all of them as holy as abbesses, and that did not save them! and nothing
+will from such godless devourers.’
+
+Gottlieb was gone, having often before heard mention of the calamity
+experienced by these fated women.
+
+‘Comfort thee, good heart, on my breast,’ said Margarita, taking Lisbeth
+to that sweet nest of peace and fortitude.
+
+‘Margarita! ‘tis your doing! have I not said--lure them not, for they
+swarm too early upon us! And here they are! and, perhaps, in five
+minutes all will be over!
+
+Herr Je!--What, you are laughing! Heavens of goodness, the girl is
+delighted!’
+
+Here a mocking ha-ha! accompanied by a thundering snack at the door,
+shook the whole house, and again the trumpet burst the ears with fury.
+
+This summons, which seemed to Aunt Lisbeth final, wrought a strange
+composure in her countenance. She was very pale, but spread her dress
+decently, as if fear had departed, and clasped her hands on her knees.
+
+‘The will of the Lord above must be done,’ said she; ‘it is impious to
+complain when we are given into the hand of the Philistines. Others have
+been martyred, and were yet acceptable.’
+
+To this heroic speech she added, with cold energy: ‘Let them come!’
+
+‘Aunt,’ cried Margarita, ‘I hear my father’s voice with those men.
+Aunty! I will not let him be alone. I must go down to him. You will be
+safe here. I shall come to you if there’s cause for alarm.’
+
+And in spite of Aunt Lisbeth’s astonished shriek of remonstrance, she
+hurried off to rejoin Gottlieb.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAGER
+
+Ere Margarita had reached the landing of the stairs, she repented her
+haste and shrank back. Wrapt in a thunder of oaths, she distinguished:
+‘‘Tis the little maiden we want; let’s salute her and begone! or cap
+your skull with something thicker than you’ve on it now, if you want a
+whole one, happy father!’
+
+‘Gottlieb von Groschen I am,’ answered her father, ‘and the Kaiser----’
+
+‘‘S as fond of a pretty girl as we are! Down with her, and no more
+drivelling! It’s only for a moment, old Measure and Scales!’
+
+‘I tell you, rascals, I know your master, and if you’re not punished for
+this, may I die a beggar!’ exclaimed Gottlieb, jumping with rage.
+
+‘May you die as rich as an abbot! And so you will, if you don’t bring
+her down, for I’ve sworn to see her; there ‘s the end of it, man!’
+
+‘I’ll see, too, if the laws allow this villany!’ cried Gottlieb.
+‘Insulting a peaceful citizen! in his own house! a friend of your
+emperor! Gottlieb von Groschen!’
+
+‘Groschen? We’re cousins, then! You wouldn’t shut out your nearest kin?
+Devil’s lightning! Don’t you know me? Pfennig? Von Pfennig! This
+here’s Heller: that’s Zwanziger: all of us Vons, every soul! You’re not
+decided? This’ll sharpen you, my jolly King Paunch!’
+
+And Margarita heard the ruffian step as if to get swing for a blow. She
+hurried into the passage, and slipping in front of her father, said to
+his assailant:
+
+‘You have asked for me! I am here!’
+
+Her face was colourless, and her voice seemed to issue from between a
+tightened cord. She stood with her left foot a little in advance, and
+her whole body heaving and quivering: her arms folded and pressed hard
+below her bosom: her eyes dilated to a strong blue: her mouth ashy
+white. A strange lustre, as of suppressed internal fire, flickered over
+her.
+
+‘My name ‘s Schwartz Thier, and so ‘s my nature!’ said the fellow with
+a grin; ‘but may I never smack lips with a pretty girl again, if I harm
+such a young beauty as this! Friendly dealing’s my plan o’ life.’
+
+‘Clear out of my house, then, fellow, and here’s money for you,’ said
+Gottlieb, displaying a wrathfully-trembling handful of coin.
+
+‘Pish! money! forty times that wouldn’t cover my bet! And if it did?
+Shouldn’t I be disgraced? jeered at for a sheep-heart? No, I’m no ninny,
+and not to be diddled. I’ll talk to the young lady! Silence, out there!
+all’s going proper’: this to his comrades through the door. ‘So, my
+beautiful maiden! thus it stands: We saw you at the window, looking
+like a fresh rose with a gold crown on. Here are we poor fellows come
+to welcome the Kaiser. I began to glorify you. “Schwartz Thier!” says
+Henker Rothhals to me, “I’ll wager you odds you don’t have a kiss of
+that fine girl within twenty minutes, counting from the hand-smack!”
+ Done! was my word, and we clapped our fists together. Now, you see,
+that’s straightforward! All I want is, not to lose my money and be made
+a fool of--leaving alone that sugary mouth which makes mine water’; and
+he drew the back of his hand along his stubbled jaws: ‘So, come! don’t
+hesitate! no harm to you, my beauty, but a compliment, and Schwartz
+Thier’s your friend and anything else you like for ever after. Come,
+time’s up, pretty well.’
+
+Margarita leaned to her father a moment as if mortal sickness had seized
+her. Then cramping her hands and feet, she said in his ear, ‘Leave me
+to my own care; go, get the men to protect thee’; and ordered Schwartz
+Thier to open the door wide.
+
+Seeing Gottlieb would not leave her, she joined her hands, and begged
+him. ‘The good God will protect me! I will overmatch these men. Look,
+my father! they dare not strike me in the street: you they would fell
+without pity. Go! what they dare in a house, they dare not in the
+street.’
+
+Schwartz Thier had opened the door. At sight of Margarita, the troop
+gave a shout.
+
+‘Now! on the doorstep, full in view, my beauteous one! that they may see
+what a lucky devil I am--and have no doubts about the handing over.’
+
+Margarita looked behind. Gottlieb was still there, every member of him
+quaking like a bog under a heavy heel. She ran to him. ‘My father! I
+have a device wilt thou spoil it, and give me to this beast? You can do
+nothing, nothing! protect yourself and save me!’
+
+‘Cologne! broad day!’ muttered Gottlieb, as if the enormity had
+prostrated his belief in facts; and moved slowly back.
+
+Margarita strode to the door-step. Schwartz Thier was awaiting her,
+his arm circled out, and his leering face ducked to a level with his
+victim’s. This rough show of gallantry proved costly to him. As he was
+gently closing his iron hold about her, enjoying before hand with grim
+mouthridges the flatteries of triumph, Margarita shot past him through
+the door, and was already twenty paces beyond the troop before either
+of them thought of pursuing her. At the first sound of a hoof, Henker
+Rothhals seized the rider’s bridle-rein, and roared: ‘Fair play for a
+fair bet! leave all to the Thier!’ The Thier, when he had recovered
+from his amazement, sought for old Gottlieb to give him a back-hit, as
+Margarita foresaw that he would. Not finding him at hand, out lumbered
+the fellow as swiftly as his harness would allow, and caught a glimpse
+of Margarita rapidly fleeting up the cathedral square.
+
+‘Only five minutes, Schwartz Thier!’ some of the troop sung out.
+
+‘The devil can do his business in one,’ was the retort, and Schwartz
+Thier swung himself on his broad-backed charger, and gored the fine
+beast till she rattled out a blast of sparkles from the flint.
+
+In a minute he drew up in front of Margarita.
+
+‘So! you prefer settling this business in the square.
+
+Good! my choice sweetheart!’ and he sprang to her side.
+
+The act of flight had touched the young girl’s heart with the spirit of
+flight. She crouched like a winded hare under the nose of the hound, and
+covered her face with her two hands. Margarita was no wisp in weight,
+but Schwartz Thier had her aloft in his arm as easily as if he had
+tossed up a kerchief.
+
+‘Look all, and witness!’ he shouted, lifting the other arm.
+
+Henker Rothhals and the rest of the troop looked, as they came trotting
+to the scene, with the coolness of umpires: but they witnessed something
+other than what Schwartz Thier proposed. This was the sight of a
+formidable staff, whirling an unfriendly halo over the head of the
+Thier, and descending on it with such honest intent to confound and
+overthrow him, that the Thier succumbed to its force without argument,
+and the square echoed blow and fall simultaneously. At the same time
+the wielder of this sound piece of logic seized Margarita, and raised
+a shout in the square for all true men to stand by him in rescuing
+a maiden from the clutch of brigands and ravishers. A crowd was
+collecting, but seemed to consider the circle now formed by the horsemen
+as in a manner charmed, for only one, a fair slender youth, came forward
+and ranged himself beside the stranger.
+
+‘Take thou the maiden: I’ll keep to the staff,’ said this latter,
+stumbling over his speech as if he was in a foreign land among old roots
+and wolfpits which had already shaken out a few of his teeth, and made
+him cautious about the remainder.
+
+‘Can it be Margarita!’ exclaimed the youth, bending to her, and calling
+to her: ‘Margarita! Fraulein Groschen!’
+
+She opened her eyes, shuddered, and said: ‘I was not afraid! Am I safe?’
+
+‘Safe while I have life, and this good friend.’
+
+‘Where is my father?’
+
+‘I have not seen him.’
+
+‘And you--who are you? Do I owe this to you?’
+
+‘Oh! no! no! Me you owe nothing.’
+
+Margarita gazed hurriedly round, and at her feet there lay the Thier
+with his steel-cap shining in dints, and three rivulets of blood
+coursing down his mottled forehead. She looked again at the youth, and a
+blush of recognition gave life to her cheeks.
+
+‘I did not know you. Pardon me. Farina! what thanks can reward such
+courage! Tell me! shall we go?’
+
+‘The youth eyed her an instant, but recovering himself, took a rapid
+survey, and called to the stranger to follow and help give the young
+maiden safe conduct home.
+
+‘Just then Henker Rothhals bellowed, ‘Time’s up!’ He was answered by a
+chorus of agreement from the troop. They had hitherto patiently acted
+their parts as spectators, immovable on their horses. The assault on
+the Thier was all in the play, and a visible interference of fortune in
+favour of Henker Rothhals. Now general commotion shuttled them, and the
+stranger’s keen hazel eyes read their intentions rightly when he lifted
+his redoubtable staff in preparation for another mighty swoop, this time
+defensive. Rothhals, and half a dozen others, with a war-cry of curses,
+spurred their steeds at once to ride him down. They had not reckoned the
+length and good-will of their antagonist’s weapon. Scarce were they in
+motion, when round it whizzed, grazing the nostrils of their horses
+with a precision that argued practice in the feat, and unhorsing two,
+Rothhals among the number. He dropped heavily on his head, and showed
+signs of being as incapable of combat as the Thier. A cheer burst from
+the crowd, but fell short.
+
+The foremost of their number was struck flat to the earth by a fellow of
+the troop.
+
+Calling on St. George, his patron saint, the stranger began
+systematically to make a clear ring in his path forward. Several of the
+horsemen essayed a cut at his arm with their long double-handed swords,
+but the horses could not be brought a second time to the edge of the
+magic circle; and the blood of these warriors being thoroughly up, they
+now came at him on foot. In their rage they would have made short work
+with the three, in spite of the magistracy of Cologne, had they not been
+arrested by cries of ‘Werner! Werner!’
+
+At the South-west end of the square, looking Rhinewards, rode the
+marauder Baron, in full armour, helm and hauberk, with a single retainer
+in his rear. He had apparently caught sight of the brawl, and, either
+because he distinguished his own men, or was seeking his natural
+element, hastened up for his share in it, which was usually that of the
+king of beasts. His first call was for Schwartz Thier. The men made way,
+and he beheld his man in no condition to make military responses.
+He shouted for Henker Rothhals, and again the men opened their ranks
+mutely, exhibiting the two stretched out in diverse directions, with
+their feet slanting to a common point. The Baron glared; then caught off
+his mailed glove, and thrust it between his teeth. A rasping gurgle of
+oaths was all they heard, and presently surged up,
+
+‘Who was it?’
+
+Margarita’s eyes were shut. She opened them fascinated with horror.
+There was an unearthly awful and comic mixture of sounds in Werner’s
+querulous fury, that was like the noise of a complaining bear, rolling
+up from hollow-chested menace to yawning lament. Never in her life had
+Margarita such a shock of fear. The half gasp of a laugh broke on her
+trembling lips. She stared at Werner, and was falling; but Farina’s arm
+clung instantly round her waist. The stranger caught up her laugh, loud
+and hearty.
+
+‘As for who did it, Sir Baron,’ he cried, is a cheery tone, ‘I am the
+man! As you may like to know why--and that’s due to you and me both of
+us--all I can say is, the Black Muzzle yonder lying got his settler for
+merry-making with this peaceful maiden here, without her consent--an
+offence in my green island they reckon a crack o’ the sconce light
+basting for, I warrant all company present,’ and he nodded sharply
+about. ‘As for the other there, who looks as if a rope had been round
+his neck once and shirked its duty, he counts his wages for helping the
+devil in his business, as will any other lad here who likes to come on
+and try.’
+
+Werner himself, probably, would have given him the work he wanted; but
+his eye had sidled a moment over Margarita, and the hardly-suppressed
+applause of the crowd at the stranger’s speech failed to bring his ire
+into action this solitary time.
+
+‘Who is the maiden?’ he asked aloud.
+
+‘Fraulein von Groschen,’ replied Farina.
+
+‘Von Groschen! Von Groschen! the daughter of Gottlieb
+Groschen?--Rascals!’ roared the Baron, turning on his men, and out
+poured a mud-spring of filthy oaths and threats, which caused Henker
+Rothhals, who had opened his eyes, to close them again, as if he had
+already gone to the place of heat.
+
+‘Only lend me thy staff, friend,’ cried Werner.
+
+‘Not I! thwack ‘em with your own wood,’ replied the stranger, and fell
+back a leg.
+
+Werner knotted his stringy brows, and seemed torn to pieces with the
+different pulling tides of his wrath. He grasped the mane of his horse
+and flung abroad handfuls, till the splendid animal reared in agony.
+
+‘You shall none of you live over this night, villains! I ‘ll hang
+you, every hag’s son! My last orders were,--Keep quiet in the city, ye
+devil’s brood. Take that! and that!’ laying at them with his bare sword.
+‘Off with you, and carry these two pigs out of sight quickly, or I’ll
+have their heads, and make sure o’ them.’
+
+The latter injunction sprang from policy, for at the head of the chief
+street there was a glitter of the city guard, marching with shouldered
+spears.
+
+‘Maiden,’ said Werner, with a bull’s bow, ‘let me conduct thee to thy
+father.’
+
+Margarita did not reply; but gave her hand to Farina, and took a step
+closer to the stranger.
+
+Werner’s brows grew black.
+
+‘Enough to have saved you, fair maid,’ he muttered hoarsely. ‘Gratitude
+never was a woman’s gift. Say to your father that I shall make excuses
+to him for the conduct of my men.’
+
+Whereupon, casting a look of leisurely scorn toward the guard coming up
+in the last beams of day, the Baron shrugged his huge shoulders to an
+altitude expressing the various contemptuous shades of feudal coxcombry,
+stuck one leather-ruffled arm in his side, and jolted off at an easy
+pace.
+
+‘Amen!’ ejaculated the stranger, leaning on his staff. ‘There are Barons
+in my old land; but never a brute beast in harness.’
+
+Margarita stood before him, and took his two hands.
+
+‘You will come with me to my father! He will thank you. I cannot. You
+will come?’
+
+Tears and a sob of relief started from her.
+
+The city guard, on seeing Werner’s redoubtable back turned, had adopted
+double time, and now came panting up, while the stranger bent smiling
+under a fresh overflow of innocent caresses. Margarita was caught to her
+father’s breast.
+
+‘You shall have vengeance for this, sweet chuck,’ cried old Gottlieb in
+the intervals of his hugs.
+
+‘Fear not, my father; they are punished’: and Margarita related the
+story of the stranger’s prowess, elevating him into a second Siegfried.
+The guard huzzaed him, but did not pursue the Baron.
+
+Old Gottlieb, without hesitation, saluted the astonished champion with a
+kiss on either cheek.
+
+‘My best friend! You have saved my daughter from indignity! Come with
+us home, if you can believe that a home where the wolves come daring us,
+dragging our dear ones from our very doorsteps. Come, that we may thank
+you under a roof at least. My little daughter! Is she not a brave lass?’
+
+‘She’s nothing less than the white rose of Germany,’ said the stranger,
+with a good bend of the shoulders to Margarita.
+
+‘So she’s called,’ exclaimed Gottlieb; ‘she ‘s worthy to be a man!’
+
+‘Men would be the losers, then, more than they could afford,’ replied
+the stranger, with a ringing laugh.
+
+‘Come, good friend,’ said Gottlieb; ‘you must need refreshment. Prove
+you are a true hero by your appetite. As Charles the Great said to
+Archbishop Turpin, “I conquered the world because Nature gave me a
+gizzard; for everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach.”
+ Come, all! A day well ended, notwithstanding!’
+
+
+
+
+THE SILVER ARROW
+
+At the threshold of Gottlieb’s house a number of the chief burgesses
+of Cologne had corporated spontaneously to condole with him. As he came
+near, they raised a hubbub of gratulation. Strong were the expressions
+of abhorrence and disgust of Werner’s troop in which these excellent
+citizens clothed their outraged feelings; for the insult to Gottlieb
+was the insult of all. The Rhinestream taxes were provoking enough to
+endure; but that the licence of these free-booting bands should extend
+to the homes of free and peaceful men, loyal subjects of the Emperor,
+was a sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes, as the saying
+went, and must now be met as became burgesses of ancient Cologne, and by
+joint action destroyed.
+
+‘In! in, all of you!’ said Gottlieb, broadening his smile to suit the
+many. ‘We ‘ll talk about that in-doors. Meantime, I’ve got a hero to
+introduce to you: flesh and blood! no old woman’s coin and young girl’s
+dream-o’day: the honest thing, and a rarity, my masters. All that over
+some good Rhine-juice from above Bacharach. In, and welcome, friends!’
+
+Gottlieb drew the stranger along with him under the carved old oak-wood
+portals, and the rest paired, and reverentially entered in his wake.
+Margarita, to make up for this want of courtesy, formed herself the
+last of the procession. She may have had another motive, for she took
+occasion there to whisper something to Farina, bringing sun and cloud
+over his countenance in rapid flushes. He seemed to remonstrate in dumb
+show; but she, with an attitude of silence, signified her wish to seal
+the conversation, and he drooped again. On the door step she paused a
+moment, and hung her head pensively, as if moved by a reminiscence. The
+youth had hurried away some strides. Margarita looked after him. His
+arms were straightened to his flanks, his hands clenched, and straining
+out from the wrist. He had the aspect of one tugging against the
+restraint of a chain that suddenly let out link by link to his whole
+force.
+
+‘Farina!’ she called; and wound him back with a run. ‘Farina! You do not
+think me ungrateful? I could not tell my father in the crowd what you
+did for me. He shall know. He will thank you. He does not understand
+you now, Farina. He will. Look not so sorrowful. So much I would say to
+you.’
+
+So much was rushing on her mind, that her maidenly heart became unruly,
+and warned her to beware.
+
+The youth stood as if listening to a nightingale of the old woods, after
+the first sweet stress of her voice was in his ear. When she ceased,
+he gazed into her eyes. They were no longer deep and calm like forest
+lakes; the tender-glowing blue quivered, as with a spark of the young
+girl’s soul, in the beams of the moon then rising.
+
+‘Oh, Margarita!’ said the youth, in tones that sank to sighs: ‘what am I
+to win your thanks, though it were my life for such a boon!’
+
+He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it. Twice his lips dwelt upon
+those pure fingers.
+
+‘Margarita: you forgive me: I have been so long without hope. I have
+kissed your hand, dearest of God’s angels!’
+
+She gently restrained the full white hand in his pressure.
+
+‘Margarita! I have thought never before death to have had this sacred
+bliss. I am guerdoned in advance for every grief coming before death.’
+
+She dropped on him one look of a confiding softness that was to the
+youth like the opened gate of the innocent garden of her heart.
+
+‘You pardon me, Margarita? I may call you my beloved? strive, wait,
+pray, hope, for you, my star of life?’
+
+Her face was so sweet a charity!
+
+‘Dear love! one word!--or say nothing, but remain, and move not. So
+beautiful you are! Oh, might I kneel to you here; dote on you; worship
+this white hand for ever.’
+
+The colour had passed out of her cheeks like a blissful western red
+leaving rich paleness in the sky; and with her clear brows levelled at
+him, her bosom lifting more and more rapidly, she struggled against the
+charm that was on her, and at last released her hand.
+
+‘I must go. I cannot stay. Pardon you? Who might not be proud of your
+love!--Farewell!’
+
+She turned to move away, but lingered a step from him, hastily touching
+her bosom and either hand, as if to feel for a brooch or a ring. Then
+she blushed, drew the silver arrow from the gathered gold-shot braids
+above her neck, held it out to him, and was gone.
+
+Farina clutched the treasure, and reeled into the street. Half a dozen
+neighbours were grouped by the door.
+
+‘What ‘s the matter in Master Groschen’s house now?’ one asked, as he
+plunged into the midst of them.
+
+‘Matter?’ quoth the joy-drunken youth, catching at the word, and mused
+off into raptures; ‘There never was such happiness! ‘Tis paradise
+within, exile without. But what exile! A star ever in the heavens
+to lighten the road and cheer the path of the banished one’; and he
+loosened his vest and hugged the cold shaft on his breast.
+
+‘What are you talking and capering at, fellow?’ exclaimed another:
+‘Can’t you answer about those shrieks, like a Christian, you that have
+just come out of the house? Why, there’s shrieking now! It ‘s a woman.
+Thousand thunders! it sounds like the Frau Lisbeth’s voice. What can be
+happening to her?’
+
+‘Perhaps she’s on fire,’ was coolly suggested between two or three.
+
+‘Pity to see the old house burnt,’ remarked one.
+
+‘House! The woman, man! the woman!’
+
+‘Ah!’ replied the other, an ancient inhabitant of Cologne, shaking his
+head, ‘the house is oldest!’
+
+Farina, now recovering his senses, heard shrieks that he recognized
+as possible in the case of Aunt Lisbeth dreading the wickedness of
+an opposing sex, and alarmed by the inrush of old Gottlieb’s numerous
+guests. To confirm him, she soon appeared, and hung herself halfway out
+of one of the upper windows, calling desperately to St. Ursula for aid.
+He thanked the old lady in his heart for giving him a pretext to enter
+Paradise again; but before even love could speed him, Frau Lisbeth was
+seized and dragged remorselessly out of sight, and he and the rosy room
+darkened together.
+
+Farina twice strode off to the Rhine-stream; as many times he returned.
+It was hard to be away from her. It was harder to be near and not close.
+His heart flamed into jealousy of the stranger. Everything threatened to
+overturn his slight but lofty structure of bliss so suddenly shot into
+the heavens. He had but to remember that his hand was on the silver
+arrow, and a radiance broke upon his countenance, and a calm fell upon
+his breast. ‘It was a plight of her troth to me,’ mused the youth. ‘She
+loves me! She would not trust her frank heart to speak. Oh, generous
+young girl! what am I to dare hope for such a prize? for I never can
+be worthy. And she is one who, giving her heart, gives it all. Do I not
+know her? How lovely she looked thanking the stranger! The blue of her
+eyes, the warm-lighted blue, seemed to grow full on the closing lids,
+like heaven’s gratitude. Her beauty is wonderful. What wonder, then,
+if he loves her? I should think him a squire in his degree. There are
+squires of high birth and low.’
+
+So mused Farina with his arms folded and his legs crossed in the shadow
+of Margarita’s chamber. Gradually he fell into a kind of hazy doze. The
+houses became branded with silver arrows. All up the Cathedral stone was
+a glitter, and dance, and quiver of them. In the sky mazed confusion of
+arrowy flights and falls. Farina beheld himself in the service of the
+Emperor watching these signs, and expecting on the morrow to win glory
+and a name for Margarita. Glory and the name now won, old Gottlieb was
+just on the point of paternally blessing them, when a rude pat aroused
+him from the delicious moon-dream.
+
+‘Hero by day! house-guard by night! That tells a tale,’ said a cheerful
+voice.
+
+The moon was shining down the Cathedral square and street, and Farina
+saw the stranger standing solid and ruddy before him. He was at first
+prompted to resent such familiar handling, but the stranger’s face was
+of that bland honest nature which, like the sun, wins everywhere back a
+reflection of its own kindliness.
+
+‘You are right,’ replied Farina; ‘so it is!’
+
+‘Pretty wines inside there, and a rare young maiden. She has a throat
+like a nightingale, and more ballads at command than a piper’s wallet.
+Now, if I hadn’t a wife at home.’
+
+‘You’re married?’ cried Farina, seizing the stranger’s hand.
+
+‘Surely; and my lass can say something for herself on the score of brave
+looks, as well as the best of your German maids here, trust me.’
+
+Farina repressed an inclination to perform a few of those antics which
+violent joy excites, and after rushing away and back, determined to give
+his secret to the stranger.
+
+‘Look,’ said he in a whisper, that opens the private doors of a
+confidence.
+
+But the stranger repeated the same word still more earnestly, and
+brought Farina’s eyes on a couple of dark figures moving under the
+Cathedral.
+
+‘Some lamb’s at stake when the wolves are prowling,’ he added: ‘‘Tis
+now two hours to the midnight. I doubt if our day’s work be over till we
+hear the chime, friend.’
+
+‘What interest do you take in the people of this house that you watch
+over them thus?’ asked Farina.
+
+The stranger muffled a laugh in his beard.
+
+‘An odd question, good sooth. Why, in the first place, we like well
+whatso we have done good work for. That goes for something. In the
+second, I’ve broken bread in this house. Put down that in the reckoning.
+In the third; well! in the third, add up all together, and the sum
+total’s at your service, young sir.’
+
+Farina marked him closely. There was not a spot on his face for guile to
+lurk in, or suspicion to fasten on. He caught the stranger’s hand.
+
+‘You called me friend just now. Make me your friend. Look, I was going
+to say: I love this maiden! I would die for her. I have loved her long.
+This night she has given me a witness that my love is not vain. I am
+poor. She is rich. I am poor, I said, and feel richer than the Kaiser
+with this she has given me! Look, it is what our German girls slide in
+their back-hair, this silver arrow!’
+
+‘A very pretty piece of heathenish wear!’ exclaimed the stranger.
+
+‘Then, I was going to say--tell me, friend, of a way to win honour and
+wealth quickly; I care not at how rare a risk. Only to wealth, or high
+baronry, will her father give her!’
+
+The stranger buzzed on his moustache in a pause of cool pity, such as
+elders assume when young men talk of conquering the world for their
+mistresses: and in truth it is a calm of mind well won!
+
+‘Things look so brisk at home here in the matter of the maiden, that
+I should say, wait a while and watch your chance. But you’re a boy of
+pluck: I serve in the Kaiser’s army, under my lord: the Kaiser will be
+here in three days. If you ‘re of that mind then, I doubt little you may
+get posted well: but, look again! there’s a ripe brew yonder. Marry, you
+may win your spurs this night even; who knows?--‘S life! there’s a tall
+fellow joining those two lurkers.’
+
+‘Can you see into the murk shadow, Sir Squire?’
+
+‘Ay! thanks to your Styrian dungeons, where I passed a year’s
+apprenticeship:
+
+       “I learnt to watch the rats and mice
+         At play, with never a candle-end.
+        They play’d so well; they sang so nice;
+         They dubb’d me comrade; called me friend!”
+
+So says the ballad of our red-beard king’s captivity. All evil has a
+good:
+
+       “When our toes and chins are up,
+        Poison plants make sweetest cup”
+
+as the old wives mumble to us when we’re sick. Heigho! would I were in
+the little island well home again, though that were just their song of
+welcome to me, as I am a Christian.’
+
+‘Tell me your name, friend,’ said Farina.
+
+‘Guy’s my name, young man: Goshawk’s my title. Guy the Goshawk! so they
+called me in my merry land. The cap sticks when it no longer fits.
+Then I drove the arrow, and was down on my enemy ere he could ruffle a
+feather. Now, what would be my nickname?
+
+       “A change so sad, and a change so bad,
+         Might set both Christian and heathen a sighing:
+        Change is a curse, for it’s all for the worse:
+         Age creeps up, and youth is flying!”
+
+and so on, with the old song. But here am I, and yonder’s a game that
+wants harrying; so we’ll just begin to nose about them a bit.’
+
+He crossed to the other side of the street, and Farina followed out
+of the moonlight. The two figures and the taller one were evidently
+observing them; for they also changed their position and passed behind
+an angle of the Cathedral.
+
+‘Tell me how the streets cross all round the Cathedral you know the
+city,’ said the stranger, holding out his hand.
+
+Farina traced with his finger a rough map of the streets on the
+stranger’s hand.
+
+‘Good! that’s how my lord always marks the battlefield, and makes me
+show him the enemy’s posts. Forward, this way!’
+
+He turned from the Cathedral, and both slid along close under the eaves
+and front hangings of the houses. Neither spoke. Farina felt that he
+was in the hands of a skilful captain, and only regretted the want of a
+weapon to make harvest of the intended surprise; for he judged clearly
+that those were fellows of Werner’s band on the look-out. They wound
+down numberless intersections of narrow streets with irregular-built
+houses standing or leaning wry-faced in row, here a quaint-beamed
+cottage, there almost a mansion with gilt arms, brackets, and devices.
+Oil-lamps unlit hung at intervals by the corners, near a pale Christ on
+crucifix. Across the passages they hung alight. The passages and
+alleys were too dusky and close for the moon in her brightest ardour to
+penetrate; down the streets a slender lane of white beams could steal:
+‘In all conscience,’ as the good citizens of Cologne declared, ‘enough
+for those heathen hounds and sons of the sinful who are abroad when
+God’s own blessed lamp is out.’ So, when there was a moon, the expense
+of oil was saved to the Cologne treasury, thereby satisfying the
+virtuous.
+
+After incessant doubling here and there, listening to footfalls, and
+themselves eluding a chase which their suspicious movements aroused,
+they came upon the Rhine. A full flood of moonlight burnished the
+knightly river in glittering scales, and plates, and rings, as headlong
+it rolled seaward on from under crag and banner of old chivalry and
+rapine. Both greeted the scene with a burst of pleasure. The grey mist
+of flats on the south side glimmered delightful to their sight, coming
+from that drowsy crowd and press of habitations; but the solemn glory
+of the river, delaying not, heedless, impassioned-pouring on in some
+sublime conference between it and heaven to the great marriage of
+waters, deeply shook Farina’s enamoured heart. The youth could not
+restrain his tears, as if a magic wand had touched him. He trembled with
+love; and that delicate bliss which maiden hope first showers upon us
+like a silver rain when she has taken the shape of some young beauty and
+plighted us her fair fleeting hand, tenderly embraced him.
+
+As they were emerging into the spaces of the moon, a cheer from the
+stranger arrested Farina.
+
+‘Seest thou? on the wharf there! that is the very one, the tallest of
+the three. Lakin! but we shall have him.’
+
+Wrapt in a long cloak, with low pointed cap and feather, stood the
+person indicated. He appeared to be meditating on the flow of the water,
+unaware of hostile presences, or quite regardless of them. There was a
+majesty in his height and air, which made the advance of the two upon
+him more wary and respectful than their first impulse had counselled.
+They could not read his features, which were mantled behind voluminous
+folds: all save a pair of very strange eyes, that, even as they gazed
+directly downward, seemed charged with restless fiery liquid.
+
+The two were close behind him: Guy the Goshawk prepared for one of those
+fatal pounces on the foe that had won him his title. He consulted Farina
+mutely, who Nodded readiness; but the instant after, a cry of anguish
+escaped from the youth:
+
+‘Lost! gone! lost! Where is it? where! the arrow! The Silver Arrow! My
+Margarita!’
+
+Ere the echoes of his voice had ceased lamenting into the distance, they
+found themselves alone on the wharf.
+
+
+
+
+THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY
+
+‘He opened like a bat!’ said the stranger.
+
+‘His shadow was red!’ said Farina.
+
+‘He was off like an arrow!’ said the stranger.
+
+‘Oh! pledge of my young love, how could I lose thee!’ exclaimed the
+youth, and his eyes were misted with tears.
+
+Guy the Goshawk shook his brown locks gravely.
+
+‘Bring me a man, and I ‘ll stand up against him, whoever he be, like a
+man; but this fellow has an ill scent and foreign ways about him,
+that he has! His eye boils all down my backbone and tingles at my
+finger-tips. Jesu, save us!’
+
+‘Save us!’ repeated Farina, with the echo of a deadened soul.
+
+They made the sign of the Cross, and purified the place with holy
+ejaculations.
+
+‘I ‘ve seen him at last; grant it be for the last time! That’s my
+prayer, in the name of the Virgin and Trinity,’ said Guy. ‘And now let’s
+retrace our steps: perchance we shall hunt up that bauble of yours, but
+I’m not fit for mortal work this night longer.’
+
+Burdened by their black encounter, the two passed again behind the
+Cathedral. Farina’s hungry glances devoured each footmark of their
+track. Where the moon held no lantern for him, he went on his knees,
+and groped for his lost treasure with a miser’s eager patience of agony,
+drawing his hand slowly over the stony kerb and between the interstices
+of the thick-sown flints, like an acute-feeling worm. Despair grew heavy
+in his breast. At every turning he invoked some good new saint to aid
+him, and ran over all the propitiations his fancy could suggest and his
+religious lore inspire. By-and-by they reached the head of the street
+where Margarita dwelt. The moon was dipping down, and paler, as if
+touched with a warning of dawn. Chill sighs from the open land
+passed through the spaces of the city. On certain coloured gables and
+wood-crossed fronts, the white light lingered; but mostly the houses
+were veiled in dusk, and Gottlieb’s house was confused in the twilight
+with those of his neighbours, notwithstanding its greater stateliness
+and the old grandeur of its timbered bulk. They determined to take up
+their position there again, and paced on, Farina with his head below his
+shoulders, and Guy nostril in air, as if uneasy in his sense of smell.
+
+On the window-ledge of a fair-fitted domicile stood a flower-pot, a rude
+earthen construction in the form of a river-barge, wherein grew some
+valley lilies that drooped their white bells over the sides.
+
+The Goshawk eyed them wistfully.
+
+‘I must smell those blessed flowers if I wish to be saved!’ and he
+stamped resolve with his staff.
+
+Moved by this exclamation, Farina gazed up at them.
+
+‘How like a company of maidens they look floating in the vessel of
+life!’ he said.
+
+Guy curiously inspected Farina and the flower-pot, shrugged, and with
+his comrade’s aid, mounted to a level with it, seized the prize and
+redescended.
+
+‘There,’ he cried, between long luxurious sniffs, ‘that chases him out
+of the nostril sooner than aught else, the breath of a fresh lass-like
+flower! I was tormented till now by the reek of the damned rising from
+under me. This is heaven’s own incense, I think!’
+
+And Guy inhaled the flowers and spake prettily to them.
+
+‘They have a melancholy sweetness, friend,’ said Farina. ‘I think of
+whispering Fays, and Elf, and Erl, when their odour steals through me.
+Do not you?’
+
+‘Nay, nor hope to till my wits are clean gone,’ was the Goshawk’s reply.
+‘To my mind, ‘tis an honest flower, and could I do good service by the
+young maiden who there set it, I should be rendering back good service
+done; for if that flower has not battled the devil in my nose this
+night, and beaten him, my head’s a medlar!’
+
+‘I scarce know whether as a devout Christian I should listen to that,
+friend,’ Farina mildly remonstrated. ‘Lilies are indeed emblems of the
+saints; but then they are not poor flowers of earth, being transfigured,
+lustrous unfadingly. Oh, Cross and Passion! with what silver serenity
+thy glory enwraps me, gazing on these fair bells! I look on the white
+sea of the saints. I am enamoured of fleshly anguish and martyrdom. All
+beauty is that worn by wan-smiling faces wherein Hope sits as a crown
+on Sorrow, and the pale ebb of mortal life is the twilight of joy
+everlasting. Colourless peace! Oh, my beloved! So walkest thou for my
+soul on the white sea ever at night, clad in the straight fall of thy
+spotless virgin linen; bearing in thy hand the lily, and leaning thy
+cheek to it, where the human rose is softened to a milky bloom of red,
+the espousals of heaven with earth; over thee, moving with thee, a
+wreath of sapphire stars, and the solitude of purity around!’
+
+‘Ah!’ sighed the Goshawk, dandling his flower-pot; ‘the moon gives
+strokes as well’s the sun. I’ faith, moon-struck and maid-struck in
+one! He’ll be asking for his head soon. This dash of the monk and the
+minstrel is a sure sign. That ‘s their way of loving in this land: they
+all go mad, straight off. I never heard such talk.’
+
+Guy accompanied these remarks with a pitiful glance at his companion.
+
+‘Come, Sir Lover! lend me a help to give back what we’ve borrowed to its
+rightful owner. ‘S blood! but I feel an appetite. This night-air takes
+me in the wind like a battering ram. I thought I had laid in a stout
+four-and-twenty hours’ stock of Westphalian Wurst at Master Groschen’s
+supper-table. Good stuff, washed down with superior Rhine wine; say your
+Liebfrauenmilch for my taste; though, when I first tried it, I grimaced
+like a Merry-Andrew, and remembered roast beef and Glo’ster ale in my
+prayers.’
+
+The Goshawk was in the act of replacing the pot of lilies, when a blow
+from a short truncheon, skilfully flung, struck him on the neck and
+brought him to the ground. With him fell the lilies. He glared to the
+right and left, and grasped the broken flower-pot for a return missile;
+but no enemy was in view to test his accuracy of aim.
+
+The deep-arched doorways showed their empty recesses the windows slept.
+
+‘Has that youth played me false?’ thought the discomfited squire, as he
+leaned quietly on his arm. Farina was nowhere near.
+
+Guy was quickly reassured.
+
+‘By my fay, now! that’s a fine thing! and a fine fellow! and a fleet
+foot! That lad ‘ll rise! He’ll be a squire some day. Look at him. Bowels
+of a’Becket! ‘tis a sight! I’d rather see that, now, than old Groschen
+‘s supper-table groaning with Wurst again, and running a river of
+Rudesheimer! Tussle on! I’ll lend a hand if there’s occasion; but you
+shall have the honour, boy, an you can win it.’
+
+This crying on of the hound was called forth by a chase up the street,
+in which the Goshawk beheld Farina pursue and capture a stalwart
+runaway, who refused with all his might to be brought back, striving
+every two and three of his tiptoe steps to turn against the impulse
+Farina had got on his neck and nether garments.
+
+‘Who ‘d have thought the lad was so wiry and mettlesome, with his soft
+face, blue eyes, and lank locks? but a green mead has more in it than
+many a black mountain. Hail, and well done! if I could dub you knight, I
+would: trust me!’ and he shook Farina by the hand.
+
+Farina modestly stood aside, and allowed the Goshawk to confront his
+prisoner.
+
+‘So, Sir Shy-i’the-dark! gallant Stick-i’the-back! Squire Truncheon, and
+Knight of the noble order of Quicksilver Legs! just take your stand at
+the distance you were off me when you discharged this instrument at my
+head. By ‘r lady! I smart a scratch to pay you in coin, and it’s lucky
+for you the coin is small, or you might reckon on it the same, trust me.
+Now, back!’
+
+The Goshawk lunged out with the truncheon, but the prisoner displayed no
+hesitation in complying, and fell back about a space of fifteen yards.
+
+‘I suppose he guesses I’ve never done the stupid trick before,’ mused
+Guy, ‘or he would not be so sharp.’ Observing that Farina had also
+fallen back in a line as guard, Guy motioned him to edge off to the
+right more, bawling, ‘Never mind why!’
+
+‘Now,’ thought Guy, ‘if I were sure of notching him, I’d do the speech
+part first; but as I’m not--throwing truncheons being no honourable
+profession anywhere--I’ll reserve that. The rascal don’t quail. We’ll
+see how long he stands firm.’
+
+The Goshawk cleared his wrist, fixed his eye, and swung the truncheon
+meditatively to and fro by one end. He then launched off the shoulder
+a mighty down-fling, calmly, watching it strike the prisoner to earth,
+like an ox under the hammer.
+
+‘A hit!’ said he, and smoothed his wrist.
+
+Farina knelt by the body, and lifted the head on his breast. ‘Berthold!
+Berthold!’ he cried; ‘no further harm shall hap to you, man! Speak!’
+
+‘You ken the scapegrace?’ said Guy, sauntering up.
+
+‘‘Tis Berthold Schmidt, son of old Schmidt, the great goldsmith of
+Cologne.’
+
+‘St. Dunstan was not at his elbow this time!’
+
+‘A rival of mine,’ whispered Farina.
+
+‘Oho!’ and the Goshawk wound a low hiss at his tongue’s tip. ‘Well! as
+I should have spoken if his ears had been open: Justice struck the blow;
+and a gentle one. This comes of taking a flying shot, and not standing
+up fair. And that seems all that can be said. Where lives he?’
+
+Farina pointed to the house of the Lilies.
+
+‘Beshrew me! the dog has some right on his side. Whew! yonder he lives?
+He took us for some night-prowlers. Why not come up fairly, and ask my
+business?
+
+Smelling a flower is not worth a broken neck, nor defending your
+premises quite deserving a hole in the pate. Now, my lad, you see what
+comes of dealing with cut and run blows; and let this be a warning to
+you.’
+
+They took the body by head and feet, and laid him at the door of his
+father’s house. Here the colour came to his cheek, and they wiped off
+the streaks of blood that stained him. Guy proved he could be tender
+with a fallen foe, and Farina with an ill-fated rival. It was who could
+suggest the soundest remedies, or easiest postures. One lent a kerchief
+and nursed him; another ran to the city fountain and fetched him water.
+Meantime the moon had dropped, and morning, grey and beamless, looked on
+the house-peaks and along the streets with steadier eye. They now both
+discerned a body of men, far down, fronting Gottlieb’s house, and drawn
+up in some degree of order. All their charity forsook them at once.
+
+‘Possess thyself of the truncheon,’ said Guy: ‘You see it can damage.
+More work before breakfast, and a fine account I must give of myself to
+my hostess of the Three Holy Kings!’
+
+Farina recovered the destructive little instrument.
+
+‘I am ready,’ said he. ‘But hark! there’s little work for us there, I
+fancy. Those be lads of Cologne, no grunters of the wild. ‘Tis the White
+Rose Club. Always too late for service.’
+
+Voices singing a hunting glee, popular in that age, swelled up the clear
+morning air; and gradually the words became distinct.
+
+             The Kaiser went a-hunting,
+               A-hunting, tra-ra:
+          With his bugle-horn at springing morn,
+          The Kaiser trampled bud and thorn:
+                    Tra-ra!
+
+        And the dew shakes green as the horsemen rear,
+        And a thousand feathers they flutter with fear;
+        And a pang drives quick to the heart of the deer;
+          For the Kaiser’s out a-hunting,
+                  Tra-ra!
+             Ta, ta, ta, ta,
+             Tra-ra, tra-ra,
+             Ta-ta, tra-ra, tra-ra!
+
+the owner of the truncheon awoke to these reviving tones, and uttered a
+faint responsive ‘Tra-ra!’
+
+‘Hark again!’ said Farina, in reply to the commendation of the Goshawk,
+whose face was dimpled over with the harmony.
+
+          The wild boar lay a-grunting,
+             A-grunting, tra-ra!
+        And, boom! comes the Kaiser to hunt up me?
+        Or, queak! the small birdie that hops on the tree?
+                  Tra-ra!
+        O birdie, and boar, and deer, lie tame!
+        For a maiden in bloom, or a full-blown dame,
+        Are the daintiest prey, and the windingest game,
+          When Kaisers go a-hunting,
+                  Tra-ra!
+             Ha, ha, ha, ha,
+               Tra-ra, tra-ra,
+             Ha-ha, tra-ra, tra-ra!
+
+The voices held long on the last note, and let it die in a forest
+cadence.
+
+‘‘Fore Gad! well done. Hurrah! Tra-ra, ha-ha, tra-ra! That’s a trick
+we’re not half alive to at home,’ said Guy. ‘I feel friendly with these
+German lads.’
+
+The Goshawk’s disposition toward German lads was that moment harshly
+tested by a smart rap on the shoulder from an end of German oak, and a
+proclamation that he was prisoner of the hand that gave the greeting, in
+the name of the White Rose Club. Following that, his staff was wrested
+from him by a dozen stout young fellows, who gave him no time to get
+his famous distance for defence against numbers; and he and Farina were
+marched forthwith to the chorusing body in front of Gottlieb Groschen’s
+house.
+
+
+
+
+THE MISSIVES
+
+Of all the inmates, Gottlieb had slept most with the day on his eyelids,
+for Werner hung like a nightmare over him. Margarita lay and dreamed
+in rose-colour, and if she thrilled on her pillowed silken couch like a
+tense-strung harp, and fretted drowsily in little leaps and starts, it
+was that a bird lay in her bosom, panting and singing through the
+night, and that he was not to be stilled, but would musically utter the
+sweetest secret thoughts of a love-bewitched maiden. Farina’s devotion
+she knew his tenderness she divined: his courage she had that day
+witnessed. The young girl no sooner felt that she could love worthily,
+than she loved with her whole strength. Muffed and remote came the
+hunting-song under her pillow, and awoke dreamy delicate curves in her
+fair face, as it thinned but did not banish her dream. Aunt Lisbeth also
+heard the song, and burst out of her bed to see that the door and window
+were secured against the wanton Kaiser. Despite her trials, she had
+taken her spell of sleep; but being possessed of some mystic maiden
+belief that in cases of apprehended peril from man, bed was a rock of
+refuge and fortified defence, she crept back there, and allowed the
+sun to rise without her. Gottlieb’s voice could not awaken her to the
+household duties she loved to perform with such a doleful visage. She
+heard him open his window, and parley in angry tones with the musicians
+below.
+
+‘Decoys!’ muttered Aunt Lisbeth; ‘be thou alive to them, Gottlieb!’
+
+He went downstairs and opened the street door, whereupon the scolding
+and railing commenced anew.
+
+‘Thou hast given them vantage, Gottlieb, brother mine,’ she complained;
+‘and the good heavens only can say what may result from such
+indiscreetness.’
+
+A silence, combustible with shuffling of feet in the passage and on the
+stairs, dinned horrors into Aunt Lisbeth’s head.
+
+‘It was just that sound in the left wing of Hollenbogenblitz,’ she said:
+‘only then it was night and not morning. Ursula preserve me!’
+
+‘Why, Lisbeth! Lisbeth!’ cried Gottlieb from below. ‘Come down! ‘tis
+full five o’ the morning. Here’s company; and what are we to do without
+the woman?’
+
+‘Ah, Gottlieb! that is like men! They do not consider how different it
+is for us!’ which mysterious sentence being uttered to herself alone,
+enjoyed a meaning it would elsewhere have been denied.
+
+Aunt Lisbeth dressed, and met Margarita descending. They exchanged the
+good-morning of young maiden and old.
+
+‘Go thou first,’ said Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+Margarita gaily tripped ahead.
+
+‘Girl!’ cried Aunt Lisbeth, ‘what’s that thing in thy back hair?’
+
+‘I have borrowed Lieschen’s arrow, aunt. Mine has had an accident.’
+
+‘Lieschen’s arrow! An accident! Now I will see to that after breakfast,
+Margarita.’
+
+‘Tra-ra, ta-ta, tra-ra, tra-ra,’ sang Margarita.
+
+          ‘The wild boar lay a-grunting,
+             A-grunting, tra-ra.’
+
+‘A maiden’s true and proper ornament! Look at mine, child! I have worn
+it fifty years. May I deserve to wear it till I am called! O Margarita!
+trifle not with that symbol.’
+
+       ‘“O birdie, and boar, and deer, lie tame!”
+
+I am so happy, aunty.’
+
+‘Nice times to be happy in, Margarita.’
+
+       “Be happy in Spring, sweet maidens all,
+        For Autumn’s chill will early fall.”
+
+So sings the Minnesinger, aunty; and
+
+       ‘“A maiden in the wintry leaf
+        Will spread her own disease of grief.”
+
+I love the Minnesingers! Dear, sweet-mannered men they are! Such lovers!
+And men of deeds as well as song: sword on one side and harp on the
+other. They fight till set of sun, and then slacken their armour to waft
+a ballad to their beloved by moonlight, covered with stains of battle as
+they are, and weary!’
+
+‘What a girl! Minnesingers! Yes; I know stories of those Minnesingers.
+They came to the castle--Margarita, a bead of thy cross is broken. I
+will attend to it. Wear the pearl one till I mend this. May’st thou
+never fall in the way of Minnesingers. They are not like Werner’s troop.
+They do not batter at doors: they slide into the house like snakes.’
+
+‘Lisbeth! Lisbeth!’ they heard Gottlieb calling impatiently.
+
+‘We come, Gottlieb!’ and in a low murmur Margarita heard her say: ‘May
+this day pass without trouble and shame to the pious and the chaste.’
+
+Margarita knew the voice of the stranger before she had opened the door,
+and on presenting herself, the hero gave her a guardian-like salute.
+
+‘One may see,’ he said, ‘that it requires better men than those of
+Werner to drive away the rose from that cheek.’
+
+Gottlieb pressed the rosy cheek to his shoulder and patted her.
+
+‘What do you think, Grete? You have now forty of the best lads in
+Cologne enrolled to protect you, and keep guard over the house night
+and day. There! What more could a Pfalzgrafin ask, now? And voluntary
+service; all to be paid with a smile, which I daresay my lady won’t
+refuse them. Lisbeth, you know our friend. Fear him not, good Lisbeth,
+and give us breakfast. Well, sweet chuck, you’re to have royal honours
+paid you. I warrant they’ve begun good work already in locking up that
+idle moony vagabond, Farina--’
+
+‘Him? What for, my father? How dared they! What has he done?’
+
+‘O, start not, my fairy maid! A small matter of breakage, pet! He
+tried to enter Cunigonde Schmidt’s chamber, and knocked down her pot
+of lilies: for which Berthold Schmidt knocked him down, and our friend
+here, out of good fellowship, knocked down Berthold. However, the chief
+offender is marched off to prison by your trusty guard, and there let
+him cool himself. Berthold shall tell you the tale himself: he’ll
+be here to breakfast, and receive your orders, mistress
+commander-in-chief.’
+
+The Goshawk had his eye on Margarita. Her teeth were tight down on her
+nether lip, and her whole figure had a strange look of awkwardness, she
+was so divided with anger.
+
+‘As witness of the affair, I think I shall make a clearer statement,
+fair maiden,’ he interposed. ‘In the first place, I am the offender. We
+passed under the window of the Fraulein Schmidt, and ‘twas I mounted
+to greet the lilies. One shoot of them is in my helm, and here let me
+present them to a worthier holder.’
+
+He offered the flowers with a smile, and Margarita took them, radiant
+with gratitude.
+
+‘Our friend Berthold,’ he continued, ‘thought proper to aim a blow at me
+behind my back, and then ran for his comrades. He was caught, and by
+my gallant young hero, Farina; concerning whose character I regret that
+your respected father and I differ: for, on the faith of a soldier
+and true man, he’s the finest among the fine fellows I’ve yet met in
+Germany, trust me. So, to cut the story short, execution was done upon
+Berthold by my hand, for an act of treachery. He appears to be a sort of
+captain of one of the troops, and not affectionately disposed to Farina;
+for the version of the affair you have heard from your father is a
+little invention of Master Berthold’s own. To do him justice, he seemed
+equally willing to get me under the cold stone; but a word from your
+good father changed the current; and as I thought I could serve our
+friend better free than behind bars, I accepted liberty. Pshaw! I should
+have accepted it any way, to tell the truth, for your German dungeons
+are mortal shivering ratty places. So rank me no hero, fair Mistress
+Margarita, though the temptation to seem one in such sweet eyes was
+beginning to lead me astray. And now, as to our business in the streets
+at this hour, believe the best of us.’
+
+‘I will! I do!’ said Margarita.
+
+‘Lisbeth! Lisbeth!’ called Gottlieb. ‘Breakfast, little sister! our
+champion is starving. He asks for wurst, milk-loaves, wine, and all thy
+rarest conserves. Haste, then, for the honour of Cologne is at stake.’
+
+Aunt Lisbeth jingled her keys in and out, and soon that harmony drew a
+number of domestics with platters of swine flesh, rolls of white wheaten
+bread, the perpetual worst, milk, wine, barley-bread, and household
+stores of dainties in profusion, all sparkling on silver, relieved by
+spotless white cloth. Gottlieb beheld such a sunny twinkle across the
+Goshawk’s face at this hospitable array, that he gave the word of onset
+without waiting for Berthold, and his guest immediately fell to, and did
+not relax in his exertions for a full half-hour by the Cathedral clock,
+eschewing the beer with a wry look made up of scorn and ruefulness, and
+drinking a well-brimmed health in Rhine wine all round. Margarita was
+pensive: Aunt Lisbeth on her guard. Gottlieb remembered Charles the
+Great’s counsel to Archbishop Turpin, and did his best to remain on
+earth one of its lords dominant.
+
+‘Poor Berthold!’ said he. ‘‘Tis a good lad, and deserves his seat at my
+table oftener. I suppose the flower-pot business has detained him. We’ll
+drink to him: eh, Grete?’
+
+‘Drink to him, dear father!--but here he is to thank you in person.’
+
+Margarita felt a twinge of pity as Berthold entered. The livid stains
+of his bruise deepened about his eyes, and gave them a wicked light
+whenever they were fixed intently; but they looked earnest; and spoke
+of a combat in which he could say that he proved no coward and was used
+with some cruelty. She turned on the Goshawk a mute reproach; yet smiled
+and loved him well when she beheld him stretch a hand of welcome and
+proffer a brotherly glass to Berthold. The rich goldsmith’s son was
+occupied in studying the horoscope of his fortunes in Margarita’s eyes;
+but when Margarita directed his attention to Guy, he turned to him with
+a glance of astonishment that yielded to cordial greeting.
+
+‘Well done, Berthold, my brave boy! All are friends who sit at table,’
+said Gottlieb. ‘In any case, at my table:
+
+          “‘Tis a worthy foe
+          Forgives the blow
+          Was dealt him full and fairly,”
+
+says the song; and the proverb takes it up with, “A generous enemy is a
+friend on the wrong side”; and no one’s to blame for that, save old Dame
+Fortune. So now a bumper to this jovial make-up between you. Lisbeth!
+you must drink it.’
+
+The little woman bowed melancholy obedience.
+
+‘Why did you fling and run?’ whispered Guy to Berthold.
+
+‘Because you were two against one.’
+
+‘Two against one, man! Why, have you no such thing as fair play in this
+land of yours? Did you think I should have taken advantage of that?’
+
+‘How could I tell who you were, or what you would do?’ muttered
+Berthold, somewhat sullenly.
+
+‘Truly no, friend! So you ran to make yourself twenty to two? But don’t
+be down on the subject. I was going to say, that though I treated you in
+a manner upright, ‘twas perhaps a trifle severe, considering your youth:
+but an example’s everything; and I must let you know in confidence, that
+no rascal truncheon had I flung in my life before; so, you see, I gave
+you all the chances.’
+
+Berthold moved his lips in reply; but thinking of the figure of defeat
+he was exhibiting before Margarita, caused him to estimate unfavourably
+what chances had stood in his favour.
+
+The health was drunk. Aunt Lisbeth touched the smoky yellow glass with a
+mincing lip, and beckoned Margarita to withdraw.
+
+‘The tapestry, child!’ she said. ‘Dangerous things are uttered after the
+third glass, I know, Margarita.’
+
+‘Do you call my champion handsome, aunt?’
+
+‘I was going to speak to you about him, Margarita. If I remember, he has
+rough, good looks, as far as they go. Yes: but thou, maiden, art thou
+thinking of him? I have thrice watched him wink; and that, as we
+know, is a habit of them that have sold themselves. And what is frail
+womankind to expect from such a brawny animal?’
+
+          ‘And oh! to lace his armour up,
+          And speed him to the field;
+          To pledge him in a kissing-cup,
+          The knight that will not yield!
+
+I am sure he is tender, aunt. Notice how gentle he looks now and then.’
+
+‘Thou girl! Yes, I believe she is madly in love with him. Tender,
+and gentle! So is the bear when you’re outside his den; but enter it,
+maiden, and try! Thou good Ursula, preserve me from such a fate.’
+
+‘Fear not, dear aunt! Have not a fear of it! Besides, it is not always
+the men that are bad. You must not forget Dalilah, and Lot’s wife, and
+Pfalzgrafin Jutta, and the Baroness who asked for a piece of poor Kraut.
+But, let us work, let us work!’
+
+Margarita sat down before Siegfried, and contemplated the hero. For the
+first time, she marked a resemblance in his features to Farina: the same
+long yellow hair scattered over his shoulders as that flowing from under
+Siegfried’s helm; the blue eyes, square brows, and regular outlines.
+‘This is a marvel,’ thought Margarita. ‘And Farina! it was to watch
+over me that he roamed the street last night, my best one! Is he not
+beautiful?’ and she looked closer at Siegfried.
+
+Aunt Lisbeth had begun upon the dragon with her usual method, and was
+soon wandering through skeleton halls of the old palatial castle in
+Bohemia. The woolly tongue of the monster suggested fresh horrors to
+her, and if Margarita had listened, she might have had fair excuses
+to forget her lover’s condition; but her voice only did service like a
+piece of clock-work, and her mind was in the prison with Farina. She
+was long debating how to win his release; and meditated so deeply, and
+exclaimed in so many bursts of impatience, that Aunt Lisbeth found her
+heart melting to the maiden. ‘Now,’ said she, ‘that is a well-known
+story about the Electress Dowager of Bavaria, when she came on a visit
+to the castle; and, my dear child, be it a warning. Terrible, too!’ and
+the little woman shivered pleasantly. ‘She had--I may tell you
+this, Margarita--yes, she had been false to her wedded husband.--You
+understand, maiden; or, no! you do not understand: I understand it only
+partly, mind. False, I say----’
+
+‘False--not true: go on, dear aunty,’ said Margarita, catching the word.
+
+‘I believe she knows as much as I do!’ ejaculated Aunt Lisbeth; ‘such
+are girls nowadays. When I was young-oh! for a maiden to know anything
+then--oh! it was general reprobation. No one thought of confessing it.
+We blushed and held down our eyes at the very idea. Well, the Electress!
+she was--you must guess. So she called for her caudle at eleven o’clock
+at night. What do you think that was? Well, there was spirit in it: not
+to say nutmeg, and lemon, and peach kernels. She wanted me to sit with
+her, but I begged my mistress to keep me from the naughty woman: and no
+friend of Hilda of Bayern was Bertha of Bohmen, you may be sure. Oh! the
+things she talked while she was drinking her caudle.
+
+Isentrude sat with her, and said it was fearful!--beyond blasphemy! and
+that she looked like a Bible witch, sitting up drinking and swearing
+and glaring in her nightclothes and nightcap. She was on a journey into
+Hungary, and claimed the hospitality of the castle on her way there.
+Both were widows. Well, it was a quarter to twelve. The Electress
+dropped back on her pillow, as she always did when she had finished the
+candle. Isentrude covered her over, heaped up logs on the fire, wrapped
+her dressing-gown about her, and prepared to sleep. It was Winter, and
+the wind howled at the doors, and rattled the windows, and shook the
+arras--Lord help us! Outside was all snow, and nothing but forest; as
+you saw when you came to me there, Gretelchen. Twelve struck. Isentrude
+was dozing; but she says that after the last stroke she woke with cold.
+A foggy chill hung in the room. She looked at the Electress, who had not
+moved. The fire burned feebly, and seemed weighed upon: Herr Je!--she
+thought she heard a noise. No. Quite quiet! As heaven preserve her, says
+slip, the smell in that room grew like an open grave, clammily putrid.
+Holy Virgin! This time she was certain she heard a noise; but it seemed
+on both sides of her. There was the great door leading to the first
+landing and state-room; and opposite exactly there was the panel of the
+secret passage. The noises seemed to advance as if step by step, and
+grew louder in each ear as she stood horrified on the marble of the
+hearth. She looked at the Electress again, and her eyes were wide open;
+but for all Isentrude’s calling, she would not wake. Only think! Now the
+noise increased, and was a regular tramp-grate, tramp-screw sound-coming
+nearer and nearer: Saints of mercy! The apartment was choking with
+vapours. Isentrude made a dart, and robed herself behind a curtain of
+the bed just as the two doors opened. She could see through a slit in
+the woven work, and winked her eyes which she had shut close on hearing
+the scream of the door-hinges--winked her eyes to catch a sight for
+moment--we are such sinful, curious creatures!--What she saw then, she
+says she shall never forget; nor I! As she was a living woman, there she
+saw the two dead princes, the Prince Palatine of Bohemia and the Elector
+of Bavaria, standing front to front at the foot of the bed, all in white
+armour, with drawn swords, and attendants holding pine-torches. Neither
+of them spoke. Their vizors were down; but she knew them by their arms
+and bearing: both tall, stately presences, good knights in their day,
+and had fought against the Infidel! So one of them pointed to the bed,
+and then a torch was lowered, and the fight commenced. Isentrude saw the
+sparks fly, and the steel struck till it was shattered; but they fought
+on, not caring for wounds, and snorting with fury as they grew hotter.
+They fought a whole hour. The poor girl was so eaten up with looking on,
+that she let go the curtain and stood quite exposed among them. So, to
+steady herself, she rested her hand on the bed-side; and--think what she
+felt--a hand as cold as ice locked hers, and get from it she could not!
+That instant one of the princes fell. It was Bohmen. Bayern sheathed his
+sword, and waved his hand, and the attendants took up the slaughtered
+ghost, feet and shoulders, and bore him to the door of the secret
+passage, while Bayern strode after--’
+
+‘Shameful!’ exclaimed Margarita. ‘I will speak to Berthold as he
+descends. I hear him coming. He shall do what I wish.’
+
+‘Call it dreadful, Grete! Dreadful it was. If Berthold would like to
+sit and hear--Ah! she is gone. A good girl! and of a levity only on the
+surface.’
+
+Aunt Lisbeth heard Margarita’s voice rapidly addressing Berthold. His
+reply was low and brief. ‘Refuses to listen to anything of the sort,’
+Aunt Lisbeth interpreted it. Then he seemed to be pleading, and
+Margarita uttering short answers. ‘I trust ‘tis nothing a maiden should
+not hear,’ the little lady exclaimed with a sigh.
+
+The door opened, and Lieschen stood at the entrance.
+
+‘For Fraulein Margarita,’ she said, holding a letter halfway out.
+
+‘Give it,’ Aunt Lisbeth commanded.
+
+The woman hesitated--‘‘Tis for the Fraulein.’
+
+‘Give it, I tell thee!’ and Aunt Lisbeth eagerly seized the missive,
+and subjected it to the ordeal of touch. It was heavy, and contained
+something hard. Long pensive pressures revealed its shape on the paper.
+It was an arrow. ‘Go!’ said she to the woman, and, once alone, began,
+bee-like, to buzz all over it, and finally entered. It contained
+Margarita’s Silver Arrow. ‘The art of that girl!’ And the writing said:
+
+   ‘SWEETEST MAIDEN!
+
+   ‘By this arrow of our betrothal, I conjure thee to meet me in all
+   haste without the western gate, where, burning to reveal to thee
+   most urgent tidings that may not be confided to paper, now waits,
+   petitioning the saints, thy
+
+                    ‘FARINA.’
+
+Aunt Lisbeth placed letter and arrow in a drawer; locked it; and ‘always
+thought so.’ She ascended the stairs to consult with Gottlieb. Roars
+of laughter greeted her just as she lifted the latch, and she retreated
+abashed.
+
+There was no time to lose. Farina must be caught in the act of waiting
+for Margarita, and by Gottlieb, or herself. Gottlieb was revelling. ‘May
+this be a warning to thee, Gottlieb,’ murmured Lisbeth, as she hooded
+her little body in Margarita’s fur-cloak, and determined that she would
+be the one to confound Farina.
+
+Five minutes later Margarita returned. Aunt Lisbeth was gone. The dragon
+still lacked a tip to his forked tongue, and a stream of fiery threads
+dangled from the jaws of the monster. Another letter was brought into
+the room by Lieschen.
+
+‘For Aunt Lisbeth,’ said Margarita, reading the address. ‘Who can it be
+from?’
+
+‘She does not stand pressing about your letters,’ said the woman; and
+informed Margarita of the foregoing missive.
+
+‘You say she drew an arrow from it?’ said Margarita, with burning face.
+‘Who brought this? tell me!’ and just waiting to hear it was Farina’s
+mother, she tore the letter open, and read:
+
+   ‘DEAREST LISBETH!
+
+   ‘Thy old friend writes to thee; she that has scarce left eyes to see
+   the words she writes. Thou knowest we are a fallen house, through
+   the displeasure of the Emperor on my dead husband. My son, Farina,
+   is my only stay, and well returns to me the blessings I bestow upon
+   him. Some call him idle: some think him too wise. I swear to thee,
+   Lisbeth, he is only good. His hours are devoted to the extraction
+   of essences--to no black magic. Now he is in trouble-in prison.
+   The shadow that destroyed his dead father threatens him. Now, by
+   our old friendship, beloved Lisbeth! intercede with Gottlieb, that
+   he may plead for my son before the Emperor when he comes--’
+
+Margarita read no more. She went to the window, and saw her guard
+marshalled outside. She threw a kerchief over her head, and left the
+house by the garden gate.
+
+
+
+
+THE MONK
+
+By this time the sun stood high over Cologne. The market-places were
+crowded with buyers and sellers, mixed with a loitering swarm of
+soldiery, for whose thirsty natures winestalls had been tumbled up.
+Barons and knights of the empire, bravely mounted and thickly followed,
+poured hourly into Cologne from South Germany and North. Here, staring
+Suabians, and round-featured warriors of the East Kingdom, swaggered up
+and down, patting what horses came across them, for lack of occupation
+for their hands. Yonder, huge Pomeranians, with bosks of beard stiffened
+out square from the chin, hurtled mountainous among the peaceable
+inhabitants. Troopers dismounted went straddling, in tight hose and
+loose, prepared to drink good-will to whomsoever would furnish the
+best quality liquor for that solemn pledge, and equally ready to pick
+a quarrel with them that would not. It was a scene of flaring feathers,
+wide-flapped bonnets, flaunting hose, blue and battered steel plates,
+slashed woollen haunch-bags, leather-leggings, ensigns, and imperious
+boots and shoulders. Margarita was too hurried in her mind to
+be conscious of an imprudence; but her limbs trembled, and she
+instinctively quickened her steps. When she stood under the sign of
+the Three Holy Kings, where dwelt Farina’s mother, she put up a fervent
+prayer of thanks, and breathed freely.
+
+‘I had expected a message from Lisbeth,’ said Frau Farina; ‘but thou,
+good heart! thou wilt help us?’
+
+‘All that may be done by me I will do,’ replied Margarita; ‘but his
+mother yearns to see him, and I have come to bear her company.’
+
+The old lady clasped her hands and wept.
+
+‘Has he found so good a friend, my poor boy! And trust me, dear maiden,
+he is not unworthy, for better son never lived, and good son, good all!
+Surely we will go to him, but not as thou art. I will dress thee.
+Such throngs are in the streets: I heard them clattering in early this
+morning. Rest, dear heart, till I return.’
+
+Margarita had time to inspect the single sitting-room in which her lover
+lived. It was planted with bottles, and vases, and pipes, and cylinders,
+piling on floor, chair, and table. She could not suppress a slight
+surprise of fear, for this display showed a dealing with hidden things,
+and a summoning of scattered spirits. It was this that made his brow so
+pale, and the round of his eye darker than youth should let it be! She
+dismissed the feeling, and assumed her own bright face as Dame Farina
+reappeared, bearing on her arm a convent garb, and other apparel.
+Margarita suffered herself to be invested in the white and black robes
+of the denial of life.
+
+‘There!’ said the Frau Farina, ‘and to seal assurance, I have engaged
+a guard to accompany us. He was sorely bruised in a street combat
+yesterday, and was billeted below, where I nursed and tended him, and he
+is grateful, as man should be-though I did little, doing my utmost--and
+with him near us we have nought to fear.’
+
+‘Good,’ said Margarita, and they kissed and departed. The guard was
+awaiting them outside.
+
+‘Come, my little lady, and with thee the holy sister! ‘Tis no step
+from here, and I gage to bring ye safe, as sure as my name’s Schwartz
+Thier!--Hey? The good sister’s dropping. Look, now! I’ll carry her.’
+
+Margarita recovered her self-command before he could make good this
+offer.
+
+‘Only let us hasten there,’ she gasped.
+
+The Thier strode on, and gave them safe-conduct to the prison where
+Farina was confined, being near one of the outer forts of the city.
+
+‘Thank and dismiss him,’ whispered Margarita.
+
+‘Nay! he will wait-wilt thou not, friend! We shall not be long, though
+it is my son I visit here,’ said Frau Farina.
+
+‘Till to-morrow morning, my little lady! The lion thanked him that
+plucked the thorn from his foot, and the Thier may be black, but he’s
+not ungrateful, nor a worse beast than the lion.’
+
+They entered the walls and left him.
+
+For the first five minutes Schwartz Thier found employment for
+his faculties by staring at the shaky, small-paned windows of the
+neighbourhood. He persevered in this, after all novelty had been
+exhausted, from an intuitive dread of weariness. There was nothing to
+see. An old woman once bobbed out of an attic, and doused the flints
+with water. Harassed by increasing dread of the foul nightmare of
+nothing-to-do, the Thier endeavoured to establish amorous intelligence
+with her. She responded with an indignant projection of the underjaw,
+evanishing rapidly. There was no resource left him but to curse her with
+extreme heartiness. The Thier stamped his right leg, and then his left,
+and remembered the old woman as a grievance five minutes longer. When
+she was clean forgotten, he yawned. Another spouse of the moment was
+wanted, to be wooed, objurgated, and regretted. The prison-gate was in
+a secluded street. Few passengers went by, and those who did edged away
+from the ponderous, wanton-eyed figure of lazy mischief lounging there,
+as neatly as they well could. The Thier hailed two or three. One took
+to his legs, another bowed, smirked, gave him a kindly good-day, and
+affected to hear no more, having urgent business in prospect. The Thier
+was a faithful dog, but the temptation to betray his trust and pursue
+them was mighty. He began to experience an equal disposition to cry and
+roar. He hummed a ballad--
+
+       ‘I swore of her I’d have my will,
+         And with him I’d have my way:
+        I learn’d my cross-bow over the hill:
+         Now what does my lady say?
+
+Give me the good old cross-bow, after all, and none of these lumbering
+puff-and-bangs that knock you down oftener than your man!
+
+       ‘A cross stands in the forest still,
+         And a cross in the churchyard grey:
+        My curse on him who had his will,
+         And on him who had his way!
+
+Good beginning, bad ending! ‘Tisn’t so always. “Many a cross has the
+cross-bow built,” they say. I wish I had mine, now, to peg off that old
+woman, or somebody. I’d swear she’s peeping at me over the gable, or
+behind some cranny. They’re curious, the old women, curse ‘em! And the
+young, for that matter. Devil a young one here.
+
+       ‘When I’m in for the sack of a town,
+         What, think ye, I poke after, up and down?
+        Silver and gold I pocket in plenty,
+         But the sweet tit-bit is my lass under twenty.
+
+I should like to be in for the sack of this Cologne. I’d nose out that
+pretty girl I was cheated of yesterday. Take the gold and silver, and
+give me the maiden! Her neck’s silver, and her hair gold. Ah! and her
+cheeks roses, and her mouth-say no more! I’m half thinking Werner, the
+hungry animal, has cast wolf’s eyes on her. They say he spoke of her
+last night. Don’t let him thwart me. Thunderblast him! I owe him a
+grudge. He’s beginning to forget my plan o’ life.’
+
+A flight of pigeons across the blue top of the street abstracted the
+Thier from these reflections. He gaped after them in despair, and fell
+to stretching and shaking himself, rattling his lungs with loud reports.
+As he threw his eyes round again, they encountered those of a monk
+opposite fastened on him in penetrating silence. The Thier hated monks
+as a wild beast shuns fire; but now even a monk was welcome.
+
+‘Halloo!’ he sung out.
+
+The monk crossed over to him.
+
+‘Friend!’ said he, ‘weariness is teaching thee wantonness. Wilt thou
+take service for a night’s work, where the danger is little, the reward
+lasting?’
+
+‘As for that,’ replied the Thier, ‘danger comes to me like greenwood to
+the deer, and good pay never yet was given in promises. But I’m bound
+for the next hour to womankind within there. They’re my masters; as
+they’ve been of tough fellows before me.’
+
+‘I will seek them, and win their consent,’ said the monk, and so left
+him.
+
+‘Quick dealing!’ thought the Thier, and grew brisker. ‘The Baron won’t
+want me to-night: and what if he does? Let him hang himself--though, if
+he should, ‘twill be a pity I’m not by to help him.’
+
+He paced under the wall to its farthest course. Turning back, he
+perceived the monk at the gateway.
+
+‘A sharp hand!’ thought the Thier.
+
+‘Intrude no question on me,’ the monk began; ‘but hold thy peace and
+follow: the women release thee, and gladly.’
+
+‘That’s not my plan o’ life, now! Money down, and then command me’: and
+Schwartz Thier stood with one foot forward, and hand stretched out.
+
+A curl of scorn darkened the cold features of the monk.
+
+He slid one hand into a side of his frock above the girdle, and tossed a
+bag of coin.
+
+‘Take it, if ‘tis in thee to forfeit the greater blessing,’ he cried
+contemptuously.
+
+The Thier peeped into the bag, and appeared satisfied.
+
+‘I follow,’ said he; ‘lead on, good father, and I’ll be in the track of
+holiness for the first time since my mother was quit of me.’
+
+The monk hurried up the street and into the marketplace, oblivious of
+the postures and reverences of the people, who stopped to stare at him
+and his gaunt attendant. As they crossed the square, Schwartz Thier
+spied Henker Rothhals starting from a wine-stall on horseback, and could
+not forbear hailing him. Before the monk had time to utter a reproach,
+they were deep together in a double-shot of query and reply.
+
+‘Whirr!’ cried the Thier, breaking on some communication. ‘Got her, have
+they? and swung her across stream? I’m one with ye for my share, or call
+me sheep!’
+
+He waved his hand to the monk, and taking hold of the horse’s rein, ran
+off beside his mounted confederate, heavily shod as he was.
+
+The monk frowned after him, and swelled with a hard sigh.
+
+‘Gone!’ he exclaimed, ‘and the accursed gold with him! Well did a voice
+warn me that such service was never to be bought!’
+
+He did not pause to bewail or repent, but returned toward the prison
+with rapid footsteps, muttering: ‘I with the prison-pass for two; why
+was I beguiled by that bandit? Saw I not the very youth given into my
+hands there, he that was with the damsel and the aged woman?’
+
+
+
+
+THE RIDE AND THE RACE
+
+Late in the noon a horseman, in the livery of the Kaiser’s body-guard,
+rode dry and dusty into Cologne, with tidings that the Kaiser was at
+Hammerstein Castle, and commanding all convocated knights, barons,
+counts, and princes, to assemble and prepare for his coming, on a
+certain bare space of ground within two leagues of Cologne, thence to
+swell the train of his triumphal entry into the ancient city of his
+empire.
+
+Guy the Goshawk, broad-set on a Flemish mare, and a pack-horse beside
+him, shortly afterward left the hotel of the Three Holy Kings, and
+trotted up to Gottlieb’s door.
+
+‘Tent-pitching is now my trade,’ said he, as Gottlieb came down to him.
+‘My lord is with the Kaiser. I must say farewell for the nonce. Is the
+young lady visible?’
+
+‘Nor young, nor old, good friend,’ replied Gottlieb, with a countenance
+somewhat ruffled. ‘I dined alone for lack of your company. Secret
+missives came, I hear, to each of them, and both are gadding. Now what
+think you of this, after the scene of yesterday?--Lisbeth too!’
+
+‘Preaches from the old text, Master Groschen; “Never reckon on womankind
+for a wise act.” But farewell! and tell Mistress Margarita that I take
+it ill of her not giving me her maiden hand to salute before parting. My
+gravest respects to Frau Lisbeth. I shall soon be sitting with you over
+that prime vintage of yours, or fortune’s dead against me.’
+
+So, with a wring of the hand, Guy put the spur to his round-flanked
+beast, and was quickly out of Cologne on the rough roadway.
+
+He was neither the first nor the last of the men-at-arms hastening to
+obey the Kaiser’s mandate. A string of horse and foot in serpentine
+knots stretched along the flat land, flashing colours livelier than the
+spring-meadows bordering their line of passage. Guy, with a nod for all,
+and a greeting for the best-disposed, pushed on toward the van, till the
+gathering block compelled him to adopt the snail’s pace of the advance
+party, and gave him work enough to keep his two horses from being jammed
+with the mass. Now and then he cast a weather-eye on the heavens, and
+was soon confirmed in an opinion he had repeatedly ejaculated, that ‘the
+first night’s camping would be a drencher.’ In the West a black bank
+of cloud was blotting out the sun before his time. Northeast shone bare
+fields of blue lightly touched with loosefloating strips and flakes of
+crimson vapour. The furrows were growing purple-dark, and gradually a
+low moaning obscurity enwrapped the whole line, and mufed the noise of
+hoof, oath, and waggon-wheel in one sullen murmur.
+
+Guy felt very much like a chopped worm, as he wriggled his way onward
+in the dusk, impelled from the rear, and reduced to grope after the main
+body. Frequent and deep counsel he took with a trusty flask suspended
+at his belt. It was no pleasant reflection that the rain would be down
+before he could build up anything like shelter for horse and man. Still
+sadder the necessity of selecting his post on strange ground, and in
+darkness. He kept an anxious look-out for the moon, and was presently
+rejoiced to behold a broad fire that twinkled branchy beams through an
+east-hill orchard.
+
+‘My lord calls her Goddess,’ said Guy, wistfully. ‘The title’s
+outlandish, and more the style of these foreigners but she may have it
+to-night, an she ‘ll just keep the storm from shrouding her bright eye a
+matter of two hours.’
+
+She rose with a boding lustre. Drifts of thin pale upper-cloud leaned
+down ladders, pure as virgin silver, for her to climb to her highest
+seat on the unrebellious half-circle of heaven.
+
+‘My mind’s made up!’ quoth Guy to the listening part of himself. ‘Out of
+this I’ll get.’
+
+By the clearer ray he had discerned a narrow track running a white
+parallel with the general route. At the expense of dislocating a mile
+of the cavalcade, he struck into it. A dyke had to be taken, some heavy
+fallows crossed, and the way was straight before him. He began to sneer
+at the slow jog-trot and absence of enterprise which made the fellows he
+had left shine so poorly in comparison with the Goshawk, but a sight of
+two cavaliers in advance checked his vanity, and now to overtake them he
+tasked his fat Flemish mare with unwonted pricks of the heel, that made
+her fling out and show more mettle than speed.
+
+The objects of this fiery chase did not at first awake to a sense of
+being pursued. Both rode with mantled visages, and appeared profoundly
+inattentive to the world outside their meditations. But the Goshawk
+was not to be denied, and by dint of alternately roaring at them and
+upbraiding his two stumping beasts, he at last roused the younger of the
+cavaliers, who called to his companion loudly: without effect it seemed,
+for he had to repeat the warning. Guy was close up with them, when the
+youth exclaimed:
+
+‘Father! holy father! ‘Tis Sathanas in person!’
+
+The other rose and pointed trembling to a dark point in the distance as
+he vociferated:
+
+‘Not here! not here; but yonder!’
+
+Guy recognized the voice of the first speaker, and cried:
+
+‘Stay! halt a second! Have you forgotten the Goshawk?’
+
+‘Never!’ came the reply, ‘and forget not Farina!’
+
+Spur and fleeter steeds carried them out of hearing ere Guy could throw
+in another syllable. Farina gazed back on him remorsefully, but the Monk
+now rated his assistant with indignation.
+
+‘Thou weak one! nothing less than fool! to betray thy name on such an
+adventure as this to soul save the saints!’
+
+Farina tossed back his locks, and held his forehead to the moon. All the
+Monk’s ghostly wrath was foiled by the one little last sweet word of his
+beloved, which made music in his ears whenever annoyance sounded.
+
+‘And herein,’ say the old writers, ‘are lovers, who love truly, truly
+recompensed for their toils and pains; in that love, for which they
+suffer, is ever present to ward away suffering not sprung of love: but
+the disloyal, who serve not love faithfully, are a race given over
+to whatso this base world can wreak upon them, without consolation or
+comfort of their mistress, Love; whom sacrificing not all to, they know
+not to delight in.’
+
+The soul of a lover lives through every member of him in the joy of a
+moonlight ride. Sorrow and grief are slow distempers that crouch from
+the breeze, and nourish their natures far from swift-moving things. A
+true lover is not one of those melancholy flies that shoot and maze over
+muddy stagnant pools. He must be up in the great air. He must strike
+all the strings of life. Swiftness is his rapture. In his wide arms
+he embraces the whole form of beauty. Eagle-like are his instincts;
+dove-like his desires. Then the fair moon is the very presence of his
+betrothed in heaven. So for hours rode Farina in a silver-fleeting
+glory; while the Monk as a shadow, galloped stern and silent beside
+him. So, crowning them in the sky, one half was all love and light; one,
+blackness and fell purpose.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMBAT ON DRACHENFELS
+
+Not to earth was vouchsafed the honour of commencing the great battle of
+that night. By an expiring blue-shot beam of moonlight, Farina beheld
+a vast realm of gloom filling the hollow of the West, and the moon was
+soon extinguished behind sluggish scraps of iron scud detached from the
+swinging bulk of ruin, as heavily it ground on the atmosphere in the
+first thunder-launch of motion.
+
+The heart of the youth was strong, but he could not view without quicker
+fawning throbs this manifestation of immeasurable power, which seemed as
+if with a stroke it was capable of destroying creation and the works of
+man. The bare aspect of the tempest lent terrors to the adventure he
+was engaged in, and of which he knew not the aim, nor might forecast
+the issue. Now there was nothing to illumine their path but such forked
+flashes as lightning threw them at intervals, touching here a hill with
+clustered cottages, striking into day there a May-blossom, a patch of
+weed, a single tree by the wayside. Suddenly a more vivid and continuous
+quiver of violet fire met its reflection on the landscape, and Farina
+saw the Rhine-stream beneath him.
+
+‘On such a night,’ thought he, ‘Siegfried fought and slew the dragon!’
+
+A blast of light, as from the jaws of the defeated dragon in his throes,
+made known to him the country he traversed. Crimsoned above the water
+glimmered the monster-haunted rock itself, and mid-channel beyond, flat
+and black to the stream, stretched the Nuns’ Isle in cloistral peace.
+
+‘Halt!’ cried the Monk, and signalled with a peculiar whistle, to
+which he seemed breathlessly awaiting an answer. They were immediately
+surrounded by longrobed veiled figures.
+
+‘Not too late?’ the Monk hoarsely asked of them.
+
+‘Yet an hour!’ was the reply, in soft clear tones of a woman’s voice.
+
+‘Great strength and valour more than human be mine,’ exclaimed the Monk,
+dismounting.
+
+He passed apart from them; and they drew in a circle, while he prayed,
+kneeling.
+
+Presently he returned, and led Farina to a bank, drawing from some
+hiding-place a book and a bell, which he gave into the hands of the
+youth.
+
+‘For thy soul, no word!’ said the Monk, speaking down his throat as he
+took in breath. ‘Nay! not in answer to me! Be faithful, and more than
+earthly fortune is thine; for I say unto thee, I shall not fail, having
+grace to sustain this combat.’
+
+Thereupon he commenced the ascent of Drachenfels.
+
+Farina followed. He had no hint of the Monk’s mission, nor of the
+part himself was to play in it. Such a load of silence gathered on
+his questioning spirit, that the outcry of the rageing elements alone
+prevented him from arresting the Monk and demanding the end of his
+service there. That outcry was enough to freeze speech on the very lips
+of a mortal. For scarce had they got footing on the winding path of
+the crags, when the whole vengeance of the storm was hurled against the
+mountain. Huge boulders were loosened and came bowling from above: trees
+torn by their roots from the fissures whizzed on the eddies of the wind:
+torrents of rain foamed down the iron flanks of rock, and flew off in
+hoar feathers against the short pauses of darkness: the mountain heaved,
+and quaked, and yawned a succession of hideous chasms.
+
+‘There’s a devil in this,’ thought Farina. He looked back and marked the
+river imaging lurid abysses of cloud above the mountain-summit--yea! and
+on the summit a flaming shape was mirrored.
+
+Two nervous hands stayed the cry on his mouth.
+
+‘Have I not warned thee?’ said the husky voice of the Monk. ‘I may well
+watch, and think for thee as for a dog. Be thou as faithful!’
+
+He handed a flask to the youth, and bade him drink. Farina drank and
+felt richly invigorated. The Monk then took bell and book.
+
+‘But half an hour,’ he muttered, ‘for this combat that is to ring
+through centuries.’
+
+Crossing himself, he strode wildly upward. Farina saw him beckon back
+once, and the next instant he was lost round an incline of the highest
+peak.
+
+The wind that had just screamed a thousand death-screams, was now
+awfully dumb, albeit Farina could feel it lifting hood and hair. In the
+unnatural stillness his ear received tones of a hymn chanted below; now
+sinking, now swelling; as though the voices faltered between prayer and
+inspiration. Farina caught on a projection of crag, and fixed his eyes
+on what was passing on the height.
+
+There was the Monk in his brown hood and wrapper, confronting--if he
+might trust his balls of sight--the red-hot figure of the Prince of
+Darkness.
+
+As yet no mortal tussle had taken place between them. They were arguing:
+angrily, it was true: yet with the first mutual deference of practised
+logicians. Latin and German was alternately employed by both. It
+thrilled Farina’s fervid love of fatherland to hear the German Satan
+spoke: but his Latin was good, and his command over that tongue
+remarkable; for, getting the worst of the argument, as usual, he
+revenged himself by parodying one of the Church canticles with a point
+that discomposed his adversary, and caused him to retreat a step,
+claiming support against such shrewd assault.
+
+‘The use of an unexpected weapon in warfare is in itself half a victory.
+Induce your antagonist to employ it as a match for you, and reckon on
+completely routing him...’ says the old military chronicle.
+
+‘Come!’ said the Demon with easy raillery. ‘You know your game--I
+mine! I really want the good people to be happy; dancing, kissing,
+propagating, what you will. We quite agree. You can have no objection to
+me, but a foolish old prejudice--not personal, but class; an antipathy
+of the cowl, for which I pardon you! What I should find in you to
+complain of--I have only to mention it, I am sure--is, that perhaps you
+do speak a little too much through your nose.’
+
+The Monk did not fall into the jocular trap by retorting in the same
+strain.
+
+‘Laugh with the Devil, and you won’t laugh longest,’ says the proverb.
+
+Keeping to his own arms, the holy man frowned.
+
+‘Avaunt, Fiend!’ he cried. ‘To thy kingdom below! Thou halt raged over
+earth a month, causing blights, hurricanes, and epidemics of the deadly
+sins. Parley no more! Begone!’
+
+The Demon smiled: the corners of his mouth ran up to his ears, and his
+eyes slid down almost into one.
+
+‘Still through the nose!’ said he reproachfully.
+
+‘I give thee Five Minutes!’ cried the Monk.
+
+‘I had hoped for a longer colloquy,’ sighed the Demon, jogging his left
+leg and trifling with his tail.
+
+‘One Minute!’ exclaimed the Monk.
+
+‘Truly so!’ said the Demon. ‘I know old Time and his habits better than
+you really can. We meet every Saturday night, and communicate our best
+jokes. I keep a book of them Down There!’
+
+And as if he had reason to remember the pavement of his Halls, he stood
+tiptoe and whipped up his legs.
+
+‘Two Minutes!’
+
+The Demon waved perfect acquiescence, and continued:
+
+‘We understand each other, he and I. All Old Ones do. As long as he
+lasts, I shall. The thing that surprises me is, that you and I cannot
+agree, similar as we are in temperament, and playing for the long odds,
+both of us. My failure is, perhaps, too great a passion for sport, aha!
+Well, ‘tis a pity you won’t try and live on the benevolent principle.
+I am indeed kind to them who commiserate my condition. I give them all
+they want, aha! Hem! Try and not believe in me now, aha! Ho!... Can’t
+you? What are eyes? Persuade yourself you’re dreaming. You can do
+anything with a mind like yours, Father Gregory! And consider the luxury
+of getting me out of the way so easily, as many do. It is my finest
+suggestion, aha! Generally I myself nudge their ribs with the capital
+idea--You’re above bribes? I was going to observe--’
+
+‘Three!’
+
+‘Observe, that if you care for worldly honours, I can smother you with
+that kind of thing. Several of your first-rate people made a bargain
+with me when they were in the fog, and owe me a trifle. Patronage they
+call it. I hook the high and the low. Too-little and too-much serve
+me better than Beelzebub. A weak stomach is certainly more carnally
+virtuous than a full one. Consequently my kingdom is becoming too
+respectable. They’ve all got titles, and object to being asked to poke
+the fire without--Honourable-and-with-Exceeding-Brightness-Beaming
+Baroness This! Admirably-Benignant-Down-looking Highness That!
+Interrupts business, especially when you have to ask them to fry
+themselves, according to the rules... Would you like Mainz and the
+Rheingau?... You don’t care for Beauty--Puella, Puellae? I have plenty
+of them, too, below. The Historical Beauties warmed up at a moment’s
+notice. Modern ones made famous between morning and night--Fame is the
+sauce of Beauty. Or, no--eh?’
+
+‘Four!’
+
+‘Not quite so fast, if you please. You want me gone. Now, where’s
+your charity? Do you ask me to be always raking up those poor devils
+underneath? While I’m here, they’ve a respite. They cannot think
+you kind, Father Gregory! As for the harm, you see, I’m not the more
+agreeable by being face to face with you--though some fair dames do take
+to my person monstrously. The secret is, the quantity of small talk
+I can command: that makes them forget my smell, which is, I confess,
+abominable, displeasing to myself, and my worst curse. Your sort, Father
+Gregory, are somewhat unpleasant in that particular--if I may judge by
+their Legate here. Well, try small talk. They would fall desperately in
+love with polecats and skunks if endowed with small talk. Why, they
+have become enamoured of monks before now! If skunks, why not monks? And
+again--’
+
+‘Five!’
+
+Having solemnly bellowed this tremendous number, the holy man lifted his
+arms to begin the combat.
+
+Farina felt his nerves prick with admiration of the ghostly warrior
+daring the Second Power of Creation on that lonely mountain-top. He
+expected, and shuddered at thought of the most awful fight ever yet
+chronicled of those that have taken place between heroes and the hounds
+of evil: but his astonishment was great to hear the Demon, while Bell
+was in air and Book aloft, retreat, shouting, ‘Hold!’
+
+‘I surrender,’ said he sullenly. ‘What terms?’
+
+‘Instantaneous riddance of thee from face of earth.’
+
+‘Good!--Now,’ said the Demon, ‘did you suppose I was to be trapped into
+a fight? No doubt you wish to become a saint, and have everybody talking
+of my last defeat.... Pictures, poems, processions, with the Devil
+downmost! No. You’re more than a match for me.’
+
+‘Silence, Darkness!’ thundered the Monk, ‘and think not to vanquish thy
+victor by flatteries. Begone!’
+
+And again he towered in his wrath.
+
+The Demon drew his tail between his legs, and threw the forked, fleshy,
+quivering end over his shoulder. He then nodded cheerfully, pointed
+his feet, and finicked a few steps away, saying: ‘I hope we shall meet
+again.’
+
+Upon that he shot out his wings, that were like the fins of the
+wyver-fish, sharpened in venomous points.
+
+‘Commands for your people below?’ he inquired, leering with chin
+awry. ‘Desperate ruffians some of those cowls. You are right not to
+acknowledge them.’
+
+Farina beheld the holy man in no mood to let the Enemy tamper with him
+longer.
+
+The Demon was influenced by a like reflection; for, saying, ‘Cologne is
+the city your Holiness inhabits, I think?’ he shot up rocket-like
+over Rhineland, striking the entire length of the stream, and its
+rough-bearded castle-crests, slate-ledges, bramble-clefts, vine-slopes,
+and haunted valleys, with one brimstone flash. Frankfort and the far
+Main saw him and reddened. Ancient Trier and Mosel; Heidelberg and
+Neckar; Limberg and Lahn, ran guilty of him. And the swift artery of
+these shining veins, Rhine, from his snow cradle to his salt decease,
+glimmered Stygian horrors as the Infernal Comet, sprung over Bonn,
+sparkled a fiery minute along the face of the stream, and vanished,
+leaving a seam of ragged flame trailed on the midnight heavens.
+
+Farina breathed hard through his teeth.
+
+‘The last of him was awful,’ said he, coming forward to where the Monk
+knelt and grasped his breviary, ‘but he was vanquished easily.’
+
+‘Easily?’ exclaimed the holy man, gasping satisfaction: ‘thou weakling!
+is it for thee to measure difficulties, or estimate powers? Easily? thou
+worldling! and so are great deeds judged when the danger’s past! And
+what am I but the humble instrument that brought about this wondrous
+conquest! the poor tool of this astounding triumph! Shall the sword say,
+This is the battle I won! Yonder the enemy I overthrow! Bow to me, ye
+lords of earth, and worshippers of mighty acts? Not so! Nay, but the
+sword is honoured in the hero’s grasp, and if it break not, it is
+accounted trusty. This, then, this little I may claim, that I was
+trusty! Trusty in a heroic encounter! Trusty in a battle with earth’s
+terror! Oh! but this must not be said. This is to think too much! This
+is to be more than aught yet achieved by man!’
+
+The holy warrior crossed his arms, and gently bowed his head.
+
+‘Take me to the Sisters,’ he said. ‘The spirit has gone out of me! I am
+faint, and as a child!’
+
+Farina asked, and had, his blessing.
+
+‘And with it my thanks!’ said the Monk. ‘Thou hast witnessed how he can
+be overcome! Thou hast looked upon a scene that will be the glory of
+Christendom! Thou hast beheld the discomfiture of Darkness before the
+voice of Light! Yet think not much of me: account me little in this
+matter! I am but an instrument! but an instrument!--and again, but an
+instrument!’
+
+Farina drew the arms of the holy combatant across his shoulders and
+descended Drachenfels.
+
+The tempest was as a forgotten anguish. Bright with maiden splendour
+shone the moon; and the old rocks, cherished in her beams, put up their
+horns to blue heaven once more. All the leafage of the land shook as to
+shake off a wicked dream, and shuddered from time to time, whispering
+of old fears quieted, and present peace. The heart of the river fondled
+with the image of the moon in its depths.
+
+‘This is much to have won for earth,’ murmured the Monk. ‘And what is
+life, or who would not risk all, to snatch such loveliness from the
+talons of the Fiend, the Arch-foe? Yet, not I! not I! say not, ‘twas I
+did this!’
+
+Soft praises of melody ascended to them on the moist fragrance of air.
+It was the hymn of the Sisters.
+
+‘How sweet!’ murmured the Monk. ‘Put it from me! away with it!’
+
+Rising on Farina’s back, and stirruping his feet on the thighs of the
+youth, he cried aloud: ‘I charge ye, whoso ye be, sing not this deed
+before the emperor! By the breath of your nostrils; pause! ere ye
+whisper aught of the combat of Saint Gregory with Satan, and his
+victory, and the marvel of it, while he liveth; for he would die the
+humble monk he is.’
+
+He resumed his seat, and Farina brought him into the circle of the
+Sisters. Those pure women took him, and smoothed him, lamenting, and
+filling the night with triumphing tones.
+
+Farina stood apart.
+
+‘The breeze tells of dawn,’ said the Monk; ‘we must be in Cologne before
+broad day.’
+
+They mounted horse, and the Sisters grouped and reverenced under the
+blessings of the Monk.
+
+‘No word of it!’ said the Monk warningly. ‘We are silent, Father!’ they
+answered. ‘Cologne-ward!’ was then his cry, and away he and Farina,
+flew.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOSHAWK LEADS
+
+Morning was among the grey eastern clouds as they rode upon the
+camp hastily formed to meet the Kaiser. All there was in a wallow
+of confusion. Fierce struggles for precedence still went on in the
+neighbourhood of the imperial tent ground, where, under the standard of
+Germany, lounged some veterans of the Kaiser’s guard, calmly watching
+the scramble. Up to the edge of the cultivated land nothing was to be
+seen but brawling clumps of warriors asserting the superior claims of
+their respective lords. Variously and hotly disputed were these claims,
+as many red coxcombs testified. Across that point where the green field
+flourished, not a foot was set, for the Kaiser’s care of the farmer, and
+affection for good harvests, made itself respected even in the heat of
+those jealous rivalries. It was said of him, that he would have camped
+in a bog, or taken quarters in a cathedral, rather than trample down a
+green blade of wheat, or turn over one vine-pole in the empire. Hence
+the presence of Kaiser Heinrich was never hailed as Egypt’s plague by
+the peasantry, but welcome as the May month wherever he went.
+
+Father Gregory and Farina found themselves in the centre of a group ere
+they drew rein, and a cry rose, ‘The good father shall decide, and all’s
+fair,’ followed by, ‘Agreed! Hail and tempest! he’s dropped down o’
+purpose.’
+
+‘Father,’ said one, ‘here it is! I say I saw the Devil himself fly off
+Drachenfels, and flop into Cologne. Fritz here, and Frankenbauch, saw
+him too. They’ll swear to him: so ‘ll I. Hell’s thunder! will we. Yonder
+fellows will have it ‘twas a flash o’ lightning, as if I didn’t see him,
+horns, tail, and claws, and a mighty sight ‘twas, as I’m a sinner.’
+
+A clash of voices, for the Devil and against him, burst on this accurate
+description of the Evil spirit. The Monk sank his neck into his chest.
+
+‘Gladly would I hold silence on this, my sons,’ said he, in a
+supplicating voice.
+
+‘Speak, Father,’ cried the first spokesman, gathering courage from the
+looks of the Monk.
+
+Father Gregory appeared to commune with himself deeply. At last, lifting
+his head, and murmuring, ‘It must be,’ he said aloud:
+
+‘‘Twas verily Satan, O my sons! Him this night in mortal combat I
+encountered and overcame on the summit of Drachenfels, before the eyes
+of this youth; and from Satan I this night deliver ye! an instrument
+herein as in all other.’
+
+Shouts, and a far-spreading buzz resounded in the camp. Hundreds had now
+seen Satan flying off the Drachenstein. Father Gregory could no
+longer hope to escape from the importunate crowds that beset him for
+particulars. The much-contested point now was, as to the exact position
+of Satan’s tail during his airy circuit, before descending into Cologne.
+It lashed like a lion’s. ‘Twas cocked, for certain! He sneaked it
+between his legs like a lurcher! He made it stumpy as a brown bear’s! He
+carried it upright as a pike!
+
+‘O my sons! have I sown dissension? Have I not given ye peace?’
+exclaimed the Monk.
+
+But they continued to discuss it with increasing frenzy.
+
+Farina cast a glance over the tumult, and beheld his friend Guy
+beckoning earnestly. He had no difficulty in getting away to him, as the
+fetters of all eyes were on the Monk alone.
+
+The Goshawk was stamping with excitement.
+
+‘Not a moment to be lost, my lad,’ said Guy, catching his arm. ‘Here,
+I’ve had half-a-dozen fights already for this bit of ground. Do you know
+that fellow squatting there?’
+
+Farina beheld the Thier at the entrance of a tumbledown tent. He was
+ruefully rubbing a broken head.
+
+‘Now,’ continued Guy, ‘to mount him is the thing; and then after the
+wolves of Werner as fast as horse-flesh can carry us. No questions!
+Bound, are you? And what am I? But this is life and death, lad! Hark!’
+
+The Goshawk whispered something that sucked the blood out of Farina’s
+cheek.
+
+‘Look you--what’s your lockjaw name? Keep good faith with me, and you
+shall have your revenge, and the shiners I promise, besides my lord’s
+interest for a better master: but, sharp! we won’t mount till we’re out
+of sight o’ the hell-scum you horde with.’
+
+The Thier stood up and staggered after them through the camp. There was
+no difficulty in mounting him horses were loose, and scampering about
+the country, not yet delivered from their terrors of the last night’s
+tempest.
+
+‘Here be we, three good men!’ exclaimed Guy, when they were started, and
+Farina had hurriedly given him the heads of his adventure with the Monk.
+‘Three good men! One has helped to kick the devil: one has served an
+apprenticeship to his limb: and one is ready to meet him foot to foot
+any day, which last should be myself. Not a man more do we want, though
+it were to fish up that treasure you talk of being under the Rhine
+there, and guarded by I don’t know how many tricksy little villains.
+Horses can be ferried across at Linz, you say?’
+
+‘Ay, thereabout,’ grunted the Thier.
+
+‘We ‘re on the right road, then!’ said Guy. ‘Thanks to you both, I’ve
+had no sleep for two nights--not a wink, and must snatch it going--not
+the first time.’
+
+The Goshawk bent his body, and spoke no more. Farina could not get a
+word further from him. By the mastery he still had over his rein, the
+Goshawk alone proved that he was of the world of the living. Schwartz
+Thier, rendered either sullen or stunned by the latest cracked crown he
+had received, held his jaws close as if they had been nailed.
+
+At Linz the horses were well breathed. The Goshawk, who had been snoring
+an instant before, examined them keenly, and shook his calculating head.
+
+‘Punch that beast of yours in the ribs,’ said he to Farina. ‘Ah! not
+a yard of wind in him. And there’s the coming back, when we shall have
+more to carry. Well: this is my lord’s money; but i’ faith, it’s going
+in a good cause, and Master Groschen will make it all right, no doubt;
+not a doubt of it.’
+
+The Goshawk had seen some excellent beasts in the stables of the
+Kaiser’s Krone; but the landlord would make no exchange without an
+advance of silver. This done, the arrangement was prompt.
+
+‘Schwartz Thier!--I’ve got your name now,’ said Guy, as they were
+ferrying across, ‘you’re stiff certain they left Cologne with the maiden
+yesternoon, now?’
+
+‘Ah, did they! and she’s at the Eck safe enow by this time.’
+
+‘And away from the Eck this night she shall come, trust me!’
+
+‘Or there will I die with her!’ cried Farina.
+
+‘Fifteen men at most, he has, you said,’ continued Guy.
+
+‘Two not sound, five true as steel, and the rest shillyshally. ‘Slife,
+one lock loose serves us; but two saves us: five we’re a match for,
+throwing in bluff Baron; the remainder go with victory.’
+
+‘Can we trust this fellow?’ whispered Farina.
+
+‘Trust him!’ roared Guy. ‘Why, I’ve thumped him, lad; pegged and
+pardoned him. Trust him? trust me! If Werner catches a sight of that
+snout of his within half-a-mile of his hold, he’ll roast him alive.’
+
+He lowered his voice: ‘Trust him? We can do nothing without him. I
+knocked the devil out of him early this morning. No chance for his
+Highness anywhere now. This Eck of Werner’s would stand a siege from the
+Kaiser in person, I hear. We must into it like weasels; and out as we
+can.’
+
+Dismissing the ferry-barge with stern injunctions to be in waiting from
+noon to noon, the three leapt on their fresh nags.
+
+‘Stop at the first village,’ said Guy; ‘we must lay in provision.
+As Master Groschen says, “Nothing’s to be done, Turpin, without
+provender.”’
+
+‘Goshawk!’ cried Farina; ‘you have time; tell me how this business was
+done.’
+
+The only reply was a soft but decided snore, that spoke, like a
+voluptuous trumpet, of dreamland and its visions.
+
+At Sinzig, the Thier laid his hand on Guy’s bridle, with the words,
+‘Feed here,’ a brief, but effective, form of signal, which aroused the
+Goshawk completely. The sign of the Trauben received them. Here, wurst
+reeking with garlic, eggs, black bread, and sour wine, was all they
+could procure. Farina refused to eat, and maintained his resolution, in
+spite of Guy’s sarcastic chiding.
+
+‘Rub down the beasts, then, and water them,’ said the latter. ‘Made a
+vow, I suppose,’ muttered Guy.
+
+‘That’s the way of those fellows. No upright manly
+take-the-thing-as-it-comes; but fly-sky-high whenever there’s a dash on
+their heaven. What has his belly done to offend him? It will be crying
+out just when we want all quiet. I wouldn’t pay Werner such a compliment
+as go without a breakfast for him. Not I! Would you, Schwartz Thier?’
+
+‘Henker! not I!’ growled the Thier. ‘He’ll lose one sooner.’
+
+‘First snatch his prey, or he’ll be making, God save us! a meal for a
+Kaiser, the brute.’
+
+Guy called in the landlady, clapped down the score, and abused the wine.
+
+‘Sir,’ said the landlady, ‘ours is but a poor inn, and we do our best.’
+
+‘So you do,’ replied the Goshawk, softened; ‘and I say that a civil
+tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine.’
+
+The landlady, a summer widow, blushed, and as he was stepping from the
+room, called him aside.
+
+‘I thought you were one of that dreadful Werner’s band, and I hate him.’
+
+Guy undeceived her.
+
+‘He took my sister,’ she went on, ‘and his cruelty killed her. He
+persecuted me even in the lifetime of my good man. Last night he came
+here in the middle of the storm with a young creature bright as an
+angel, and sorrowful--’
+
+‘He’s gone, you’re sure?’ broke in Guy.
+
+‘Gone! Oh, yes! Soon as the storm abated he dragged her on. Oh! the way
+that young thing looked at me, and I able to do nothing for her.’
+
+‘Now, the Lord bless you for a rosy Christian!’ cried Guy, and, in his
+admiration, he flung his arm round her and sealed a ringing kiss on each
+cheek.
+
+‘No good man defrauded by that! and let me see the fellow that thinks
+evil of it. If I ever told a woman a secret, I ‘d tell you one now,
+trust me. But I never do, so farewell! Not another?’
+
+Hasty times keep the feelings in a ferment, and the landlady was
+extremely angry with Guy and heartily forgave him, all within a minute.
+
+‘No more,’ said she, laughing: ‘but wait; I have something for you.’
+
+The Goshawk lingered on a fretting heel. She was quickly under his elbow
+again with two flasks leaning from her bosom to her arms.
+
+‘There! I seldom meet a man like you; and, when I do, I like to be
+remembered. This is a true good wine, real Liebfrauenmilch, which I only
+give to choice customers.’
+
+‘Welcome it is!’ sang Guy to her arch looks; ‘but I must pay for it.’
+
+‘Not a pfennig!’ said the landlady.
+
+‘Not one?’
+
+‘Not one!’ she repeated, with a stamp of the foot.
+
+‘In other coin, then,’ quoth Guy; and folding her waist, which did not
+this time back away, the favoured Goshawk registered rosy payment on a
+very fresh red mouth, receiving in return such lively discount, that he
+felt himself bound in conscience to make up the full sum a second time.
+
+‘What a man!’ sighed the landlady, as she watched the Goshawk lead off
+along the banks; ‘courtly as a knight, open as a squire, and gentle as a
+page!’
+
+
+
+
+WERNER’S ECK
+
+A league behind Andernach, and more in the wintry circle of the sun than
+Laach, its convenient monastic neighbour, stood the castle of Werner,
+the Robber Baron. Far into the South, hazy with afternoon light, a
+yellow succession of sandhills stretched away, spouting fire against the
+blue sky of an elder world, but now dead and barren of herbage. Around
+is a dusty plain, where the green blades of spring no sooner peep than
+they become grimed with sand and take an aged look, in accordance with
+the ungenerous harvests they promise. The aridity of the prospect is
+relieved on one side by the lofty woods of Laach, through which the sun
+setting burns golden-red, and on the other by the silver sparkle of a
+narrow winding stream, bordered with poplars, and seen but a glistening
+mile of its length by all the thirsty hills. The Eck, or Corner, itself,
+is thick-set with wood, but of a stunted growth, and lying like a dark
+patch on the landscape. It served, however, entirely to conceal the
+castle, and mask every movement of the wary and terrible master. A
+trained eye advancing on the copse would hardly mark the glimmer of the
+turrets over the topmost leaves, but to every loophole of the walls
+lies bare the circuit of the land. Werner could rule with a glance the
+Rhine’s course down from the broad rock over Coblentz to the white tower
+of Andernach. He claimed that march as his right; but the Mosel was no
+hard ride’s distance, and he gratified his thirst for rapine chiefly on
+that river, delighting in it, consequently, as much as his robber nature
+boiled over the bound of his feudal privileges.
+
+Often had the Baron held his own against sieges and restrictions, bans
+and impositions of all kinds. He boasted that there was never a knight
+within twenty miles of him that he had not beaten, nor monk of the same
+limit not in his pay. This braggadocio received some warrant from his
+yearly increase of licence; and his craft and his castle combined,
+made him a notable pest of the region, a scandal to the abbey whose
+countenance he had, and a frightful infliction on the poorer farmers and
+peasantry.
+
+The sun was beginning to slope over Laach, and threw the shadows of the
+abbey towers half-way across the blue lake-waters, as two men in the
+garb of husbandmen emerged from the wood. Their feet plunged heavily and
+their heads hung down, as they strode beside a wain mounted with straw,
+whistling an air of stupid unconcern; but a close listener might have
+heard that the lumbering vehicle carried a human voice giving them
+directions as to the road they were to take, and what sort of behaviour
+to observe under certain events. The land was solitary. A boor passing
+asked whether toll or tribute they were conveying to Werner. Tribute,
+they were advised to reply, which caused him to shrug and curse as he
+jogged on. Hearing him, the voice in the wain chuckled grimly. Their
+next speech was with a trooper, who overtook them, and wanted to know
+what they had in the wain for Werner. Tribute, they replied, and won the
+title of ‘brave pigs’ for their trouble.
+
+‘But what’s the dish made of?’ said the trooper, stirring the straw with
+his sword-point.
+
+‘Tribute,’ came the answer.
+
+‘Ha! You’ve not been to Werner’s school,’ and the trooper swung a
+sword-stroke at the taller of the two, sending a tremendous shudder
+throughout his frame; but he held his head to the ground, and only
+seemed to betray animal consciousness in leaning his ear closer to the
+wain.
+
+‘Blood and storm! Will ye speak?’ cried the trooper.
+
+‘Never talk much; but an ye say nothing to the Baron,’--thrusting his
+hand into the straw--‘here’s what’s better than speaking.’
+
+‘Well said!--Eh? Liebfrauenmilch? Ho, ho! a rare bleed!’
+
+Striking the neck of the flask on a wheel, the trooper applied it to his
+mouth, and ceased not deeply ingurgitating till his face was broad to
+the sky and the bottle reversed. He then dashed it down, sighed, and
+shook himself.
+
+‘Rare news! the Kaiser’s come: he’ll be in Cologne by night; but first
+he must see the Baron, and I’m post with the order. That’s to show you
+how high he stands in the Kaiser’s grace. Don’t be thinking of upsetting
+Werner yet, any of you; mind, now!’
+
+‘That’s Blass-Gesell,’ said the voice in the wain, as the trooper
+trotted on: adding, ‘‘gainst us.’
+
+‘Makes six,’ responded the driver.
+
+Within sight of the Eck, they descried another trooper coming toward
+them. This time the driver was first to speak.
+
+‘Tribute! Provender! Bread and wine for the high Baron Werner from his
+vassals over Tonnistein.’
+
+‘And I’m out of it! fasting like a winter wolf,’ howled the fellow.
+
+He was in the act of addressing himself to an inspection of the
+wain’s contents, when a second flask lifted in air, gave a sop to his
+curiosity. This flask suffered the fate of the former.
+
+‘A Swabian blockhead, aren’t you?’
+
+‘Ay, that country,’ said the driver. ‘May be, Henker Rothhals happens to
+be with the Baron?’
+
+‘To hell with him! I wish he had my job, and I his, of watching the
+yellow-bird in her new cage, till she’s taken out to-night, and then a
+jolly bumper to the Baron all round.’
+
+The driver wished him a fortunate journey, strongly recommending him
+to skirt the abbey westward, and go by the Ahr valley, as there was
+something stirring that way, and mumbling, ‘Makes five again,’ as he put
+the wheels in motion.
+
+‘Goshawk!’ said his visible companion; ‘what do you say now?’
+
+‘I say, bless that widow!’
+
+‘Oh! bring me face to face with this accursed Werner quickly, my God!’
+gasped the youth.
+
+‘Tusk! ‘tis not Werner we want--there’s the Thier speaking. No, no,
+Schwartz Thier! I trust you, no doubt; but the badger smells at a hole,
+before he goes inside it. We’re strangers, and are allowed to miss our
+way.’
+
+Leaving the wain in Farina’s charge, he pushed through a dense growth
+of shrub and underwood, and came crouching on a precipitous edge of
+shrouded crag, which commanded a view of the stronghold, extending round
+it, as if scooped clean by some natural action, about a stone’sthrow
+distant, and nearly level with the look-out tower. Sheer from a deep
+circular basin clothed with wood, and bottomed with grass and bubbling
+water, rose a naked moss-stained rock, on whose peak the castle firmly
+perched, like a spying hawk. The only means of access was by a narrow
+natural bridge of rock flung from this insulated pinnacle across to the
+mainland. One man, well disposed, might have held it against forty.
+
+‘Our way’s the best,’ thought Guy, as he meditated every mode of gaining
+admission. ‘A hundred men an hour might be lost cutting steps up that
+steep slate; and once at the top we should only have to be shoved down
+again.’
+
+While thus engaged, he heard a summons sounded from the castle, and
+scrambled back to Farina.
+
+‘The Thier leads now,’ said he, ‘and who leads is captain. It seems
+easier to get out of that than in. There’s a square tower, and a round.
+I guess the maiden to be in the round. Now, lad, no crying out--You
+don’t come in with us; but back you go for the horses, and have them
+ready and fresh in yon watered meadow under the castle. The path down
+winds easy.’
+
+‘Man!’ cried Farina, ‘what do you take me for?--go you for the horses.’
+
+‘Not for a fool,’ Guy rejoined, tightening his lip; ‘but now is your
+time to prove yourself one.’
+
+‘With you, or without you, I enter that castle!’
+
+‘Oh! if you want to be served up hot for the Baron’s supper-mess, by all
+means.’
+
+‘Thunder!’ growled Schwartz Thier, ‘aren’t ye moving?’
+
+The Goshawk beckoned Farina aside.
+
+‘Act as I tell you, or I’m for Cologne.’
+
+‘Traitor!’ muttered the youth.
+
+‘Swearing this, that if we fail, the Baron shall need a leech sooner
+than a bride.’
+
+‘That stroke must be mine!’
+
+The Goshawk griped the muscle of Farina’s arm till the youth was
+compelled to slacken it with pain.
+
+‘Could you drive a knife through a six-inch wood-wall? I doubt this wild
+boar wants a harder hit than many a best man could give. ‘Sblood! obey,
+sirrah. How shall we keep yon fellow true, if he sees we’re at points?’
+
+‘I yield,’ exclaimed Farina with a fall of the chest; ‘but hear I
+nothing of you by midnight--Oh! then think not I shall leave another
+minute to chance. Farewell! haste! Heaven prosper you! You will see her,
+and die under her eyes. That may be denied to me. What have I done to be
+refused that last boon?’
+
+‘Gone without breakfast and dinner,’ said Guy in abhorrent tones.
+
+A whistle from the wain, following a noise of the castlegates being
+flung open, called the Goshawk away, and he slouched his shoulders and
+strode to do his part, without another word. Farina gazed after him, and
+dropped into the covert.
+
+
+
+
+THE WATER-LADY
+
+‘Bird of lovers! Voice of the passion of love! Sweet, deep,
+disaster-toning nightingale!’ sings the old minnesinger; ‘who that has
+not loved, hearing thee is touched with the wand of love’s mysteries,
+and yearneth to he knoweth not whom, humbled by overfulness of heart;
+but who, listening, already loveth, heareth the language he would speak,
+yet faileth in; feeleth the great tongueless sea of his infinite desires
+stirred beyond his narrow bosom; is as one stript of wings whom the
+angels beckon to their silver homes: and he leaneth forward to ascend to
+them, and is mocked by his effort: then is he of the fallen, and of
+the fallen would he remain, but that tears lighten him, and through the
+tears stream jewelled shafts dropt down to him from the sky, precious
+ladders inlaid with amethyst, sapphire, blended jasper, beryl,
+rose-ruby, ether of heaven flushed with softened bloom of the
+insufferable Presences: and lo, the ladders dance, and quiver, and
+waylay his eyelids, and a second time he is mocked, aspiring: and after
+the third swoon standeth Hope before him with folded arms, and eyes dry
+of the delusions of tears, saying, Thou hast seen! thou hast felt! thy
+strength hath reached in thee so far! now shall I never die in thee!’
+
+‘For surely,’ says the minstrel, ‘Hope is not born of earth, or it were
+perishable. Rather know her the offspring of that embrace strong
+love straineth the heavens with. This owe we to thy music, bridal
+nightingale! And the difference of this celestial spirit from the
+smirking phantasy of whom all stand soon or late forsaken, is the
+difference between painted day with its poor ambitious snares, and night
+lifting its myriad tapers round the throne of the eternal, the prophet
+stars of everlasting time! And the one dieth, and the other liveth; and
+the one is unregretted, and the other walketh in thought-spun raiment of
+divine melancholy; her ears crowded with the pale surges that wrap this
+shifting shore; in her eyes a shape of beauty floating dimly, that she
+will not attain this side the water, but broodeth on evermore.
+
+‘Therefore, hold on thy cherished four long notes, which are as the very
+edge where exultation and anguish melt, meet, and are sharpened to one
+ecstasy, death-dividing bird! Fill the woods with passionate chuckle and
+sob, sweet chaplain of the marriage service of a soul with heaven! Pour
+out thy holy wine of song upon the soft-footed darkness, till, like a
+priest of the inmost temple, ‘tis drunken with fair intelligences!’
+
+Thus the old minstrels and minnesingers.
+
+Strong and full sang the nightingales that night Farina held watch by
+the guilty castle that entombed his living beloved. The castle looked
+itself a denser shade among the moonthrown shadows of rock and tree.
+The meadow spread like a green courtyard at the castle’s foot. It was of
+lush deep emerald grass, softly mixed with grey in the moon’s light, and
+showing like jasper. Where the shadows fell thickest, there was yet a
+mist of colour. All about ran a brook, and babbled to itself. The spring
+crocus lifted its head in moist midgrasses of the meadow, rejoiced with
+freshness. The rugged heights seemed to clasp this one innocent spot as
+their only garden-treasure; and a bank of hazels hid it from the castle
+with a lover’s arm.
+
+‘The moon will tell me,’ mused Farina; ‘the moon will signal me the
+hour! When the moon hangs over the round tower, I shall know ‘tis time
+to strike.’
+
+The song of the nightingales was a full unceasing throb.
+
+It went like the outcry of one heart from branch to branch. The four
+long notes, and the short fifth which leads off to that hurried gush of
+music, gurgling rich with passion, came thick and constant from under
+the tremulous leaves.
+
+At first Farina had been deaf to them. His heart was in the dungeon
+with Margarita, or with the Goshawk in his dangers, forming a thousand
+desperate plans, among the red-hot ploughshares of desperate action.
+Finally, without a sense of being wooed, it was won. The tenderness of
+his love then mastered him.
+
+‘God will not suffer that fair head to come to harm!’ he thought, and
+with the thought a load fell off his breast.
+
+He paced the meadows, and patted the three pasturing steeds.
+Involuntarily his sight grew on the moon. She went so slowly. She
+seemed not to move at all. A little wing of vapour flew toward her;
+it whitened, passed, and the moon was slower than before. Oh! were the
+heavens delaying their march to look on this iniquity? Again and again
+he cried, ‘Patience, it is not time!’ He flung himself on the grass. The
+next moment he climbed the heights, and was peering at the mass of gloom
+that fronted the sky. It reared such a mailed head of menace, that his
+heart was seized with a quivering, as though it had been struck. Behind
+lay scattered some small faint-winkling stars on sapphire fields, and a
+stain of yellow light was in a breach of one wall.
+
+He descended. What was the Goshawk doing? Was he betrayed? It was surely
+now time? No; the moon had not yet smitten the face of the castle.
+He made his way through the hazel-bank among flitting nightmoths, and
+glanced up to measure the moon’s distance. As he did so, a first touch
+of silver fell on the hoary flint.
+
+‘Oh, young bird of heaven in that Devil’s clutch!’
+
+Sounds like the baying of boar-hounds alarmed him. They whined into
+silence.
+
+He fell back. The meadow breathed peace, and more and more the
+nightingales volumed their notes. As in a charmed circle of palpitating
+song, he succumbed to languor. The brook rolled beside him fresh as
+an infant, toying with the moonlight. He leaned over it, and thrice
+waywardly dipped his hand in the clear translucence.
+
+Was it his own face imaged there?
+
+Farina bent close above an eddy of the water. It whirled with a strange
+tumult, breaking into lines and lights a face not his own, nor the
+moon’s; nor was it a reflection. The agitation increased. Now a wreath
+of bubbles crowned the pool, and a pure water-lily, but larger, ascended
+wavering.
+
+He started aside; and under him a bright head, garlanded with gemmed
+roses, appeared. No fairer figure of woman had Farina seen. Her visage
+had the lustrous white of moonlight, and all her shape undulated in a
+dress of flashing silver-white, wonderful to see. The Lady of the Water
+smiled on him, and ran over with ripples and dimples of limpid beauty.
+Then, as he retreated on the meadow grass, she swam toward him, and
+taking his hand, pressed it to her. After her touch the youth no longer
+feared. She curved her finger, and beckoned him on. All that she did was
+done flowingly. The youth was a shadow in her silver track as she passed
+like a harmless wave over the closed crocuses; but the crocuses shivered
+and swelled their throats of streaked purple and argent as at delicious
+rare sips of a wine. Breath of violet, and ladysmock, and valley-lily,
+mingled and fluttered about her. Farina was as a man working the day’s
+intent in a dream. He could see the heart in her translucent, hanging
+like a cold dingy ruby. By the purity of his nature he felt that such
+a presence must have come but to help. It might be Margarita’s guardian
+fairy!
+
+They passed the hazel-bank, and rounded the castlecrag, washed by the
+brook and, beneath the advancing moon, standing in a ring of brawling
+silver. The youth with his fervid eyes marked the old weather-stains and
+scars of long defiance coming into colour. That mystery of wickedness
+which the towers had worn in the dusk, was dissolved, and he endured no
+more the almost abashed sensation of competing littleness that made him
+think there was nought to do, save die, combating single-handed such
+massive power. The moon shone calmly superior, like the prowess of
+maiden knights; and now the harsh frown of the walls struck resolution
+to his spirit, and nerved him with hate and the contempt true courage
+feels when matched against fraud and villany.
+
+On a fallen block of slate, cushioned with rich brown moss and rusted
+weather-stains, the Water-Lady sat, and pointed to Farina the path of
+the moon toward the round tower. She did not speak, and if his lips
+parted, put her cold finger across them. Then she began to hum a soft
+sweet monotony of song, vague and careless, very witching to hear.
+Farina caught no words, nor whether the song was of days in dust or in
+flower, but his mind bloomed with legends and sad splendours of story,
+while she sang on the slate-block under sprinkled shadows by the water.
+
+He had listened long in trance, when the Water-Lady hushed, and
+stretched forth a slender forefinger to the moon. It stood like a dot
+over the round tower. Farina rose in haste. She did not leave him to ask
+her aid, but took his hand and led him up the steep ascent. Halfway to
+the castle, she rested. There, concealed by bramble-tufts, she disclosed
+the low portal of a secret passage, and pushed it open without effort.
+She paused at the entrance, and he could see her trembling, seeming to
+wax taller, till she was like a fountain glittering in the cold light.
+Then she dropped, as drops a dying bet, and cowered into the passage.
+
+Darkness, thick with earth-dews, oppressed his senses. He felt the
+clammy walls scraping close on him. Not the dimmest lamp, or guiding
+sound, was near; but the lady went on as one who knew her way. Passing
+a low-vaulted dungeon-room, they wound up stairs hewn in the rock, and
+came to a door, obedient to her touch, which displayed a chamber faintly
+misted by a solitary bar of moonlight. Farina perceived they were above
+the foundation of the castle. The walls gleamed pale with knightly
+harness, habergeons gaping for heads, breastplates of blue steel,
+halbert, and hand-axe, greaves, glaives, boar-spears, and polished
+spur-fixed heel-pieces. He seized a falchion hanging apart, but the lady
+stayed his arm, and led to another flight of stone ending in a kind of
+corridor. Noises of laughter and high feasting beset him at this point.
+The Lady of the Water sidled her head, as to note a familiar voice; and
+then drew him to a looped aperture.
+
+Farina beheld a scene that first dazzled, but, as it grew into shape,
+sank him with dismay. Below, and level with the chamber he had left, a
+rude banqueting-hall glowed, under the light of a dozen flambeaux, with
+smoking boar’s flesh, deer’s flesh, stone-flagons, and horn-beakers. At
+the head of this board sat Werner, scarlet with furious feasting, and on
+his right hand, Margarita, bloodless as a beautiful martyr bound to the
+fire. Retainers of Werner occupied the length of the hall, chorusing the
+Baron’s speeches, and drinking their own healths when there was no call
+for another. Farina saw his beloved alone. She was dressed as when he
+parted with her last. The dear cameo lay on her bosom, but not heaving
+proudly as of old. Her shoulders were drooped forward, and contracted
+her bosom in its heaving. She would have had a humbled look, but for the
+marble sternness of her eyes. They were fixed as eyes that see the way
+of death through all earthly objects.
+
+‘Now, dogs!’ cried the Baron, ‘the health of the night! and swell your
+lungs, for I’ll have no cat’s cry when Werner’s bride is the toast.
+Monk or no monk’s leave, she’s mine. Ay, my pretty one! it shall be made
+right in the morning, if I lead all the Laach rats here by the nose.
+Thunder! no disrespect to Werner’s bride from Pope or abbot. Now, sing
+out!--or wait! these fellows shall drink it first.’
+
+He stretched and threw a beaker of wine right and left behind him, and
+Farina’s despair stiffened his limbs as he recognized the Goshawk and
+Schwartz Thier strapped to the floor. Their beards were already moist
+with previous libations similarly bestowed, and they received this
+in sullen stillness; but Farina thought he observed a rapid glance of
+encouragement dart from beneath the Goshawk’s bent brows, as Margarita
+momentarily turned her head half-way on him.
+
+‘Lick your chaps, ye beasts, and don’t say Werner stints vermin good
+cheer his nuptial-night. Now,’ continued the Baron, growing huskier as
+he talked louder: ‘Short and ringing, my devil’s pups:--Werner and his
+Bride! and may she soon give you a young baron to keep you in better
+order than I can, as, if she does her duty, she will.’
+
+The Baron stood up, and lifted his huge arm to lead the toast.
+
+‘Werner and his Bride!’
+
+Not a voice followed him. There was a sudden intimation of the call
+being echoed; but it snapped, and ended in shuffling tones, as if the
+hall-door had closed on the response.
+
+‘What ‘s this?’ roared the Baron, in that caged wild beast voice
+Margarita remembered she had heard in the Cathedral Square.
+
+No one replied.
+
+‘Speak! or I’ll rot you a fathom in the rock, curs!’
+
+‘Herr Baron!’ said Henker Rothhals impressively; ‘the matter is, that
+there’s something unholy among us.’
+
+The Baron’s goblet flew at his head before the words were uttered.
+
+‘I’ll make an unholy thing of him that says it,’ and Werner lowered at
+them one by one.
+
+‘Then I say it, Herr Baron!’ pursued Henker Rothhals, wiping his
+frontispiece: ‘The Devil has turned against you at last. Look up
+there--Ah, it’s gone now; but where’s the man sitting this side saw it
+not?’
+
+The Baron made one spring, and stood on the board.
+
+‘Now! will any rascal here please to say so?’
+
+Something in the cruel hang of his threatening hatchet jaw silenced many
+in the act of confirming the assertion.
+
+‘Stand out, Henker Rotthals!’
+
+Rotthals slid a hunting-knife up his wrist, and stepped back from the
+board.
+
+‘Beast!’ roared the Baron, ‘I said I wouldn’t shed blood to-night. I
+spared a traitor, and an enemy----’
+
+‘Look again!’ said Rothhals; ‘will any fellow say he saw nothing there.’
+
+While all heads, including Werner’s, were directed to the aperture which
+surveyed them, Rothhals tossed his knife to the Goshawk unperceived.
+
+This time answers came to his challenge, but not in confirmation. The
+Baron spoke with a gasping gentleness.
+
+‘So you trifle with me? I’m dangerous for that game. Mind you of
+Blass-Gesell? I made a better beast of him by sending him three-quarters
+of the road to hell for trial.’ Bellowing, ‘Take that!’ he discharged a
+broad blade, hitherto concealed in his right hand, straight at Rothhals.
+It fixed in his cheek and jaw, wringing an awful breath of pain from him
+as he fell against the wall.
+
+‘There’s a lesson for you not to cross me, children!’ said Werner,
+striding his stumpy legs up and down the crashing board, and puffing
+his monstrous girth of chest and midriff. ‘Let him stop there awhile, to
+show what comes of thwarting Werner!--Fire-devils! before the baroness,
+too!--Something unholy is there? Something unholy in his jaw, I
+think!--Leave it sticking! He’s against meat last, is he? I’ll teach you
+who he’s for!--Who speaks?’
+
+All hung silent. These men were animals dominated by a mightier brute.
+
+He clasped his throat, and shook the board with a jump, as he squeaked,
+rather than called, a second time ‘Who spoke?’
+
+He had not again to ask. In this pause, as the Baron glared for his
+victim, a song, so softly sung that it sounded remote, but of which
+every syllable was clearly rounded, swelled into his ears, and froze him
+in his angry posture.
+
+       ‘The blood of the barons shall turn to ice,
+         And their castle fall to wreck,
+        When a true lover dips in the water thrice,
+         That runs round Werner’s Eck.
+
+       ‘Round Werner’s Eck the water runs;
+         The hazels shiver and shake:
+        The walls that have blotted such happy suns,
+         Are seized with the ruin-quake.
+
+       ‘And quake with the ruin, and quake with rue,
+         Thou last of Werner’s race!
+        The hearts of the barons were cold that knew
+         The Water-Dame’s embrace.
+
+       ‘For a sin was done, and a shame was wrought,
+         That water went to hide:
+        And those who thought to make it nought,
+         They did but spread it wide.
+
+       ‘Hold ready, hold ready to pay the price,
+         And keep thy bridal cheer:
+        A hand has dipped in the water thrice,
+         And the Water-Dame is here.’
+
+
+
+
+THE RESCUE
+
+The Goshawk was on his feet. ‘Now, lass,’ said he to Margarita, ‘now
+is the time!’ He took her hand, and led her to the door. Schwartz Thier
+closed up behind her. Not a man in the hall interposed. Werner’s head
+moved round after them, like a dog on the watch; but he was dumb. The
+door opened, and Farina entered. He bore a sheaf of weapons under his
+arm. The familiar sight relieved Werner’s senses from the charm. He
+shouted to bar the prisoners’ passage. His men were ranged like statues
+in the hall. There was a start among them, as if that terrible noise
+communicated an instinct of obedience, but no more. They glanced at each
+other, and remained quiet.
+
+The Goshawk had his eye on Werner. ‘Stand back, lass!’ he said to
+Margarita. She took a sword from Farina, and answered, with white lips
+and flashing eyes, ‘I can fight, Goshawk!’
+
+‘And shall, if need be; but leave it to me now, returned Guy.
+
+His eye never left the Baron. Suddenly a shriek of steel rang. All fell
+aside, and the combatants stood opposed on clear ground. Farina, took
+Margarita’s left hand, and placed her against the wall between the Thier
+and himself. Werner’s men were well content to let their master fight
+it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken
+him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one
+present could swear he heard with his ears. ‘Let him take his chance,
+and try his own luck,’ they said, and shrugged. The battle was between
+Guy, as Margarita’s champion, and Werner.
+
+In Schwartz Thier’s judgement, the two were well matched, and he
+estimated their diverse qualities from sharp experience. ‘For short work
+the Baron, and my new mate for tough standing to ‘t!’ Farina’s summary
+in favour of the Goshawk was, ‘A stouter heart, harder sinews, and a
+good cause. The combat was generally regarded with a professional eye,
+and few prayers. Margarita solely there asked aid from above, and knelt
+to the Virgin; but her, too, the clash of arms and dire earnest of
+mortal fight aroused to eager eyes. She had not dallied with heroes in
+her dreams. She was as ready to second Siegfried on the crimson field as
+tend him in the silken chamber.
+
+It was well that a woman’s heart was there to mark the grace and glory
+of manhood in upright foot-to-foot encounter. For the others, it was a
+mere calculation of lucky hits. Even Farina, in his anxiety for her,
+saw but the brightening and darkening of the prospect of escape in every
+attitude and hard-ringing blow. Margarita was possessed with a painful
+exaltation. In her eyes the bestial Baron now took a nobler form and
+countenance; but the Goshawk assumed the sovereign aspect of old heroes,
+who, whether persecuted or favoured of heaven, still maintained their
+stand, remembering of what stuff they were, and who made them.
+
+‘Never,’ say the old writers, with a fervour honourable to their
+knowledge of the elements that compose our being, ‘never may this bright
+privilege of fair fight depart from us, nor advantage of it fail to be
+taken! Man against man, or beast, singly keeping his ground, is as fine
+rapture to the breast as Beauty in her softest hour affordeth. For if
+woman taketh loveliness to her when she languisheth, so surely doth man
+in these fierce moods, when steel and iron sparkle opposed, and their
+breath is fire, and their lips white with the lock of resolution; all
+their faculties knotted to a point, and their energies alive as the
+daylight to prove themselves superior, according to the laws and under
+the blessing of chivalry.’
+
+‘For all,’ they go on to improve the comparison, ‘may admire and delight
+in fair blossoming dales under the blue dome of peace; but ‘tis the
+rare lofty heart alone comprehendeth, and is heightened by, terrific
+splendours of tempest, when cloud meets cloud in skies black as the
+sepulchre, and Glory sits like a flame on the helm of Ruin’
+
+For a while the combatants aired their dexterity, contenting themselves
+with cunning cuts and flicks of the sword-edge, in which Werner first
+drew blood by a keen sweep along the forehead of the Goshawk. Guy had
+allowed him to keep his position on the board, and still fought at his
+face and neck. He now jerked back his body from the hip, and swung a
+round stroke at Werner’s knee, sending him in retreat with a snort of
+pain. Before the Baron could make good his ground, Guy was level with
+him on the board.
+
+Werner turned an upbraiding howl at his men. They were not disposed to
+second him yet. They one and all approved his personal battle with
+Fate, and never more admired him and felt his power; but the affair was
+exciting, and they were not the pillars to prop a falling house.
+
+Werner clenched his two hands to his ponderous glaive, and fell upon
+Guy with heavier fury. He was becoming not unworth the little womanly
+appreciation Margarita was brought to bestow on him. The voice of the
+Water-Lady whispered at her heart that the Baron warred on his destiny,
+and that ennobles all living souls.
+
+Bare-headed the combatants engaged, and the headpiece was the chief
+point of attack. No swerving from blows was possible for either: ward,
+or take; a false step would have ensured defeat. This also induced
+caution. Many a double stamp of the foot was heard, as each had to
+retire in turn.
+
+‘Not at his head so much, he’ll bear battering there all night long,’
+said Henker Rothhals in a breathing interval. Knocks had been pretty
+equally exchanged, but the Baron’s head certainly looked the least
+vulnerable, whereas Guy exhibited several dints that streamed freely.
+Yet he looked, eye and bearing, as fresh as when they began, and the
+calm, regular heave of his chest contrasted with Werner’s quick gasps.
+His smile, too, renewed each time the Baron paused for breath, gave
+Margarita heart. It was not a taunting smile, but one of entire
+confidence, and told all the more on his adversary. As Werner led off
+again, and the choice was always left him, every expression of the
+Goshawk’s face passed to full light in his broad eyes.
+
+The Baron’s play was a reckless fury. There was nothing to study in it.
+Guy became the chief object of speculation. He was evidently trying to
+wind his man.
+
+He struck wildly, some thought. Others judged that he was a random
+hitter, and had no mortal point in aim. Schwartz Thier’s opinion was
+frequently vented. ‘Too round a stroke--down on him! Chop-not slice!’
+
+Guy persevered in his own fashion. According to Schwartz Thier, he
+brought down by his wilfulness the blow that took him on the left
+shoulder, and nigh broke him. It was a weighty blow, followed by a thump
+of sound. The sword-edge swerved on his shoulder-blade, or he must have
+been disabled. But Werner’s crow was short, and he had no time to push
+success. One of the Goshawk’s swooping under-hits half severed his right
+wrist, and the blood spirted across the board. He gasped and seemed
+to succumb, but held to it still, though with slackened force. Guy now
+attacked. Holding to his round strokes, he accustomed Werner to guard
+the body, and stood to it so briskly right and left, that Werner grew
+bewildered, lost his caution, and gave ground. Suddenly the Goshawk’s
+glaive flashed in air, and chopped sheer down on Werner’s head. So
+shrewd a blow it was against a half-formed defence, that the Baron
+dropped without a word right on the edge of the board, and there hung,
+feebly grasping with his fingers.
+
+‘Who bars the way now?’ sang out Guy.
+
+No one accepted the challenge. Success clothed him with terrors, and
+gave him giant size.
+
+‘Then fare you well, my merry men all,’ said Guy. ‘Bear me no ill-will
+for this. A little doctoring will right the bold Baron.’
+
+He strode jauntily to the verge of the board, and held his finger for
+Margarita to follow. She stepped forward. The men put their beards
+together, muttering. She could not advance. Farina doubled his elbow,
+and presented sword-point. Three of the ruffians now disputed the way
+with bare steel. Margarita looked at the Goshawk. He was smiling calmly
+curious as he leaned over his sword, and gave her an encouraging nod.
+She made another step in defiance. One fellow stretched his hand to
+arrest her. All her maidenly pride stood up at once. ‘What a glorious
+girl!’ murmured the Goshawk, as he saw her face suddenly flash, and
+she retreated a pace and swung a sharp cut across the knuckles of
+her assailant, daring him, or one of them, with hard, bright eyes,
+beautifully vindictive, to lay hand on a pure maiden.
+
+‘You have it, Barenleib!’ cried the others, and then to Margarita:
+‘Look, young mistress! we are poor fellows, and ask a trifle of ransom,
+and then part friends.’
+
+‘Not an ace!’ the Goshawk pronounced from his post.
+
+‘Two to one, remember.’
+
+‘The odds are ours,’ replied the Goshawk confidently.
+
+They ranged themselves in front of the hall-door. Instead of accepting
+this challenge, Guy stepped to Werner, and laid his moaning foe
+length-wise in an easier posture. He then lifted Margarita on the board,
+and summoned them with cry of ‘Free passage!’ They answered by a sullen
+shrug and taunt.
+
+‘Schwartz Thier! Rothhals! Farina! buckle up, and make ready then,’ sang
+Guy.
+
+He measured the length, of his sword, and raised it. The Goshawk had not
+underrated his enemies. He was tempted to despise them when he marked
+their gradually lengthening chaps and eyeballs.
+
+Not one of them moved. All gazed at him as if their marrows were
+freezing with horror.
+
+‘What’s this?’ cried Guy.
+
+They knew as little as he, but a force was behind them irresistible
+against their efforts. The groaning oak slipped open, pushing them
+forward, and an apparition glided past, soft as the pallid silver of
+the moon. She slid to the Baron, and put her arms about him, and sang
+to him. Had the Water-Lady laid an iron hand on all those ruffians, she
+could not have held them faster bound than did the fear of her presence.
+The Goshawk drew his fair charge through them, followed by Farina, the
+Thier, and Rothhals. A last glimpse of the hall showed them still as
+old cathedral sculpture staring at white light on a fluted pillar of the
+wall.
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSAGE OF THE RHINE
+
+Low among the swarthy sandhills behind the Abbey of Laach dropped the
+round red moon. Soft lengths of misty yellow stole through the glens of
+Rhineland. The nightingales still sang. Closer and closer the moon came
+into the hushed valleys.
+
+There is a dell behind Hammerstein Castle, a ring of basking sward,
+girdled by a silver slate-brook, and guarded by four high-peaked hills
+that slope down four long wooded corners to the grassy base. Here, it is
+said, the elves and earthmen play, dancing in circles with laughing feet
+that fatten the mushroom. They would have been fulfilling the tradition
+now, but that the place was occupied by a sturdy group of mortals, armed
+with staves. The intruders were sleepy, and lay about on the inclines.
+Now and then two got up, and there rang hard echoes of oak. Again all
+were calm as cud-chewing cattle, and the white water ran pleased with
+quiet.
+
+It may be that the elves brewed mischief among them; for the oaken blows
+were becoming more frequent. One complained of a kick: another demanded
+satisfaction for a pinch. ‘Go to,’ drawled the accused drowsily in both
+cases, ‘too much beer last night!’ Within three minutes, the company
+counted a pair of broken heads. The East was winning on the West in
+heaven, and the dusk was thinning. They began to mark, each, whom he
+had cudgelled. A noise of something swiftly in motion made them alert.
+A roebuck rushed down one of the hills, and scampered across the sward.
+The fine beast went stretching so rapidly away as to be hardly distinct.
+
+‘Sathanas once more!’ they murmured, and drew together.
+
+The name passed through them like a watchword.
+
+‘Not he this time,’ cried the two new-comers, emerging from the foliage.
+‘He’s safe under Cologne--the worse for all good men who live there! But
+come! follow to the Rhine! there ‘s work for us on the yonder side, and
+sharp work.’
+
+‘Why,’ answered several, ‘we ‘ve our challenge with the lads of
+Leutesdorf and Wied to-day.’
+
+‘D’ ye see this?’ said the foremost of the others, pointing to a carved
+ivory white rose in his cap.
+
+‘Brothers!’ he swelled his voice, ‘follow with a will, for the White
+Rose is in danger!’
+
+Immediately they ranked, and followed zealously through the buds
+of young bushes, and over heaps of damp dead leaves, a half-hour’s
+scramble, when they defiled under Hammerstein, and stood before the
+Rhine. Their leader led up the river, and after a hasty walk, stopped,
+loosened his hood, and stripped.
+
+‘Now,’ said he, strapping the bundle to his back, ‘let me know the hound
+that refuses to follow his leader when the White Rose is in danger.’
+
+‘Long live Dietrich!’ they shouted. He dropped from the bank, and waded
+in. He was soon supported by the remainder of the striplings, and all
+struck out boldly into mid-stream.
+
+Never heard history of a nobler Passage of the Rhine than this made
+between Andernach and Hammerstein by members of the White Rose Club,
+bundle on back, to relieve the White Rose of Germany from thrall and
+shame!
+
+They were taken far down by the rapid current, and arrived panting to
+land. The dressing done, they marched up the pass of Tonnistein, and
+took a deep draught at the spring of pleasant waters there open to
+wayfarers. Arrived at the skirts of Laach, they beheld two farmer
+peasants lashed back to back against a hazel. They released them, but
+could gain no word of information, as the fellows, after a yawn and a
+wink, started off, all heels, to make sure of liberty. On the shores of
+the lake the brotherhood descried a body of youths, whom they hailed,
+and were welcomed to companionship.
+
+‘Where’s Berthold?’ asked Dietrich.
+
+He was not present.
+
+‘The more glory for us, then,’ Dietrich said.
+
+It was here seriously put to the captain, whether they should not halt
+at the abbey, and reflect, seeing that great work was in prospect.
+
+‘Truly,’ quoth Dietrich, ‘dying on an empty stomach is heathenish, and
+cold blood makes a green wound gape. Kaiser Conrad should be hospitable,
+and the monks honour numbers. Here be we, thirty and nine; let us go!’
+
+The West was dark blue with fallen light. The lakewaters were growing
+grey with twilight. The abbey stood muffled in shadows. Already the
+youths had commenced battering at the convent doors, when they were
+summoned by the voice of the Goshawk on horseback. To their confusion
+they beheld the White Rose herself on his right hand. Chapfallen
+Dietrich bowed to his sweet mistress.
+
+‘We were coming to the rescue,’ he stammered.
+
+A laugh broke from the Goshawk. ‘You thought the lady was locked up in
+the ghostly larder; eh!’
+
+Dietrich seized his sword, and tightened his belt.
+
+‘The Club allows no jesting with the White Rose, Sir Stranger.’
+
+Margarita made peace. ‘I thank you all, good friends. But quarrel not, I
+pray you, with them that save me at the risk of their lives.’
+
+‘Our service is equal,’ said the Goshawk, flourishing, ‘Only we happen
+to be beforehand with the Club, for which Farina and myself heartily beg
+pardon of the entire brotherhood.’
+
+‘Farina!’ exclaimed Dietrich. ‘Then we make a prisoner instead of
+uncaging a captive.’
+
+‘What ‘s this?’ said Guy.
+
+‘So much,’ responded Dietrich. ‘Yonder’s a runaway from two masters: the
+law of Cologne, and the conqueror of Satan; and all good citizens are
+empowered to bring him back, dead or alive.’
+
+‘Dietrich! Dietrich! dare you talk thus of the man who saved me?’ cried
+Margarita.
+
+Dietrich sullenly persisted.
+
+‘Then, look!’ said the White Rose, reddening under the pale dawn; ‘he
+shall not, he shall not go with you.’
+
+One of the Club was here on the point of speaking to the White Rose,--a
+breach of the captain’s privilege. Dietrich felled him unresisting to
+earth, and resumed:
+
+‘It must be done, Beauty of Cologne! the monk, Father Gregory, is now
+enduring shame and scorn for lack of this truant witness.’
+
+‘Enough! I go!’ said Farina.
+
+‘You leave me?’ Margarita looked tender reproach. Weariness and fierce
+excitement had given a liquid flame to her eyes and an endearing
+darkness round their circles that matched strangely with her plump
+youth. Her features had a soft white flush. She was less radiant, but
+never looked so bewitching. An aspect of sweet human languor caught at
+the heart of love, and raised tumults.
+
+‘It is a duty,’ said Farina.
+
+‘Then go,’ she beckoned, and held her hand for him to kiss. He raised it
+to his lips. This was seen of all the Club.
+
+As they were departing with Farina, and Guy prepared to demand
+admittance into the convent, Dietrich chanced to ask how fared Dame
+Lisbeth. Schwartz Thier was by, and answered, with a laugh, that he had
+quite forgotten the little lady.
+
+‘We took her in mistake for you, mistress! She was a one to scream! The
+moment she was kissed--mum as a cloister. We kissed her, all of us,
+for the fun of it. No harm--no harm! We should have dropped her when we
+found we had the old bird ‘stead of the young one, but reckoned ransom,
+ye see. She’s at the Eck, rattling, I’s wager, like last year’s nut in
+the shell!’
+
+‘Lisbeth! Lisbeth! poor Lisbeth; we will return to her. Instantly,’
+cried Margarita.
+
+‘Not you,’ said Guy.
+
+‘Yes! I!’
+
+‘No!’ said Guy.
+
+‘Gallant Goshawk! best of birds, let me go!’
+
+‘Without me or Farina, never! I see I shall have no chance with my lord
+now. Come, then, come, fair Irresistible! come, lads. Farina can journey
+back alone. You shall have the renown of rescuing Dame Lisbeth.’
+
+‘Farina! forget not to comfort my father,’ said Margarita.
+
+Between Margarita’s society and Farina’s, there was little dispute in
+the captain’s mind which choice to make. Farina was allowed to travel
+single to Cologne; and Dietrich, petted by Margarita, and gently jeered
+by Guy, headed the Club from Laach waters to the castle of the Robber
+Baron.
+
+
+
+
+THE BACK-BLOWS OF SATHANAS
+
+Monk Gregory was pacing the high road between the Imperial camp and
+suffering Cologne. The sun had risen through interminable distances
+of cloud that held him remote in a succession of receding mounds and
+thinner veils, realm beyond realm, till he showed fireless, like a
+phantom king in a phantom land. The lark was in the breast of morning.
+The field-mouse ran along the furrows. Dews hung red and grey on the
+weedy banks and wayside trees. At times the nostril of the good
+father was lifted, and he beat his breast, relapsing into sorrowful
+contemplation. Passed-any citizen of Cologne, the ghostly head sunk into
+its cowl. ‘There’s a black raven!’ said many. Monk Gregory heard them,
+and murmured, ‘Thou hast me, Evil one! thou hast me!’
+
+It was noon when Farina came clattering down from the camp.
+
+‘Father,’ said he, ‘I have sought thee.’
+
+‘My son!’ exclaimed Monk Gregory with silencing hand, ‘thou didst not
+well to leave me contending against the tongues of doubt. Answer me
+not. The maiden! and what weighed she in such a scale?--No more! I am
+punished. Well speaks the ancient proverb:
+
+        “Beware the back-blows of Sathanas!”
+
+I, that thought to have vanquished him! Vanity has wrecked me, in this
+world and the next. I am the victim of self-incense. I hear the demons
+shouting their chorus--“Here comes Monk Gregory, who called himself
+Conqueror of Darkness!” In the camp I am discredited and a scoff; in
+the city I am spat upon, abhorred. Satan, my son, fights not with his
+fore-claws. ‘Tis with his tail he fights, O Farina!--Listen, my son! he
+entered to his kingdom below through Cologne, even under the stones
+of the Cathedral Square, and the stench of him abominably remaineth,
+challenging the nostrils of holy and unholy alike. The Kaiser cannot
+approach for him; the citizens are outraged. Oh! had I held my peace in
+humbleness, I had truly conquered him. But he gave me easy victory, to
+inflate me. I shall not last. Now this only is left, my son; that thou
+bear living testimony to the truth of my statement, as I bear it to the
+folly!’
+
+Farina promised, in the face of all, he would proclaim and witness to
+his victory on Drachenfels.
+
+‘That I may not be ranked an impostor!’ continued the Monk. ‘And how
+great must be the virtue of them that encounter that dark spirit! Valour
+availeth nought. But if virtue be not in’ ye, soon will ye be puffed to
+bursting with that devil’s poison, self-incense. Surely, my son, thou
+art faithful; and for this service I can reward thee. Follow me yet
+again.’
+
+On the road they met Gottlieb Groschen, hastening to the camp. Dismay
+rumpled the old merchant’s honest jowl. Farina drew rein before him.
+
+‘Your daughter is safe, worthy Master Groschen,’ said he.
+
+‘Safe?’ cried Gottlieb; ‘where is she, my Grete?’
+
+Farina briefly explained. Gottlieb spread out his arms, and was going
+to thank the youth. He saw Father Gregory, and his whole frame narrowed
+with disgust.
+
+‘Are you in company with that pestilent animal, that curse of Cologne!’
+
+‘The good Monk--,’ said Farina.
+
+‘You are leagued with him, then, sirrah! Expect no thanks from me.
+Cologne, I say, is cursed! Meddling wretches! could ye not leave Satan
+alone? He hurt us not. We were free of him. Cologne, I say, is cursed!
+The enemy of mankind is brought by you to be the deadly foe of Cologne.’
+
+So saying, Gottlieb departed.
+
+‘Seest thou, my son,’ quoth the Monk, ‘they reason not!’
+
+Farina was dejected. Willingly would he, for his part, have left the
+soul of Evil a loose rover for the sake of some brighter horizon to his
+hope.
+
+No twinge of remorse accompanied Gottlieb. The Kaiser had allotted him
+an encampment and a guard of honour for his household while the foulness
+raged, and there Gottlieb welcomed back Margarita and Aunt Lisbeth on
+the noon after his meeting with Farina. The White Rose had rested at
+Laach, and was blooming again. She and the Goshawk came trotting in
+advance of the Club through the woods of Laach, startling the deer
+with laughter, and sending the hare with her ears laid back all across
+country. In vain Dietrich menaced Guy with the terrors of the Club: Aunt
+Lisbeth begged of Margarita not to leave her with the footmen in vain.
+The joyous couple galloped over the country, and sprang the ditches, and
+leapt the dykes, up and down the banks, glad as morning hawks, entering
+Andernach at a round pace; where they rested at a hostel as capable of
+producing good Rhine and Mosel wine then as now. Here they had mid-day’s
+meal laid out in the garden for the angry Club, and somewhat appeased
+them on their arrival with bumpers of the best Scharzhofberger. After a
+refreshing halt, three boats were hired. On their passage to the river,
+they encountered a procession of monks headed by the Archbishop of
+Andernach, bearing a small figure of Christ carved in blackthorn and
+varnished: said to work miracles, and a present to the good town from
+two Hungarian pilgrims.
+
+‘Are ye for Cologne?’ the monks inquired of them.
+
+‘Direct down stream!’ they answered.
+
+‘Send, then, hither to us Gregory, the conqueror of Darkness, that he
+may know there is gratitude on earth and gratulation for great deeds,’
+said the monks.
+
+So with genuflexions the travellers proceeded, and entered the boats
+by the Archbishop’s White Tower. Hammerstein Castle and Rheineck
+they floated under; Salzig and the Ahr confluence; Rolandseck and
+Nonnenwerth; Drachenfels and Bonn; hills green with young vines; dells
+waving fresh foliage. Margarita sang as they floated. Ancient ballads
+she sang that made the Goshawk sigh for home, and affected the Club with
+delirious love for the grand old water that was speeding them onward.
+Aunt Lisbeth was not to be moved. She alone held down her head.
+She looked not Gottlieb in the face as he embraced her. Nor to any
+questioning would she vouchsafe reply. From that time forth, she was
+charity to woman; and the exuberant cheerfulness and familiarity of
+the men toward her soon grew kindly and respectful. The dragon in Aunt
+Lisbeth was destroyed. She objected no more to Margarita’s cameo.
+
+The Goshawk quickly made peace with his lord, and enjoyed the
+commendation of the Kaiser. Dietrich Schill thought of challenging
+him; but the Club had graver business: and this was to pass sentence
+on Berthold Schmidt for the crime of betraying the White Rose into the
+hands of Werner. They had found Berthold at the Eck, and there consented
+to let him remain until ransom was paid for his traitorous body.
+Berthold in his mad passion was tricked by Werner, and on his release,
+by payment of the ransom, submitted to the judgement of the Club, which
+condemned him to fight them all in turn, and then endure banishment
+from Rhineland; the Goshawk, for his sister’s sake, interceding before a
+harsher tribunal.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENTRY INTO COLOGNE
+
+Seven days Kaiser Heinrich remained camped outside Cologne. Six times
+in six successive days the Kaiser attempted to enter the city, and was
+foiled.
+
+‘Beard of Barbarossa!’ said the Kaiser, ‘this is the first stronghold
+that ever resisted me.’
+
+The warrior bishops, electors, pfalzgrafs, and knights of the Empire,
+all swore it was no shame not to be a match for the Demon.
+
+‘If,’ said the reflective Kaiser, ‘we are to suffer below what poor
+Cologne is doomed to undergo now, let us, by all that is savoury, reform
+and do penance.’
+
+The wind just then setting on them dead from Cologne made the courtiers
+serious. Many thought of their souls for the first time.
+
+This is recorded to the honour of Monk Gregory.
+
+On the seventh morning, the Kaiser announced his determination to make a
+last trial.
+
+It was dawn, and a youth stood before the Kaiser’s tent, praying an
+audience.
+
+Conducted into the presence of the Kaiser, the youth, they say,
+succeeded in arousing him from his depression, for, brave as he was,
+Kaiser Heinrich dreaded the issue. Forthwith order was given for
+the cavalcade to set out according to the rescript, Kaiser Heinrich
+retaining the youth at his right hand. But the youth had found occasion
+to visit Gottlieb and Margarita, each of whom he furnished with a flash,
+[flask?] curiously shaped, and charged with a distillation.
+
+As the head of the procession reached the gates of Cologne, symptoms of
+wavering were manifest.
+
+Kaiser Heinrich commanded an advance, at all cost.
+
+Pfalzgraf Nase, as the old chronicles call him in their humour, but
+assuredly a great noble, led the van, and pushed across the draw-bridge.
+
+Hesitation and signs of horror were manifest in the assemblage round the
+Kaiser’s person. The Kaiser and the youth at his right hand were cheery.
+Not a whit drooped they! Several of the heroic knights begged the
+Kaiser’s permission to fall back.
+
+‘Follow Pfalzgraf Nase!’ the Kaiser is reported to have said.
+
+Great was the wonderment of the people of Cologne to behold Kaiser
+Heinrich riding in perfect stateliness up the main street toward
+the Cathedral, while right and left of him bishops and electors were
+dropping incapable.
+
+The Kaiser advanced till by his side the youth rode sole.
+
+‘Thy name?’ said the Kaiser.
+
+He answered: ‘A poor youth, unconquerable Kaiser! Farina I am called.’
+
+‘Thy recompense?’ said the Kaiser.
+
+He answered: ‘The hand of a maiden of Cologne, most gracious Kaiser and
+master!’
+
+‘She is thine!’ said the Kaiser.
+
+Kaiser Heinrich looked behind him, and among a host grasping the pommels
+of their saddles, and reeling vanquished, were but two erect, a maiden
+and an old man.
+
+‘That is she, unconquerable Kaiser!’ Farina continued, bowing low.
+
+‘It shall be arranged on the spot,’ said the Kaiser.
+
+A word from Kaiser Heinrich sealed Gottlieb’s compliance.
+
+Said he: ‘Gracious Kaiser and master! though such a youth could of
+himself never have aspired to the possession of a Groschen, yet when the
+Kaiser pleads for him, objection is as the rock of Moses, and streams
+consent. Truly he has done Cologne good service, and if Margarita, my
+daughter, can be persuaded--’
+
+The Kaiser addressed her with his blazing brows.
+
+Margarita blushed a ready autumn of rosy-ripe acquiescence.
+
+‘A marriage registered yonder!’ said the Kaiser, pointing upward.
+
+‘I am thine, murmured Margarita, as Farina drew near her.
+
+‘Seal it! seal it!’ quoth the Kaiser, in hearty good humour; ‘take no
+consent from man or maid without a seal.’
+
+Farina tossed the contents of a flask in air, and saluted his beloved on
+the lips.
+
+This scene took place near the charred round of earth where the Foulest
+descended to his kingdom below.
+
+Men now pervaded Cologne with flasks, purifying the atmosphere. It
+became possible to breathe freely.
+
+‘We Germans,’ said Kaiser Heinrich, when he was again surrounded by his
+courtiers, ‘may go wrong if we always follow Pfalzgraf Nase; but this
+time we have been well led.’ Whereat there was obsequious laughter.
+
+The Pfalzgraf pleaded a susceptible nostril.
+
+‘Thou art, I fear, but a timid mortal,’ said the Kaiser.
+
+‘Never have I been found so on the German Field, Imperial Majesty!’
+returned the Pfalzgraf. ‘I take glory to myself that this Nether reek
+overcomes me.’
+
+‘Even that we must combat, you see!’ exclaimed Kaiser Heinrich; ‘but
+come all to a marriage this night, and take brides as soon as you will,
+all of you. Increase, and give us loyal subjects in plenty. I count
+prosperity by the number of marriages in my empire!’
+
+The White Rose Club were invited by Gottlieb to the wedding, and took it
+in vast wrath until they saw the Kaiser, and such excellent stout German
+fare present, when immediately a battle raged as to who should do the
+event most honour, and was in dispute till dawn: Dietrich Schill being
+the man, he having consumed wurst the length of his arm, and wine
+sufficient to have floated a St. Goar salmon; which was long proudly
+chronicled in his family, and is now unearthed from among the ancient
+honourable records of Cologne.
+
+The Goshawk was Farina’s bridesman, and a very spiriting bridesman was
+he! Aunt Lisbeth sat in a corner, faintly smiling.
+
+‘Child!’ said the little lady to Margarita when they kissed at parting,
+‘your courage amazes me. Do you think? Do you know? Poor, sweet bird,
+delivered over hand and foot!’
+
+‘I love him! I love him, aunty! that’s all I know,’ said Margarita:
+‘love, love, love him!’
+
+‘Heaven help you!’ ejaculated Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+‘Pray with me,’ said Margarita.
+
+The two knelt at the foot of the bride-bed, and prayed very different
+prayers, but to the same end. That done, Aunt Lisbeth helped undress the
+White Rose, and trembled, and told a sad nuptial anecdote of the Castle,
+and put her little shrivelled hand on Margarita’s heart, and shrieked.
+
+‘Child! it gallops!’ she cried.
+
+‘‘Tis happiness,’ said Margarita, standing in her hair.
+
+‘May it last only!’ exclaimed Aunt Lisbeth.
+
+‘It will, aunty! I am humble: I am true’; and the fair girl gathered the
+frill of her nightgown.
+
+‘Look not in the glass,’ said Lisbeth; ‘not to-night! Look, if you can,
+to-morrow.’
+
+She smoothed the White Rose in her bed, tucked her up, and kissed her,
+leaving her as a bud that waits for sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+The shadow of Monk Gregory was seen no more in Cologne. He entered the
+Calendar, and ranks next St. Anthony. For three successive centuries the
+towns of Rhineland boasted his visits in the flesh, and the conqueror of
+Darkness caused dire Rhenish feuds.
+
+The Tailed Infernal repeated his famous Back-blow on Farina. The youth
+awoke one morning and beheld warehouses the exact pattern of his own,
+displaying flasks shaped even as his own, and a Farina to right and
+left of him. In a week, they were doubled. A month quadrupled them. They
+increased.
+
+‘Fame and Fortune,’ mused Farina, ‘come from man and the world: Love
+is from heaven. We may be worthy, and lose the first. We lose not love
+unless unworthy. Would ye know the true Farina? Look for him who walks
+under the seal of bliss; whose darling is for ever his young sweet
+bride, leading him from snares, priming his soul with celestial
+freshness. There is no hypocrisy can ape that aspect. Least of all, the
+creatures of the Damned! By this I may be known.’
+
+Seven years after, when the Goshawk came into Cologne to see old
+friends, and drink some of Gottlieb’s oldest Rudesheimer, he was waylaid
+by false Farinas; and only discovered the true one at last, by chance,
+in the music-gardens near the Rhine, where Farina sat, having on one
+hand Margarita, and at his feet three boys and one girl, over whom both
+bent lovingly, like the parent vine fondling its grape bunches in summer
+light.
+
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A generous enemy is a friend on the wrong side
+     All are friends who sit at table
+     Be what you seem, my little one
+     Bed was a rock of refuge and fortified defence
+     Civil tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine
+     Dangerous things are uttered after the third glass
+     Everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach
+     Face betokening the perpetual smack of lemon
+     Gratitude never was a woman’s gift
+     It was harder to be near and not close
+     Loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off
+     Never reckon on womankind for a wise act
+     Self-incense
+     Sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes
+     So are great deeds judged when the danger’s past (as easy)
+     Soft slumber of a strength never yet called forth
+     Suspicion was her best witness
+     Sweet treasure before which lies a dragon sleeping
+     We like well whatso we have done good work for
+     Weak reeds who are easily vanquished and never overcome
+     Weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a full one
+     Wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CASE OF GENERAL OPLE AND LADY CAMPER
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+An excursion beyond the immediate suburbs of London, projected long
+before his pony-carriage was hired to conduct him, in fact ever since
+his retirement from active service, led General Ople across a famous
+common, with which he fell in love at once, to a lofty highway along
+the borders of a park, for which he promptly exchanged his heart, and
+so gradually within a stone’s-throw or so of the river-side, where he
+determined not solely to bestow his affections but to settle for life.
+It may be seen that he was of an adventurous temperament, though he had
+thought fit to loosen his sword-belt. The pony-carriage, however, had
+been hired for the very special purpose of helping him to pass in review
+the lines of what he called country houses, cottages, or even sites for
+building, not too remote from sweet London: and as when Coelebs goes
+forth intending to pursue and obtain, there is no doubt of his bringing
+home a wife, the circumstance that there stood a house to let, in an
+airy situation, at a certain distance in hail of the metropolis he
+worshipped, was enough to kindle the General’s enthusiasm. He would
+have taken the first he saw, had it not been for his daughter, who
+accompanied him, and at the age of eighteen was about to undertake
+the management of his house. Fortune, under Elizabeth Ople’s guiding
+restraint, directed him to an epitome of the comforts. The place he fell
+upon is only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers, and for
+the first week after taking it he modestly followed them by terming
+it bijou. In time, when his own imagination, instigated by a state of
+something more than mere contentment, had been at work on it, he chose
+the happy phrase, ‘a gentlemanly residence.’ For it was, he declared,
+a small estate. There was a lodge to it, resembling two sentry-boxes
+forced into union, where in one half an old couple sat bent, in the
+other half lay compressed; there was a backdrive to discoverable
+stables; there was a bit of grass that would have appeared a meadow if
+magnified; and there was a wall round the kitchen-garden and a strip
+of wood round the flower-garden. The prying of the outside world was
+impossible. Comfort, fortification; and gentlemanliness made the place,
+as the General said, an ideal English home.
+
+The compass of the estate was half an acre, and perhaps a perch or two,
+just the size for the hugging love General Ople was happiest in giving.
+He wisely decided to retain the old couple at the lodge, whose members
+were used to restriction, and also not to purchase a cow, that would
+have wanted pasture. With the old man, while the old woman attended to
+the bell at the handsome front entrance with its gilt-spiked gates, he
+undertook to do the gardening; a business he delighted in, so long as he
+could perform it in a gentlemanly manner, that is to say, so long as he
+was not overlooked. He was perfectly concealed from the road. Only one
+house, and curiously indeed, only one window of the house, and further
+to show the protection extended to Douro Lodge, that window an attic,
+overlooked him. And the house was empty.
+
+The house (for who can hope, and who should desire a commodious house,
+with conservatories, aviaries, pond and boat-shed, and other joys of
+wealth, to remain unoccupied) was taken two seasons later by a lady,
+of whom Fame, rolling like a dust-cloud from the place she had left,
+reported that she was eccentric. The word is uninstructive: it does not
+frighten. In a lady of a certain age, it is rather a characteristic of
+aristocracy in retirement. And at least it implies wealth.
+
+General Ople was very anxious to see her. He had the sentiment of humble
+respectfulness toward aristocracy, and there was that in riches which
+aroused his admiration. London, for instance, he was not afraid to say
+he thought the wonder of the world. He remarked, in addition, that the
+sacking of London would suffice to make every common soldier of the
+foreign army of occupation an independent gentleman for the term of his
+natural days. But this is a nightmare! said he, startling himself with
+an abhorrent dream of envy of those enriched invading officers: for
+Booty is the one lovely thing which the military mind can contemplate
+in the abstract. His habit was to go off in an explosion of heavy sighs
+when he had delivered himself so far, like a man at war with himself.
+
+The lady arrived in time: she received the cards of the neighbourhood,
+and signalized her eccentricity by paying no attention to them,
+excepting the card of a Mrs. Baerens, who had audience of her at once.
+By express arrangement, the card of General Wilson Ople, as her nearest
+neighbour, followed the card of the rector, the social head of the
+district; and the rector was granted an interview, but Lady Camper was
+not at home to General Ople. She is of superior station to me, and may
+not wish to associate with me, the General modestly said. Nevertheless
+he was wounded: for in spite of himself, and without the slightest wish
+to obtrude his own person, as he explained the meaning that he had in
+him, his rank in the British army forced him to be the representative
+of it, in the absence of any one of a superior rank. So that he was
+professionally hurt, and his heart being in his profession, it may be
+honestly stated that he was wounded in his feelings, though he said no,
+and insisted on the distinction. Once a day his walk for constitutional
+exercise compelled him to pass before Lady Camper’s windows, which were
+not bashfully withdrawn, as he said humorously of Douro Lodge, in the
+seclusion of half-pay, but bowed out imperiously, militarily, like a
+generalissimo on horseback, and had full command of the road and levels
+up to the swelling park-foliage. He went by at a smart stride, with a
+delicate depression of his upright bearing, as though hastening to greet
+a friend in view, whose hand was getting ready for the shake. This much
+would have been observed by a housemaid; and considering his fine figure
+and the peculiar shining silveriness of his hair, the acceleration of
+his gait was noticeable. When he drove by, the pony’s right ear was
+flicked, to the extreme indignation of a mettlesome little animal. It
+ensued in consequence that the General was borne flying under the eyes
+of Lady Camper, and such pace displeasing him, he reduced it invariably
+at a step or two beyond the corner of her grounds.
+
+But neither he nor his daughter Elizabeth attached importance to so
+trivial a circumstance. The General punctiliously avoided glancing at
+the windows during the passage past them, whether in his wild career
+or on foot. Elizabeth took a side-shot, as one looks at a wayside tree.
+Their speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over
+her loneliness: and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to
+General Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very
+fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies
+must be. The rector’s account of her, too, excited the mind. She had
+informed him bluntly, that she now and then went to church to save
+appearances, but was not a church-goer, finding it impossible to support
+the length of the service; might, however, be reckoned in subscriptions
+for all the charities, and left her pew open to poor people, and none
+but the poor. She had travelled over Europe, and knew the East. Sketches
+in watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and
+a pair of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the
+writing-desk in her drawing-room. General Ople gathered from the rector
+that she had a great contempt for men: yet it was curiously varied with
+lamentations over the weakness of women. ‘Really she cannot possibly be
+an example of that,’ said the General, thinking of the pistols.
+
+Now, we learn from those who have studied women on the chess-board, and
+know what ebony or ivory will do along particular lines, or hopping,
+that men much talked about will take possession of their thoughts; and
+certainly the fact may be accepted for one of their moves. But the whole
+fabric of our knowledge of them, which we are taught to build on this
+originally acute perception, is shattered when we hear, that it is
+exactly the same, in the same degree, in proportion to the amount of
+work they have to do, exactly the same with men and their thoughts in
+the case of women much talked about. So it was with General Ople, and
+nothing is left for me to say except, that there is broader ground
+than the chessboard. I am earnest in protesting the similarity of the
+singular couples on common earth, because otherwise the General is in
+peril of the accusation that he is a feminine character; and not simply
+was he a gallant officer, and a veteran in gunpowder strife, he was
+also (and it is an extraordinary thing that a genuine humility did not
+prevent it, and did survive it) a lord and conqueror of the sex. He had
+done his pretty bit of mischief, all in the way of honour, of course,
+but hearts had knocked. And now, with his bright white hair, his
+close-brushed white whiskers on a face burnt brown, his clear-cut
+features, and a winning droop of his eyelids, there was powder in him
+still, if not shot.
+
+There was a lamentable susceptibility to ladies’ charms. On the other
+hand, for the protection of the sex, a remainder of shyness kept
+him from active enterprise and in the state of suffering, so long as
+indications of encouragement were wanting. He had killed the soft ones,
+who came to him, attracted by the softness in him, to be killed: but
+clever women alarmed and paralyzed him. Their aptness to question and
+require immediate sparkling answers; their demand for fresh wit, of a
+kind that is not furnished by publications which strike it into heads
+with a hammer, and supply it wholesale; their various reading; their
+power of ridicule too; made them awful in his contemplation.
+
+Supposing (for the inflammable officer was now thinking, and deeply
+thinking, of a clever woman), supposing that Lady Camper’s pistols were
+needed in her defence one night: at the first report proclaiming her
+extremity, valour might gain an introduction to her upon easy terms,
+and would not be expected to be witty. She would, perhaps, after the
+excitement, admit his masculine superiority, in the beautiful old
+fashion, by fainting in his arms. Such was the reverie he passingly
+indulged, and only so could he venture to hope for an acquaintance with
+the formidable lady who was his next neighbour. But the proud society of
+the burglarious denied him opportunity.
+
+Meanwhile, he learnt that Lady Camper had a nephew, and the young
+gentleman was in a cavalry regiment. General Ople met him outside his
+gates, received and returned a polite salute, liked his appearance and
+manners and talked of him to Elizabeth, asking her if by chance she
+had seen him. She replied that she believed she had, and praised his
+horsemanship. The General discovered that he was an excellent sculler.
+His daughter was rowing him up the river when the young gentleman
+shot by, with a splendid stroke, in an outrigger, backed, and floating
+alongside presumed to enter into conversation, during which he managed
+to express regrets at his aunt’s turn for solitariness. As they belonged
+to sister branches of the same Service, the General and Mr. Reginald
+Roller had a theme in common, and a passion. Elizabeth told her father
+that nothing afforded her so much pleasure as to hear him talk with Mr.
+Roller on military matters. General Ople assured her that it pleased
+him likewise. He began to spy about for Mr. Roller, and it sometimes
+occurred that they conversed across the wall; it could hardly be
+avoided. A hint or two, an undefinable flying allusion, gave the General
+to understand that Lady Camper had not been happy in her marriage. He
+was pained to think of her misfortune; but as she was not over forty,
+the disaster was, perhaps, not irremediable; that is to say, if she
+could be taught to extend her forgiveness to men, and abandon her
+solitude. ‘If,’ he said to his daughter, ‘Lady Camper should by any
+chance be induced to contract a second alliance, she would, one might
+expect, be humanized, and we should have highly agreeable neighbours.’
+Elizabeth artlessly hoped for such an event to take place.
+
+She rarely differed with her father, up to whom, taking example from the
+world around him, she looked as the pattern of a man of wise conduct.
+
+And he was one; and though modest, he was in good humour with himself,
+approved himself, and could say, that without boasting of success, he
+was a satisfied man, until he met his touchstone in Lady Camper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out,
+because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so
+cruel in it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great
+pretender, none of those who are logically displaced from the heights
+they have been raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in
+Providence. He was modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly
+residence appeased his ambition. Popular, he could own that he was, but
+not meteorically; rather by reason of his willingness to receive light
+than his desire to shed it. Why, then, was the terrible test brought
+to bear upon him, of all men? He was one of us; no worse, and not
+strikingly or perilously better; and he could not but feel, in the
+bitterness of his reflections upon an inexplicable destiny, that the
+punishment befalling him, unmerited as it was, looked like absence of
+Design in the scheme of things, Above. It looked as if the blow had been
+dealt him by reckless chance. And to believe that, was for the mind of
+General Ople the having to return to his alphabet and recommence the
+ascent of the laborious mountain of understanding.
+
+To proceed, the General’s introduction to Lady Camper was owing to a
+message she sent him by her gardener, with a request that he would cut
+down a branch of a wychelm, obscuring her view across his grounds toward
+the river. The General consulted with his daughter, and came to the
+conclusion, that as he could hardly despatch a written reply to a verbal
+message, yet greatly wished to subscribe to the wishes of Lady Camper,
+the best thing for him to do was to apply for an interview. He sent
+word that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself
+forthwith to his toilette. She was the niece of an earl.
+
+Elizabeth commended his appearance, ‘passed him,’ as he would have
+said; and well she might, for his hat, surtout, trousers and boots, were
+worthy of an introduction to Royalty. A touch of scarlet silk round the
+neck gave him bloom, and better than that, the blooming consciousness of
+it.
+
+‘You are not to be nervous, papa,’ Elizabeth said.
+
+‘Not at all,’ replied the General. ‘I say, not at all, my dear,’ he
+repeated, and so betrayed that he had fallen into the nervous mood. ‘I
+was saying, I have known worse mornings than this.’ He turned to her and
+smiled brightly, nodded, and set his face to meet the future.
+
+He was absent an hour and a half.
+
+He came back with his radiance a little subdued, by no means eclipsed;
+as, when experience has afforded us matter for thought, we cease to
+shine dazzlingly, yet are not clouded; the rays have merely grown
+serener. The sum of his impressions was conveyed in the reflective
+utterance--‘It only shows, my dear, how different the reality is from
+our anticipation of it!’
+
+Lady Camper had been charming; full of condescension, neighbourly,
+friendly, willing to be satisfied with the sacrifice of the smallest
+branch of the wych-elm, and only requiring that much for complimentary
+reasons.
+
+Elizabeth wished to hear what they were, and she thought the request
+rather singular; but the General begged her to bear in mind, that they
+were dealing with a very extraordinary woman; ‘highly accomplished,
+really exceedingly handsome,’ he said to himself, aloud.
+
+The reasons were, her liking for air and view, and desire to see into
+her neighbour’s grounds without having to mount to the attic.
+
+Elizabeth gave a slight exclamation, and blushed.
+
+‘So, my dear, we are objects of interest to her ladyship,’ said the
+General.
+
+He assured her that Lady Camper’s manners were delightful. Strange to
+tell, she knew a great deal of his antecedent history, things he had
+not supposed were known; ‘little matters,’ he remarked, by which his
+daughter faintly conceived a reference to the conquests of his dashing
+days. Lady Camper had deigned to impart some of her own, incidentally;
+that she was of Welsh blood, and born among the mountains. ‘She has a
+romantic look,’ was the General’s comment; and that her husband had been
+an insatiable traveller before he became an invalid, and had never cared
+for Art. ‘Quite an extraordinary circumstance, with such a wife!’ the
+General said.
+
+He fell upon the wych-elm with his own hands, under cover of the
+leafage, and the next day he paid his respects to Lady Camper, to
+inquire if her ladyship saw any further obstruction to the view.
+
+‘None,’ she replied. ‘And now we shall see what the two birds will do.’
+
+Apparently, then, she entertained an animosity to a pair of birds in the
+tree.
+
+‘Yes, yes; I say they chirp early in the morning,’ said General Ople.
+
+‘At all hours.’
+
+‘The song of birds...?’ he pleaded softly for nature.
+
+‘If the nest is provided for them; but I don’t like vagabond chirping.’
+
+The General perfectly acquiesced. This, in an engagement with a clever
+woman, is what you should do, or else you are likely to find yourself
+planted unawares in a high wind, your hat blown off, and your
+coat-tails anywhere; in other words, you will stand ridiculous in your
+bewilderment; and General Ople ever footed with the utmost caution
+to avoid that quagmire of the ridiculous. The extremer quags he had
+hitherto escaped; the smaller, into which he fell in his agile evasions
+of the big, he had hitherto been blest in finding none to notice.
+
+He requested her ladyship’s permission to present his daughter. Lady
+Camper sent in her card.
+
+Elizabeth Ople beheld a tall, handsomely-mannered lady, with good
+features and penetrating dark eyes, an easy carriage of her person and
+an agreeable voice, but (the vision of her age flashed out under the
+compelling eyes of youth) fifty if a day. The rich colouring confessed
+to it. But she was very pleasing, and Elizabeth’s perception dwelt on it
+only because her father’s manly chivalry had defended the lady against
+one year more than forty.
+
+The richness of the colouring, Elizabeth feared, was artificial, and
+it caused her ingenuous young blood a shudder. For we are so devoted to
+nature when the dame is flattering us with her gifts, that we loathe the
+substitute omitting to think how much less it is an imposition than a
+form of practical adoration of the genuine.
+
+Our young detective, however, concealed her emotion of childish horror.
+
+Lady Camper remarked of her, ‘She seems honest, and that is the most we
+can hope of girls.’
+
+‘She is a jewel for an honest man,’ the General sighed, ‘some day!’
+
+‘Let us hope it will be a distant day.’
+
+‘Yet,’ said the General, ‘girls expect to marry.’
+
+Lady Camper fixed her black eyes on him, but did not speak.
+
+He told Elizabeth that her ladyship’s eyes were exceedingly searching:
+‘Only,’ said he, ‘as I have nothing to hide, I am able to submit to
+inspection’; and he laughed slightly up to an arresting cough, and made
+the mantelpiece ornaments pass muster.
+
+General Ople was the hero to champion a lady whose airs of haughtiness
+caused her to be somewhat backbitten. He assured everybody, that Lady
+Camper was much misunderstood; she was a most remarkable woman; she was
+a most affable and highly intelligent lady. Building up her attributes
+on a splendid climax, he declared she was pious, charitable, witty,
+and really an extraordinary artist. He laid particular stress on
+her artistic qualities, describing her power with the brush, her
+water-colour sketches, and also some immensely clever caricatures. As he
+talked of no one else, his friends heard enough of Lady Camper, who was
+anything but a favourite. The Pollingtons, the Wilders, the Wardens, the
+Baerens, the Goslings, and others of his acquaintance, talked of Lady
+Camper and General Ople rather maliciously. They were all City people,
+and they admired the General, but mourned that he should so abjectly
+have fallen at the feet of a lady as red with rouge as a railway
+bill. His not seeing it showed the state he was in. The sister of Mrs.
+Pollington, an amiable widow, relict of a large City warehouse, named
+Barcop, was chilled by a falling off in his attentions. His apology for
+not appearing at garden parties was, that he was engaged to wait on Lady
+Camper.
+
+And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the
+obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend.
+Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let
+in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was
+gardening--not the pretty occupation of pruning--he was digging--and of
+necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable.
+From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady’s
+presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought)
+when you are caught in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. And
+though he himself loved the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart
+respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he
+gloried in his kitchen garden, this was not a secret for the world to
+know, and he almost heeled over on his beam ends when word was brought
+of the extreme honour Lady Camper had done him. He worked his arms
+hurriedly into his fatigue jacket, trusting to get away to the house and
+spend a couple of minutes on his adornment; and with any other visitor
+it might have been accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone
+in a room. She was on the square of lawn as the General stole along the
+walk. Had she kept her back to him, he might have rounded her like the
+shadow of a dial, undetected. She was frightfully acute of hearing. She
+turned while he was in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one
+leg on the march, projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg,
+the very fatallest moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling
+him.
+
+Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.
+
+He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper
+simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers,
+accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.
+
+‘A beautiful rose indeed,’ she said of the latter, ‘only it smells of
+macassar oil.’
+
+‘Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,’ rejoined
+the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. ‘I was saying, I always
+....’ And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission to
+leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult
+
+‘I have a nose,’ observed Lady Camper.
+
+Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople’s
+version of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his
+gardening costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to
+do so; and if he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his
+excessive scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.
+
+He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful of
+paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.
+
+‘It is the home for a young couple,’ she said.
+
+‘I am no longer young,’ the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to
+this confession. ‘I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a
+gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I...’
+
+‘Yes, yes!’ Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a
+contraction of the brows, as if in pain.
+
+He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.
+
+Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had
+been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her marriage
+with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and estates.
+
+The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.
+
+It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the
+residence. It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her
+reminiscences again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his
+residence, thinking it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed
+the error of repeating it, with ‘gentleman-like’ for a variation.
+
+Elizabeth was out--he knew not where. The housemaid informed him, that
+Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.
+
+‘Is she alone?’ Lady Camper inquired of him.
+
+‘I fancy so,’ the General replied.
+
+‘The poor child has no mother.’
+
+‘It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.’
+
+‘No doubt. She is too pretty to go out alone.’
+
+‘I can trust her.’
+
+‘Girls!’
+
+‘She has the spirit of a man.’
+
+‘That is well. She has a spirit; it will be tried.’
+
+The General modestly furnished an instance or two of her spiritedness.
+
+Lady Camper seemed to like this theme; she looked graciously interested.
+
+‘Still, you should not suffer her to go out alone,’ she said.
+
+‘I place implicit confidence in her,’ said the General; and Lady Camper
+gave it up.
+
+She proposed to walk down the lanes to the river-side, to meet Elizabeth
+returning.
+
+The General manifested alacrity checked by reluctance. Lady Camper had
+told him she objected to sit in a strange room by herself; after that,
+he could hardly leave her to dash upstairs to change his clothes; yet
+how, attired as he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to
+imagine his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of
+Lady Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;--and he knew the habit
+of the second rank to criticise the front--how consent to face the outer
+world in such style side by side with the lady he admired?
+
+‘Come,’ said she; and he shot forward a step, looking as if he had
+missed fire.
+
+‘Are you not coming, General?’
+
+He advanced mechanically.
+
+Not a soul met them down the lanes, except a little one, to whom Lady
+Camper gave a small silver-piece, because she was a picture.
+
+The act of charity sank into the General’s heart, as any pretty
+performance will do upon a warm waxen bed.
+
+Lady Camper surprised him by answering his thoughts. ‘No; it’s for my
+own pleasure.’
+
+Presently she said, ‘Here they are.’
+
+General Ople beheld his daughter by the river-side at the end of the
+lane, under escort of Mr. Reginald Rolles.
+
+It was another picture, and a pleasing one. The young lady and the
+young gentleman wore boating hats, and were both dressed in white, and
+standing by or just turning from the outrigger and light skiff they were
+about to leave in charge of a waterman. Elizabeth stretched a finger at
+arm’s-length, issuing directions, which Mr. Rolles took up and worded
+further to the man, for the sake of emphasis; and he, rather than
+Elizabeth, was guilty of the half-start at sight of the persons who were
+approaching.
+
+‘My nephew, you should know, is intended for a working soldier,’ said
+Lady Camper; ‘I like that sort of soldier best.’
+
+General Ople drooped his shoulders at the personal compliment.
+
+She resumed. ‘His pay is a matter of importance to him. You are aware of
+the smallness of a subaltern’s pay.
+
+‘I,’ said the General, ‘I say I feel my poor half-pay, having always
+been a working soldier myself, very important, I was saying, very
+important to me!’
+
+‘Why did you retire?’
+
+Her interest in him seemed promising. He replied conscientiously,
+‘Beyond the duties of General of Brigade, I could not, I say I could
+not, dare to aspire; I can accept and execute orders; I shrink from
+responsibility!’
+
+‘It is a pity,’ said she, ‘that you were not, like my nephew Reginald,
+entirely dependent on your profession.’
+
+She laid such stress on her remark, that the General, who had just
+expressed a very modest estimate of his abilities, was unable to
+reject the flattery of her assuming him to be a man of some fortune. He
+coughed, and said, ‘Very little.’ The thought came to him that he might
+have to make a statement to her in time, and he emphasized, ‘Very little
+indeed. Sufficient,’ he assured her, ‘for a gentlemanly appearance.’
+
+‘I have given you your warning,’ was her inscrutable rejoinder, uttered
+within earshot of the young people, to whom, especially to Elizabeth,
+she was gracious. The damsel’s boating uniform was praised, and her
+sunny flush of exercise and exposure.
+
+Lady Camper regretted that she could not abandon her parasol: ‘I freckle
+so easily.’
+
+The General, puzzling over her strange words about a warning, gazed at
+the red rose of art on her cheek with an air of profound abstraction.
+
+‘I freckle so easily,’ she repeated, dropping her parasol to defend her
+face from the calculating scrutiny.
+
+‘I burn brown,’ said Elizabeth.
+
+Lady Camper laid the bud of a Falcot rose against the young girl’s
+cheek, but fetched streams of colour, that overwhelmed the momentary
+comparison of the sunswarthed skin with the rich dusky yellow of the
+rose in its deepening inward to soft brown.
+
+Reginald stretched his hand for the privileged flower, and she let him
+take it; then she looked at the General; but the General was looking,
+with his usual air of satisfaction, nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+‘Lady Camper is no common enigma,’ General Ople observed to his
+daughter.
+
+Elizabeth inclined to be pleased with her, for at her suggestion the
+General had bought a couple of horses, that she might ride in the park,
+accompanied by her father or the little groom. Still, the great lady
+was hard to read. She tested the resources of his income by all sorts of
+instigation to expenditure, which his gallantry could not withstand; she
+encouraged him to talk of his deeds in arms; she was friendly, almost
+affectionate, and most bountiful in the presents of fruit, peaches,
+nectarines, grapes, and hot-house wonders, that she showered on his
+table; but she was an enigma in her evident dissatisfaction with him for
+something he seemed to have left unsaid. And what could that be?
+
+At their last interview she had asked him, ‘Are you sure, General, you
+have nothing more to tell me?’
+
+And as he remarked, when relating it to Elizabeth, ‘One might really be
+tempted to misapprehend her ladyship’s... I say one might commit oneself
+beyond recovery. Now, my dear, what do you think she intended?’
+
+Elizabeth was ‘burning brown,’ or darkly blushing, as her manner was.
+
+She answered, ‘I am certain you know of nothing that would interest her;
+nothing, unless...’
+
+‘Well?’ the General urged her.
+
+‘How can I speak it, papa?’
+
+‘You really can’t mean...’
+
+‘Papa, what could I mean?’
+
+‘If I were fool enough!’ he murmured. ‘No, no, I am an old man. I was
+saying, I am past the age of folly.’
+
+One day Elizabeth came home from her ride in a thoughtful mood. She had
+not, further than has been mentioned, incited her father to think of the
+age of folly; but voluntarily or not, Lady Camper had, by an excess
+of graciousness amounting to downright invitation; as thus, ‘Will you
+persist in withholding your confidence from me, General?’ She added, ‘I
+am not so difficult a person.’ These prompting speeches occurred on the
+morning of the day when Elizabeth sat at his table, after a long ride
+into the country, profoundly meditative.
+
+A note was handed to General Ople, with the request that he would step
+in to speak with Lady Camper in the course of the evening, or next
+morning. Elizabeth waited till his hat was on, then said, ‘Papa, on my
+ride to-day, I met Mr. Rolles.’
+
+‘I am glad you had an agreeable escort, my dear.’
+
+‘I could not refuse his company.’
+
+‘Certainly not. And where did you ride?’
+
+‘To a beautiful valley; and there we met.... ‘
+
+‘Her ladyship?’
+
+‘Yes.’
+
+‘She always admires you on horseback.’
+
+‘So you know it, papa, if she should speak of it.’
+
+‘And I am bound to tell you, my child,’ said the General, ‘that this
+morning Lady Camper’s manner to me was... if I were a fool... I say,
+this morning I beat a retreat, but apparently she... I see no way out of
+it, supposing she...’
+
+‘I am sure she esteems you, dear papa,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You take to
+her, my dear?’ the General inquired anxiously; ‘a little?--a little
+afraid of her?’
+
+‘A little,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘only a little.’
+
+‘Don’t be agitated about me.’
+
+‘No, papa; you are sure to do right.’
+
+‘But you are trembling.’
+
+‘Oh! no. I wish you success.’
+
+General Ople was overjoyed to be reinforced by his daughter’s good
+wishes. He kissed her to thank her. He turned back to her to kiss her
+again. She had greatly lightened the difficulty at least of a delicate
+position.
+
+It was just like the imperious nature of Lady Camper to summon him
+in the evening to terminate the conversation of the morning, from the
+visible pitfall of which he had beaten a rather precipitate retreat. But
+if his daughter cordially wished him success, and Lady Camper offered
+him the crown of it, why then he had only to pluck up spirit, like a
+good commander who has to pass a fordable river in the enemy’s
+presence; a dash, a splash, a rattling volley or two, and you are over,
+established on the opposite bank. But you must be positive of victory,
+otherwise, with the river behind you, your new position is likely to
+be ticklish. So the General entered Lady Camper’s drawing-room warily,
+watching the fair enemy. He knew he was captivating, his old conquests
+whispered in his ears, and her reception of him all but pointed to a
+footstool at her feet. He might have fallen there at once, had he not
+remembered a hint that Mr. Reginald Rolles had dropped concerning Lady
+Camper’s amazing variability.
+
+Lady Camper began.
+
+‘General, you ran away from me this morning. Let me speak. And, by the
+way, I must reproach you; you should not have left it to me. Things have
+now gone so far that I cannot pretend to be blind. I know your feelings
+as a father. Your daughter’s happiness...’
+
+‘My lady,’ the General interposed, ‘I have her distinct assurance that
+it is, I say it is wrapt up in mine.’
+
+‘Let me speak. Young people will say anything. Well, they have a certain
+excuse for selfishness; we have not. I am in some degree bound to my
+nephew; he is my sister’s son.’
+
+‘Assuredly, my lady. I would not stand in his light, be quite assured.
+If I am, I was saying if I am not mistaken, I... and he is, or has
+the making of an excellent soldier in him, and is likely to be a
+distinguished cavalry officer.’
+
+‘He has to carve his own way in the world, General.’
+
+‘All good soldiers have, my lady. And if my position is not, after a
+considerable term of service, I say if...’
+
+‘To continue,’ said Lady Camper: ‘I never have liked early marriages.
+I was married in my teens before I knew men. Now I do know them, and
+now....’
+
+The General plunged forward: ‘The honour you do us now:--a mature
+experience is worth:--my dear Lady Camper, I have admired you:--and your
+objection to early marriages cannot apply to... indeed, madam, vigour,
+they say... though youth, of course... yet young people, as you
+observe... and I have, though perhaps my reputation is against it, I was
+saying I have a natural timidity with your sex, and I am grey-headed,
+white-headed, but happily without a single malady.’
+
+Lady Camper’s brows showed a trifling bewilderment. ‘I am speaking of
+these young people, General Ople.’
+
+‘I consent to everything beforehand, my dear lady. He should be, I say
+Mr. Rolles should be provided for.’
+
+‘So should she, General, so should Elizabeth.’
+
+‘She shall be, she will, dear madam. What I have, with your permission,
+if--good heaven! Lady Camper, I scarcely know where I am. She would
+.... I shall not like to lose her: you would not wish it. In time she
+will.... she has every quality of a good wife.’
+
+‘There, stay there, and be intelligible,’ said Lady Camper. ‘She has
+every quality. Money should be one of them. Has she money?’
+
+‘Oh! my lady,’ the General exclaimed, ‘we shall not come upon your purse
+when her time comes.’
+
+‘Has she ten thousand pounds?’
+
+‘Elizabeth? She will have, at her father’s death... but as for my
+income, it is moderate, and only sufficient to maintain a gentlemanly
+appearance in proper self-respect. I make no show. I say I make no show.
+A wealthy marriage is the last thing on earth I should have aimed at.
+I prefer quiet and retirement. Personally, I mean. That is my personal
+taste. But if the lady... I say if it should happen that the lady ...
+and indeed I am not one to press a suit: but if she who distinguishes
+and honours me should chance to be wealthy, all I can do is to leave her
+wealth at her disposal, and that I do: I do that unreservedly. I feel
+I am very confused, alarmingly confused. Your ladyship merits a
+superior... I trust I have not... I am entirely at your ladyship’s
+mercy.’
+
+‘Are you prepared, if your daughter is asked in marriage, to settle ten
+thousand pounds on her, General Ople?’
+
+The General collected himself. In his heart he thoroughly appreciated
+the moral beauty of Lady Camper’s extreme solicitude on behalf of his
+daughter’s provision; but he would have desired a postponement of that
+and other material questions belonging to a distant future until his own
+fate was decided.
+
+So he said: ‘Your ladyship’s generosity is very marked. I say it is very
+marked.’
+
+‘How, my good General Ople! how is it marked in any degree?’ cried Lady
+Camper. ‘I am not generous. I don’t pretend to be; and certainly I don’t
+want the young people to think me so. I want to be just. I have assumed
+that you intend to be the same. Then will you do me the favour to reply
+to me?’
+
+The General smiled winningly and intently, to show her that he prized
+her, and would not let her escape his eulogies.
+
+‘Marked, in this way, dear madam, that you think of my daughter’s future
+more than I. I say, more than her father himself does. I know I ought
+to speak more warmly, I feel warmly. I was never an eloquent man, and if
+you take me as a soldier, I am, as, I have ever been in the service, I
+was saying I am Wilson Ople, of the grade of General, to be relied on
+for executing orders; and, madam, you are Lady Camper, and you command
+me. I cannot be more precise. In fact, it is the feeling of the
+necessity for keeping close to the business that destroys what I would
+say. I am in fact lamentably incompetent to conduct my own case.’
+
+Lady Camper left her chair.
+
+‘Dear me, this is very strange, unless I am singularly in error,’ she
+said.
+
+The General now faintly guessed that he might be in error, for his part.
+
+But he had burned his ships, blown up his bridges; retreat could not be
+thought of.
+
+He stood, his head bent and appealing to her sideface, like one
+pleadingly in pursuit, and very deferentially, with a courteous
+vehemence, he entreated first her ladyship’s pardon for his presumption,
+and then the gift of her ladyship’s hand.
+
+As for his language, it was the tongue of General Ople. But his bearing
+was fine. If his clipped white silken hair spoke of age, his figure
+breathed manliness. He was a picture, and she loved pictures.
+
+For his own sake, she begged him to cease. She dreaded to hear of
+something ‘gentlemanly.’
+
+‘This is a new idea to me, my dear General,’ she said. ‘You must give me
+time. People at our age have to think of fitness. Of course, in a sense,
+we are both free to do as we like. Perhaps I may be of some aid to you.
+My preference is for absolute independence. And I wished to talk of a
+different affair. Come to me tomorrow. Do not be hurt if I decide that
+we had better remain as we are.’
+
+The General bowed. His efforts, and the wavering of the fair enemy’s
+flag, had inspired him with a positive re-awakening of masculine passion
+to gain this fortress. He said well: ‘I have, then, the happiness,
+madam, of being allowed to hope until to-morrrow?’
+
+She replied, ‘I would not deprive you of a moment of happiness. Bring
+good sense with you when you do come.’
+
+The General asked eagerly, ‘I have your ladyship’s permission to come
+early?’
+
+‘Consult your happiness,’ she answered; and if to his mind she seemed
+returning to the state of enigma, it was on the whole deliciously. She
+restored him his youth. He told Elizabeth that night; he really must
+begin to think of marrying her to some worthy young fellow. ‘Though,’
+said he, with an air of frank intoxication, ‘my opinion is, the young
+ones are not so lively as the old in these days, or I should have been
+besieged before now.’
+
+The exact substance of the interview he forbore to relate to his
+inquisitive daughter, with a very honourable discretion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Elizabeth came riding home to breakfast from a gallop round the park,
+and passing Lady Camper’s gates, received the salutation of her parasol.
+Lady Camper talked with her through the bars. There was not a sign to
+tell of a change or twist in her neighbourly affability. She remarked
+simply enough, that it was her nephew’s habit to take early gallops, and
+possibly Elizabeth might have seen him, for his quarters were proximate;
+but she did not demand an answer. She had passed a rather restless
+night, she said. ‘How is the General?’
+
+‘Papa must have slept soundly, for he usually calls to me through his
+door when he hears I am up,’ said Elizabeth.
+
+Lady Camper nodded kindly and walked on.
+
+Early in the morning General Ople was ready for battle. His forces
+were, the anticipation of victory, a carefully arranged toilet, and an
+unaccustomed spirit of enterprise in the realms of speech; for he was no
+longer in such awe of Lady Camper.
+
+‘You have slept well?’ she inquired.
+
+‘Excellently, my lady:
+
+‘Yes, your daughter tells me she heard you, as she went by your door
+in the morning for a ride to meet my nephew. You are, I shall assume,
+prepared for business.’
+
+‘Elizabeth?... to meet...?’ General Ople’s impression of anything
+extraneous to his emotion was feeble and passed instantly. ‘Prepared!
+Oh, certainly’; and he struck in a compliment on her ladyship’s fresh
+morning bloom.
+
+‘It can hardly be visible,’ she responded; ‘I have not painted yet.’
+
+‘Does your ladyship proceed to your painting in the very early morning?’
+
+‘Rouge. I rouge.’
+
+‘Dear me! I should not have supposed it.’
+
+‘You have speculated on it very openly, General. I remember your
+trying to see a freckle through the rouge; but the truth is, I am of
+a supernatural paleness if I do not rouge, so I do. You understand,
+therefore, I have a false complexion. Now to business.’
+
+‘If your ladyship insists on calling it business. I have little to
+offer--myself!’
+
+‘You have a gentlemanly residence.’
+
+‘It is, my lady, it is. It is a bijou.’
+
+‘Ah!’ Lady Camper sighed dejectedly.
+
+‘It is a perfect bijou!’
+
+‘Oblige me, General, by not pronouncing the French word as if you were
+swearing by something in English, like a trooper.’
+
+General Ople started, admitted that the word was French, and apologized
+for his pronunciation. Her variability was now visible over a corner of
+the battlefield like a thunder-cloud.
+
+‘The business we have to discuss concerns the young people, General.’
+
+‘Yes,’ brightened by this, he assented: ‘Yes, dear Lady Camper; it is a
+part of the business; it is a secondary part; it has to be discussed; I
+say I subscribe beforehand. I may say, that honouring, esteeming you as
+I do, and hoping ardently for your consent....
+
+‘They must have a home and an income, General.’
+
+‘I presume, dearest lady, that Elizabeth will be welcome in your home. I
+certainly shall never chase Reginald out of mine.’
+
+Lady Camper threw back her head. ‘Then you are not yet awake, or you
+practice the art of sleeping with open eyes! Now listen to me. I rouge,
+I have told you. I like colour, and I do not like to see wrinkles or
+have them seen. Therefore I rouge. I do not expect to deceive the world
+so flagrantly as to my age, and you I would not deceive for a moment. I
+am seventy.’
+
+The effect of this noble frankness on the General, was to raise him from
+his chair in a sitting posture as if he had been blown up.
+
+Her countenance was inexorably imperturbable under his alternate
+blinking and gazing that drew her close and shot her distant, like a
+mysterious toy.
+
+‘But,’ said she, ‘I am an artist; I dislike the look of extreme age,
+so I conceal it as well as I can. You are very kind to fall in with the
+deception: an innocent and, I think, a proper one, before the world,
+though not to the gentleman who does me the honour to propose to me
+for my hand. You desire to settle our business first. You esteem me; I
+suppose you mean as much as young people mean when they say they love.
+Do you? Let us come to an understanding.’
+
+‘I can,’ the melancholy General gasped, ‘I say I can--I cannot--I cannot
+credit your ladyship’s...’
+
+‘You are at liberty to call me Angela.’
+
+‘Ange...’ he tried it, and in shame relapsed. ‘Madam, yes. Thanks.’
+
+‘Ah,’ cried Lady Camper, ‘do not use these vulgar contractions of
+decent speech in my presence. I abhor the word “thanks.” It is fit for
+fribbles.’
+
+‘Dear me, I have used it all my life,’ groaned the General.
+
+‘Then, for the remainder, be it understood that you renounce it. To
+continue, my age is...’
+
+‘Oh, impossible, impossible,’ the General almost wailed; there was
+really a crack in his voice.
+
+‘Advancing to seventy. But, like you, I am happy to say I have not
+a malady. I bring no invalid frame to a union that necessitates the
+leaving of the front door open day and night to the doctor. My belief
+is, I could follow my husband still on a campaign, if he were a warrior
+instead of a pensioner.’
+
+General Ople winced.
+
+He was about to say humbly, ‘As General of Brigade...’
+
+‘Yes, yes, you want a commanding officer, and that I have seen, and that
+has caused me to meditate on your proposal,’ she interrupted him; while
+he, studying her countenance hard, with the painful aspect of a youth
+who lashes a donkey memory in an examination by word of mouth, attempted
+to marshal her signs of younger years against her awful confession of
+the extremely ancient, the witheringly ancient. But for the manifest
+rouge, manifest in spite of her declaration that she had not yet that
+morning proceeded to her paintbrush, he would have thrown down his glove
+to challenge her on the subject of her age. She had actually charms. Her
+mouth had a charm; her eyes were lively; her figure, mature if you like,
+was at least full and good; she stood upright, she had a queenly seat.
+His mental ejaculation was, ‘What a wonderful constitution!’
+
+By a lapse of politeness, he repeated it to himself half aloud; he was
+shockingly nervous.
+
+‘Yes, I have finer health than many a younger woman,’ she said. ‘An
+ordinary calculation would give me twenty good years to come. I am a
+widow, as you know. And, by the way, you have a leaning for widows. Have
+you not? I thought I had heard of a widow Barcop in this parish. Do not
+protest. I assure you I am a stranger to jealousy. My income...’
+
+The General raised his hands.
+
+‘Well, then,’ said the cool and self-contained lady, ‘before I go
+farther, I may ask you, knowing what you have forced me to confess, are
+you still of the same mind as to marriage? And one moment, General. I
+promise you most sincerely that your withdrawing a step shall not, as
+far as it touches me, affect my neighbourly and friendly sentiments; not
+in any degree. Shall we be as we were?’
+
+Lady Camper extended her delicate hand to him.
+
+He took it respectfully, inspected the aristocratic and unshrunken
+fingers, and kissing them, said, ‘I never withdraw from a position,
+unless I am beaten back. Lady Camper, I...’
+
+‘My name is Angela.’
+
+The General tried again: he could not utter the name.
+
+To call a lady of seventy Angela is difficult in itself. It is, it
+seems, thrice difficult in the way of courtship.
+
+‘Angela!’ said she.
+
+‘Yes. I say, there is not a more beautiful female name, dear Lady
+Camper.’
+
+‘Spare me that word “female” as long as you live. Address me by that
+name, if you please.’
+
+The General smiled. The smile was meant for propitiation and sweetness.
+It became a brazen smile.
+
+‘Unless you wish to step back,’ said she.
+
+‘Indeed, no. I am happy, Lady Camper. My life is yours. I say, my life
+is devoted to you, dear madam.’
+
+‘Angela!’
+
+General Ople was blushingly delivered of the name.
+
+‘That will do,’ said she. ‘And as I think it possible one may be admired
+too much as an artist, I must request you to keep my number of years a
+secret.’
+
+‘To the death, madam,’ said the General.
+
+‘And now we will take a turn in the garden, Wilson Ople. And beware of
+one thing, for a commencement, for you are full of weeds, and I mean
+to pluck out a few: never call any place a gentlemanly residence in my
+hearing, nor let it come to my ears that you have been using the phrase
+elsewhere. Don’t express astonishment. At present it is enough that I
+dislike it. But this only,’ Lady Camper added, ‘this only if it is not
+your intention to withdraw from your position.’
+
+‘Madam, my lady, I was saying--hem!--Angela, I could not wish to
+withdraw.’
+
+Lady Camper leaned with some pressure on his arm, observing, ‘You have a
+curious attachment to antiquities.’
+
+‘My dear lady, it is your mind; I say, it is your mind: I was saying, I
+am in love with your mind,’ the General endeavoured to assure her, and
+himself too.
+
+‘Or is it my powers as an artist?’
+
+‘Your mind, your extraordinary powers of mind.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Lady Camper, ‘a veteran General of Brigade is as good a
+crutch as a childless old grannam can have.’
+
+And as a crutch, General Ople, parading her grounds with the aged woman,
+found himself used and treated.
+
+The accuracy of his perceptions might be questioned. He was like a man
+stunned by some great tropical fruit, which responds to the longing
+of his eyes by falling on his head; but it appeared to him, that she
+increased in bitterness at every step they took, as if determined to
+make him realize her wrinkles.
+
+He was even so inconsequent, or so little recognized his position, as to
+object in his heart to hear himself called Wilson.
+
+It is true that she uttered Wilsonople as if the names formed one word.
+And on a second occasion (when he inclined to feel hurt) she remarked,
+‘I fear me, Wilsonople, if we are to speak plainly, thou art but a
+fool.’ He, perhaps, naturally objected to that. He was, however, giddy,
+and barely knew.
+
+Yet once more the magical woman changed. All semblance of harshness, and
+harridan-like spike-tonguedness vanished when she said adieu.
+
+The astronomer, looking at the crusty jag and scoria of the magnified
+moon through his telescope, and again with naked eyes at
+the soft-beaming moon, when the crater-ridges are faint as
+eyebrow-pencillings, has a similar sharp alternation of prospect to that
+which mystified General Ople.
+
+But between watching an orb that is only variable at our caprice, and
+contemplating a woman who shifts and quivers ever with her own, how vast
+the difference!
+
+And consider that this woman is about to be one’s wife! He could have
+believed (if he had not known full surely that such things are not) he
+was in the hands of a witch.
+
+Lady Camper’s ‘adieu’ was perfectly beautiful--a kind, cordial,
+intimate, above all, to satisfy his present craving, it was a lady-like
+adieu--the adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left
+her anchorage by forty to sail into the fifties.
+
+Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy. And,
+worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness
+as soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.
+
+‘The road is open to you to retreat,’ were her last words.
+
+‘My road,’ he answered gallantly, ‘is forward.’
+
+He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to
+smile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+It is a noble thing to say that your road is forward, and it befits a
+man of battles. General Ople was too loyal a gentleman to think of any
+other road. Still, albeit not gifted with imagination, he could not
+avoid the feeling that he had set his face to Winter. He found himself
+suddenly walking straight into the heart of Winter, and a nipping
+Winter. For her ladyship had proved acutely nipping. His little
+customary phrases, to which Lady Camper objected, he could see no harm
+in whatever. Conversing with her in the privacy of domestic life would
+never be the flowing business that it is for other men. It would demand
+perpetual vigilance, hop, skip, jump, flounderings, and apologies.
+
+This was not a pleasing prospect.
+
+On the other hand, she was the niece of an earl. She was wealthy. She
+might be an excellent friend to Elizabeth; and she could be, when she
+liked, both commandingly and bewitchingly ladylike.
+
+Good! But he was a General Officer of not more than fifty-five, in his
+full vigour, and she a woman of seventy!
+
+The prospect was bleak. It resembled an outlook on the steppes. In
+point of the discipline he was to expect, he might be compared to a raw
+recruit, and in his own home!
+
+However, she was a woman of mind. One would be proud of her.
+
+But did he know the worst of her? A dreadful presentiment, that he did
+not know the worst of her, rolled an ocean of gloom upon General Ople,
+striking out one solitary thought in the obscurity, namely, that he was
+about to receive punishment for retiring from active service to a life
+of ease at a comparatively early age, when still in marching trim. And
+the shadow of the thought was, that he deserved the punishment!
+
+He was in his garden with the dawn. Hard exercise is the best of opiates
+for dismal reflections. The General discomposed his daughter by offering
+to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast. She considered
+that it would fatigue him. ‘I am not a man of eighty!’ he cried. He
+could have wished he had been.
+
+He led the way to the park, where they soon had sight of young Rolles,
+who checked his horse and spied them like a vedette, but, perceiving
+that he had been seen, came cantering, and hailing the General with
+hearty wonderment.
+
+‘And what’s this the world says, General?’ said he. ‘But we all applaud
+your taste. My aunt Angela was the handsomest woman of her time.’
+
+The General murmured in confusion, ‘Dear me!’ and looked at the young
+man, thinking that he could not have known the time.
+
+‘Is all arranged, my dear General?’
+
+‘Nothing is arranged, and I beg--I say I beg... I came out for fresh air
+and pace.’..
+
+The General rode frantically.
+
+In spite of the fresh air, he was unable to eat at breakfast. He was
+bound, of course, to present himself to Lady Camper, in common civility,
+immediately after it.
+
+And first, what were the phrases he had to avoid uttering in her
+presence? He could remember only the ‘gentlemanly residence.’ And it was
+a gentlemanly residence, he thought as he took leave of it. It was one,
+neatly named to fit the place. Lady Camper is indeed a most eccentric
+person! he decided from his experience of her.
+
+He was rather astonished that young Rolles should have spoken so coolly
+of his aunt’s leaning to matrimony; but perhaps her exact age was
+unknown to the younger members of her family.
+
+This idea refreshed him by suggesting the extremely honourable nature of
+Lady Camper’s uncomfortable confession.
+
+He himself had an uncomfortable confession to make. He would have to
+speak of his income. He was living up to the edges of it.
+
+She is an upright woman, and I must be the same! he said, fortunately
+not in her hearing.
+
+The subject was disagreeable to a man sensitive on the topic of money,
+and feeling that his prudence had recently been misled to keep up
+appearances.
+
+Lady Camper was in her garden, reclining under her parasol. A chair was
+beside her, to which, acknowledging the salutation of her suitor, she
+waved him.
+
+‘You have met my nephew Reginald this morning, General?’
+
+‘Curiously, in the park, this morning, before breakfast, I did, yes.
+Hem! I, I say I did meet him. Has your ladyship seen him?’
+
+‘No. The park is very pretty in the early morning.’
+
+‘Sweetly pretty.’
+
+Lady Camper raised her head, and with the mildness of assured
+dictatorship, pronounced: ‘Never say that before me.’
+
+‘I submit, my lady,’ said the poor scourged man.
+
+‘Why, naturally you do. Vulgar phrases have to be endured, except when
+our intimates are guilty, and then we are not merely offended, we are
+compromised by them. You are still of the mind in which you left me
+yesterday? You are one day older. But I warn you, so am I.’
+
+‘Yes, my lady, we cannot, I say we cannot check time. Decidedly of the
+same mind. Quite so.’
+
+‘Oblige me by never saying “Quite so.” My lawyer says it. It reeks of
+the City of London. And do not look so miserable.’
+
+‘I, madam? my dear lady!’ the General flashed out in a radiance that
+dulled instantly.
+
+‘Well,’ said she cheerfully, ‘and you’re for the old woman?’
+
+‘For Lady Camper.’
+
+‘You are seductive in your flatteries, General. Well, then, we have to
+speak of business.’
+
+‘My affairs----’ General Ople was beginning, with perturbed forehead;
+but Lady Camper held up her finger.
+
+‘We will touch on your affairs incidentally. Now listen to me, and do
+not exclaim until I have finished. You know that these two young ones
+have been whispering over the wall for some months. They have been
+meeting on the river and in the park habitually, apparently with your
+consent.’
+
+‘My lady!’
+
+‘I did not say with your connivance.’
+
+‘You mean my daughter Elizabeth?’
+
+‘And my nephew Reginald. We have named them, if that advances us. Now,
+the end of such meetings is marriage, and the sooner the better, if they
+are to continue. I would rather they should not; I do not hold it good
+for young soldiers to marry. But if they do, it is very certain that
+their pay will not support a family; and in a marriage of two healthy
+young people, we have to assume the existence of the family. You have
+allowed matters to go so far that the boy is hot in love; I suppose the
+girl is, too. She is a nice girl. I do not object to her personally. But
+I insist that a settlement be made on her before I give my nephew one
+penny. Hear me out, for I am not fond of business, and shall be glad to
+have done with these explanations. Reginald has nothing of his own. He
+is my sister’s son, and I loved her, and rather like the boy. He has at
+present four hundred a year from me. I will double it, on the condition
+that you at once make over ten thousand--not less; and let it be yes or
+no!--to be settled on your daughter and go to her children, independent
+of the husband--cela va sans dire. Now you may speak, General.’
+
+The General spoke, with breath fetched from the deeps:
+
+‘Ten thousand pounds! Hem! Ten! Hem, frankly--ten, my lady! One’s
+income--I am quite taken by surprise. I say Elizabeth’s conduct--though,
+poor child! it is natural to her to seek a mate, I mean, to accept a
+mate and an establishment, and Reginald is a very hopeful fellow--I
+was saying, they jump on me out of an ambush, and I wish them every
+happiness. And she is an ardent soldier, and a soldier she must marry.
+But ten thousand!’
+
+‘It is to secure the happiness of your daughter, General.’
+
+‘Pounds! my lady. It would rather cripple me.’
+
+‘You would have my house, General; you would have the moiety, as the
+lawyers say, of my purse; you would have horses, carriages, servants; I
+do not divine what more you would wish to have.’
+
+‘But, madam--a pensioner on the Government! I can look back on past
+services, I say old services, and I accept my position. But, madam, a
+pensioner on my wife, bringing next to nothing to the common estate! I
+fear my self-respect would, I say would...’
+
+‘Well, and what would it do, General Ople?’
+
+‘I was saying, my self-respect as my wife’s pensioner, my lady. I could
+not come to her empty-handed.’
+
+‘Do you expect that I should be the person to settle money on your
+daughter, to save her from mischances? A rakish husband, for example;
+for Reginald is young, and no one can guess what will be made of him.’
+
+‘Undoubtedly your ladyship is correct. We might try absence for the poor
+girl. I have no female relation, but I could send her to the sea-side to
+a lady-friend.’
+
+‘General Ople, I forbid you, as you value my esteem, ever--and I repeat,
+I forbid you ever--to afflict my ears with that phrase, “lady-friend!”’
+
+The General blinked in a state of insurgent humility.
+
+These incessant whippings could not but sting the humblest of men; and
+‘lady-friend,’ he was sure, was a very common term, used, he was sure,
+in the very best society. He had never heard Her Majesty speak at levees
+of a lady-friend, but he was quite sure that she had one; and if so,
+what could be the objection to her subjects mentioning it as a term to
+suit their own circumstances?
+
+He was harassed and perplexed by old Lady Camper’s treatment of him, and
+he resolved not to call her Angela even upon supplication--not that day,
+at least.
+
+She said, ‘You will not need to bring property of any kind to the common
+estate; I neither look for it nor desire it. The generous thing for you
+to do would be to give your daughter all you have, and come to me.’
+
+‘But, Lady Camper, if I denude myself or curtail my income--a man at his
+wife’s discretion, I was saying a man at his wife’s mercy...!’
+
+General Ople was really forced, by his manly dignity, to make this
+protest on its behalf. He did not see how he could have escaped doing
+so; he was more an agent than a principal. ‘My wife’s mercy,’ he said
+again, but simply as a herald proclaiming superior orders.
+
+Lady Camper’s brows were wrathful. A deep blood-crimson overcame the
+rouge, and gave her a terrible stormy look.
+
+‘The congress now ceases to sit, and the treaty is not concluded,’ was
+all she said.
+
+She rose, bowed to him, ‘Good morning, General,’ and turned her back.
+
+He sighed. He was a free man. But this could not be denied--whatever
+the lady’s age, she was a grand woman in her carriage, and when looking
+angry, she had a queenlike aspect that raised her out of the reckoning
+of time.
+
+So now he knew there was a worse behind what he had previously known. He
+was precipitate in calling it the worst. ‘Now,’ said he to himself, ‘I
+know the worst!’
+
+No man should ever say it. Least of all, one who has entered into
+relations with an eccentric lady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Politeness required that General Ople should not appear to rejoice in
+his dismissal as a suitor, and should at least make some show of holding
+himself at the beck of a reconsidering mind. He was guilty of running up
+to London early next day, and remaining absent until nightfall; and he
+did the same on the two following days. When he presented himself
+at Lady Camper’s lodge-gates, the astonishing intelligence, that her
+ladyship had departed for the Continent and Egypt gave him qualms of
+remorse, which assumed a more definite shape in something like awe of
+her triumphant constitution. He forbore to mention her age, for he
+was the most honourable of men, but a habit of tea-table talkativeness
+impelled him to say and repeat an idea that had visited him, to the
+effect, that Lady Camper was one of those wonderful women who are
+comparable to brilliant generals, and defend themselves from the
+siege of Time by various aggressive movements. Fearful of not being
+understood, owing to the rarity of the occasions when the squat plain
+squad of honest Saxon regulars at his command were called upon to
+explain an idea, he re-cast the sentence. But, as it happened that the
+regulars of his vocabulary were not numerous, and not accustomed to work
+upon thoughts and images, his repetitions rather succeeded in exposing
+the piece of knowledge he had recently acquired than in making his
+meaning plainer. So we need not marvel that his acquaintances should
+suppose him to be secretly aware of an extreme degree in which Lady
+Camper was a veteran.
+
+General Ople entered into the gaieties of the neighbourhood once more,
+and passed through the Winter cheerfully. In justice to him, however, it
+should be said that to the intent dwelling of his mind upon Lady Camper,
+and not to the festive life he led, was due his entire ignorance of
+his daughter’s unhappiness. She lived with him, and yet it was in other
+houses he learnt that she was unhappy. After his last interview with
+Lady Camper, he had informed Elizabeth of the ruinous and preposterous
+amount of money demanded of him for a settlement upon her and Elizabeth,
+like the girl of good sense that she was, had replied immediately, ‘It
+could not be thought of, papa.’
+
+He had spoken to Reginald likewise. The young man fell into a dramatic
+tearing-of-hair and long-stride fury, not ill becoming an enamoured
+dragoon. But he maintained that his aunt, though an eccentric, was a
+cordially kind woman. He seemed to feel, if he did not partly hint, that
+the General might have accepted Lady Camper’s terms. The young officer
+could no longer be welcome at Douro Lodge, so the General paid him
+a morning call at his quarters, and was distressed to find him
+breakfasting very late, tapping eggs that he forgot to open--one of the
+surest signs of a young man downright and deep in love, as the General
+knew from experience--and surrounded by uncut sporting journals of
+past weeks, which dated from the day when his blow had struck him, as
+accurately as the watch of the drowned man marks his minute. Lady Camper
+had gone to Italy, and was in communication with her nephew: Reginald
+was not further explicit. His legs were very prominent in his
+despair, and his fingers frequently performed the part of blunt combs;
+consequently the General was impressed by his passion for Elizabeth. The
+girl who, if she was often meditative, always met his eyes with a smile,
+and quietly said ‘Yes, papa,’ and ‘No, papa,’ gave him little concern
+as to the state of her feelings. Yet everybody said now that she was
+unhappy. Mrs. Barcop, the widow, raised her voice above the rest. So
+attentive was she to Elizabeth that the General had it kindly suggested
+to him, that some one was courting him through his daughter. He gazed
+at the widow. Now she was not much past thirty; and it was really
+singular--he could have laughed--thinking of Mrs. Barcop set him
+persistently thinking of Lady Camper. That is to say, his mad fancy
+reverted from the lady of perhaps thirty-five to the lady of seventy.
+
+Such, thought he, is genius in a woman! Of his neighbours generally,
+Mrs. Baerens, the wife of a German merchant, an exquisite player on the
+pianoforte, was the most inclined to lead him to speak of Lady Camper.
+She was a kind prattling woman, and was known to have been a governess
+before her charms withdrew the gastronomic Gottfried Baerens from his
+devotion to the well-served City club, where, as he exclaimed (ever
+turning fondly to his wife as he vocalized the compliment), he had found
+every necessity, every luxury, in life, ‘as you cannot have dem out
+of London--all save de female!’ Mrs. Baerens, a lady of Teutonic
+extraction, was distinguishable as of that sex; at least, she was not
+masculine. She spoke with great respect of Lady Camper and her
+family, and seemed to agree in the General’s eulogies of Lady Camper’s
+constitution. Still he thought she eyed him strangely.
+
+One April morning the General received a letter with the Italian
+postmark. Opening it with his usual calm and happy curiosity, he
+perceived that it was composed of pen-and-ink drawings. And suddenly
+his heart sank like a scuttled ship. He saw himself the victim of a
+caricature.
+
+The first sketch had merely seemed picturesque, and he supposed it a
+clever play of fancy by some travelling friend, or perhaps an actual
+scene slightly exaggerated. Even on reading, ‘A distant view of the city
+of Wilsonople,’ he was only slightly enlightened. His heart beat
+still with befitting regularity. But the second and the third sketches
+betrayed the terrible hand. The distant view of the city of Wilsonople
+was fair with glittering domes, which, in the succeeding near view,
+proved to have been soap-bubbles, for a place of extreme flatness,
+begirt with crazy old-fashioned fortifications, was shown; and in
+the third view, representing the interior, stood for sole place of
+habitation, a sentry-box.
+
+Most minutely drawn, and, alas! with fearful accuracy, a military
+gentleman in undress occupied the box. Not a doubt could exist as to the
+person it was meant to be.
+
+The General tried hard to remain incredulous. He remembered too well who
+had called him Wilsonople.
+
+But here was the extraordinary thing that sent him over the
+neighbourhood canvassing for exclamations: on the fourth page was the
+outline of a lovely feminine hand, holding a pen, as in the act of
+shading, and under it these words: ‘What I say is, I say I think it
+exceedingly unladylike.’
+
+Now consider the General’s feelings when, turning to this fourth page,
+having these very words in his mouth, as the accurate expression of his
+thoughts, he discovered them written!
+
+An enemy who anticipates the actions of our mind, has a quality of the
+malignant divine that may well inspire terror. The senses of General
+Ople were struck by the aspect of a lurid Goddess, who penetrated him,
+read him through, and had both power and will to expose and make him
+ridiculous for ever.
+
+The loveliness of the hand, too, in a perplexing manner contested his
+denunciation of her conduct. It was ladylike eminently, and it involved
+him in a confused mixture of the moral and material, as great as young
+people are known to feel when they make the attempt to separate them, in
+one of their frenzies.
+
+With a petty bitter laugh he folded the letter, put it in his
+breast-pocket, and sallied forth for a walk, chiefly to talk to himself
+about it. But as it absorbed him entirely, he showed it to the rector,
+whom he met, and what the rector said is of no consequence, for General
+Ople listened to no remarks, calling in succession on the Pollingtons,
+the Goslings, the Baerens, and others, early though it was, and
+the lords of those houses absent amassing hoards; and to the ladies
+everywhere he displayed the sketches he had received, observing, that
+Wilsonople meant himself; and there he was, he said, pointing at the
+capped fellow in the sentry-box, done unmistakably. The likeness indeed
+was remarkable. ‘She is a woman of genius,’ he ejaculated, with utter
+melancholy. Mrs. Baerens, by the aid of a magnifying glass, assisted
+him to read a line under the sentry-box, that he had taken for a mere
+trembling dash; it ran, A gentlemanly residence.
+
+‘What eyes she has!’ the General exclaimed; ‘I say it is miraculous what
+eyes she has at her time of... I was saying, I should never have known
+it was writing.’
+
+He sighed heavily. His shuddering sensitiveness to caricature was
+increased by a certain evident dread of the hand which struck; the
+knowing that he was absolutely bare to this woman, defenceless, open to
+exposure in his little whims, foibles, tricks, incompetencies, in what
+lay in his heart, and the words that would come to his tongue. He felt
+like a man haunted.
+
+So deeply did he feel the blow, that people asked how it was that he
+could be so foolish as to dance about assisting Lady Camper in her
+efforts to make him ridiculous; he acted the parts of publisher and
+agent for the fearful caricaturist. In truth, there was a strangely
+double reason for his conduct; he danced about for sympathy, he had the
+intensest craving for sympathy, but more than this, or quite as much, he
+desired to have the powers of his enemy widely appreciated; in the first
+place, that he might be excused to himself for wincing under them, and
+secondly, because an awful admiration of her, that should be deepened
+by a corresponding sentiment around him, helped him to enjoy luxurious
+recollections of an hour when he was near making her his own--his own,
+in the holy abstract contemplation of marriage, without realizing their
+probable relative conditions after the ceremony.
+
+‘I say, that is the very image of her ladyship’s hand,’ he was
+especially fond of remarking, ‘I say it is a beautiful hand.’
+
+He carried the letter in his pocket-book; and beginning to fancy that
+she had done her worst, for he could not imagine an inventive malignity
+capable of pursuing the theme, he spoke of her treatment of him with
+compassionate regret, not badly assumed from being partly sincere.
+
+Two letters dated in France, the one Dijon, the other Fontainebleau,
+arrived together; and as the General knew Lady Camper to be returning to
+England, he expected that she was anxious to excuse herself to him. His
+fingers were not so confident, for he tore one of the letters to open
+it.
+
+The City of Wilsonople was recognizable immediately. So likewise was the
+sole inhabitant.
+
+General Ople’s petty bitter laugh recurred, like a weak-chested
+patient’s cough in the shifting of our winds eastward.
+
+A faceless woman’s shadow kneels on the ground near the sentry-box,
+weeping. A faceless shadow of a young man on horseback is beheld
+galloping toward a gulf. The sole inhabitant contemplates his largely
+substantial full fleshed face and figure in a glass.
+
+Next, we see the standard of Great Britain furled; next, unfurled and
+borne by a troop of shadows to the sentry-box. The officer within
+says, ‘I say I should be very happy to carry it, but I cannot quit this
+gentlemanly residence.’
+
+Next, the standard is shown assailed by popguns. Several of the shadows
+are prostrate. ‘I was saying, I assure you that nothing but this
+gentlemanly residence prevents me from heading you,’ says the gallant
+officer.
+
+General Ople trembled with protestant indignation when he saw himself
+reclining in a magnified sentry-box, while detachments of shadows hurry
+to him to show him the standard of his country trailing in the dust; and
+he is maliciously made to say, ‘I dislike responsibility. I say I am
+a fervent patriot, and very fond of my comforts, but I shun
+responsibility.’
+
+The second letter contained scenes between Wilsonople and the Moon.
+
+He addresses her as his neighbour, and tells her of his triumphs over
+the sex.
+
+He requests her to inform him whether she is a ‘female,’ that she may be
+triumphed over.
+
+He hastens past her window on foot, with his head bent, just as the
+General had been in the habit of walking.
+
+He drives a mouse-pony furiously by.
+
+He cuts down a tree, that she may peep through.
+
+Then, from the Moon’s point of view, Wilsonople, a Silenus, is discerned
+in an arm-chair winking at a couple too plainly pouting their lips for a
+doubt of their intentions to be entertained.
+
+A fourth letter arrived, bearing date of Paris. This one illustrated
+Wilsonople’s courtship of the Moon, and ended with his ‘saying,’ in his
+peculiar manner, ‘In spite of her paint I could not have conceived her
+age to be so enormous.’
+
+How break off his engagement with the Lady Moon? Consent to none of her
+terms!
+
+Little used as he was to read behind a veil, acuteness of suffering
+sharpened the General’s intelligence to a degree that sustained him
+in animated dialogue with each succeeding sketch, or poisoned arrow
+whirring at him from the moment his eyes rested on it; and here are a
+few samples:
+
+‘Wilsonople informs the Moon that she is “sweetly pretty.”
+
+‘He thanks her with “thanks” for a handsome piece of lunar green cheese.
+
+‘He points to her, apparently telling some one, “my lady-friend.”
+
+‘He sneezes “Bijou! bijou! bijou!”’
+
+They were trifles, but they attacked his habits of speech; and he began
+to grow more and more alarmingly absurd in each fresh caricature of his
+person.
+
+He looked at himself as the malicious woman’s hand had shaped him. It
+was unjust; it was no resemblance--and yet it was! There was a corner
+of likeness left that leavened the lump; henceforth he must walk abroad
+with this distressing image of himself before his eyes, instead of the
+satisfactory reflex of the man who had, and was happy in thinking that
+he had, done mischief in his time. Such an end for a conquering man was
+too pathetic.
+
+The General surprised himself talking to himself in something louder
+than a hum at neighbours’ dinner-tables. He looked about and noticed
+that people were silently watching him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Lady Camper’s return was the subject of speculation in the
+neighbourhood, for most people thought she would cease to persecute the
+General with her preposterous and unwarrantable pen-and-ink sketches
+when living so closely proximate; and how he would behave was the
+question. Those who made a hero of him were sure he would treat her
+with disdain. Others were uncertain. He had been so severely hit that it
+seemed possible he would not show much spirit.
+
+He, for his part, had come to entertain such dread of the post, that
+Lady Camper’s return relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he
+would have forgiven her, though he feared to see her, if only she had
+promised to leave him in peace for the future. He feared to see
+her, because of the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her
+ladyship’s hand. Of course he could not avoid being seen by her, and
+that was a particular misery. A gentlemanly humility, or demureness
+of aspect, when seen, would, he hoped, disarm his enemy. It should,
+he thought. He had borne unheard-of things. No one of his friends and
+acquaintances knew, they could not know, what he had endured. It has
+caused him fits of stammering. It had destroyed the composure of his
+gait. Elizabeth had informed him that he talked to himself incessantly,
+and aloud. She, poor child, looked pale too. She was evidently anxious
+about him.
+
+Young Rolles, whom he had met now and then, persisted in praising his
+aunt’s good heart. So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge, she might
+now be inclined for peace, on the terms of distant civility.
+
+‘Yes! poor Elizabeth!’ sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl’s
+disappointment; ‘poor Elizabeth! she little guesses what her father has
+gone through. Poor child! I say, she hasn’t an idea of my sufferings.’
+
+General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper’s lodgegates and escaped
+to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing
+of his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and
+re-establish him.
+
+He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper’s card was
+brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing
+promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General
+instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon
+in quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of
+information.
+
+Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and
+went on digging.
+
+The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic
+caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast
+and thick. Not a day’s interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the
+shafts of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The
+deadliness of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one
+of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the
+opinion of the world. He might have concealed the sketches, but he could
+not have concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the
+unhappy General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he
+were repeating something to them for the tenth time.
+
+‘I say,’ said he, ‘I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to
+sit, as she must--I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have
+the right view of me. And there you see--this is what she has done.
+This is the last, this is the afternoon’s delivery. Her ladyship has
+me correctly as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to
+ladies.’
+
+A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.
+
+‘I say I could not allow ladies to see it,’ he informed the gentlemen,
+who were suffered to inspect it freely.
+
+‘But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning
+to night,’ the General said, with a quivering tongue, ‘unless I stay at
+home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the
+place, and my lease; and I shall--I say, I shall find nowhere in England
+for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent--a residence
+you would call fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi... it is, in short, a
+gem. But I shall have to go.’
+
+Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.
+
+The General said, ‘Tha... I thank you very much. I would not have her
+ladyship suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,’ he confessed
+pitiably, ‘what it is right to say, and what not--what not. I-I-I never
+know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the
+light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to
+go.’
+
+Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow
+him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite
+equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.
+
+Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm,
+General Ople met Mr. Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth
+were mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his
+attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his
+persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were
+constrained to part.
+
+A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading
+Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder
+with policeman’s fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating
+them to hear him. ‘Meet,’ he tells them, ‘as often as you like, in my
+company, so long as you listen to me’; and the pathos of his aspect
+makes hungry demand for a sympathetic audience.
+
+Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old
+couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the
+close packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General
+Ople, in his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about
+at Mrs. Pollington’s lawn-party. Some have said, that he should not have
+betrayed his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of
+his daughter’s being the Psyche. Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing
+to the violence of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have been the
+very sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard
+to deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches: ‘As you like,
+my lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it.
+... If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring.... I may go,
+I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk upright, I
+walk upright.’
+
+Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General’s
+renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper’s conduct,
+and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.
+
+He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole
+chapter of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of
+morocco leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments on
+them, and observing, ‘There will be more, there must be more, I say I am
+sure there are things I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,’
+he declined to seek redress or simple protection; and the miserable
+spectacle was exhibited soon after of this courtly man listening to Mrs.
+Barcop on the weather, and replying in acquiescence: ‘It is hot.--If
+your ladyship will only abstain from colours. Very hot as you say,
+madam,--I do not complain of pen and ink, but I would rather escape
+colours. And I dare say you find it hot too?’
+
+Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed over the wreck of a handsome
+military officer.
+
+She asked him: ‘What is your objection to colours?’
+
+His hand was at his breast-pocket immediately, as he said: ‘Have you not
+seen?’--though but a few minutes back he had shown her the contents of
+the packet, including a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.
+
+By this time the entire district was in fervid sympathy with General
+Ople. The ladies did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment that
+a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a state of semi-lunacy;
+but one or two confessed to their husbands, that it required a
+great admiration of General Ople not to despise him, both for his
+susceptibility and his patience. As for the men, they knew him to
+have faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife; they knew him to
+have endured privation, not only cold but downright want of food and
+drink--an almost unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters; so
+they could not quite look on him in contempt; but his want of sense was
+offensive, and still more so his submission to a scourging by a woman.
+Not one of them would have deigned to feel it. Would they have allowed
+her to see that she could sting them? They would have laughed at her. Or
+they would have dragged her before a magistrate.
+
+It was a Sunday in early Summer when General Ople walked to morning
+service, unaccompanied by Elizabeth, who was unwell. The church was of
+the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square pews, permitting
+the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with
+the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often
+did, feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for
+grappling with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to
+be seen.
+
+The Church was, besides, a sanctuary for him. Hither his enemy did not
+come. He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked a happy man
+again.
+
+He had passed into his hat and out of it, which he habitually did
+standing, when who should walk up to within a couple of yards of him
+but Lady Camper. Her pew was full of poor people, who made signs of
+retiring. She signified to them that they were to sit, then quietly took
+her seat among them, fronting the General across the aisle.
+
+During the sermon a low voice, sharp in contradistinction to the
+monotone of the preacher’s, was heard to repeat these words: ‘I say I am
+not sure I shall survive it.’ Considerable muttering in the same quarter
+was heard besides.
+
+After the customary ceremonious game, when all were free to move, of
+nobody liking to move first, Lady Camper and a charity boy were the
+persons who took the lead. But Lady Camper could not quit her pew, owing
+to the sticking of the door. She smiled as with her pretty hand she
+twice or thrice essayed to shake it open. General Ople strode to her
+aid. He pulled the door, gave the shadow of a respectful bow, and no
+doubt he would have withdrawn, had not Lady Camper, while acknowledging
+the civility, placed her prayer-book in his hands to carry at her heels.
+There was no choice for him. He made a sort of slipping dance back for
+his hat, and followed her ladyship. All present being eager to witness
+the spectacle, the passage of Lady Camper dragging the victim General
+behind her was observed without a stir of the well-dressed members of
+the congregation, until a desire overcame them to see how Lady Camper
+would behave to her fish when she had him outside the sacred edifice.
+
+None could have imagined such a scene. Lady Camper was in her carriage;
+General Ople was holding her prayer-book, hat in hand, at the carriage
+step, and he looked as if he were toasting before the bars of a furnace;
+for while he stood there, Lady Camper was rapidly pencilling outlines in
+a small pocket sketchbook. There are dogs whose shyness is put to it to
+endure human observation and a direct address to them, even on the part
+of their masters; and these dear simple dogs wag tail and turn their
+heads aside waveringly, as though to entreat you not to eye them and
+talk to them so. General Ople, in the presence of the sketchbook, was
+much like the nervous animal. He would fain have run away. He glanced at
+it, and round about, and again at it, and at the heavens. Her ladyship’s
+cruelty, and his inexplicable submission to it, were witnessed of the
+multitude.
+
+The General’s friends walked very slowly. Lady Camper’s carriage whirled
+by, and the General came up with them, accosting them and himself
+alternately. They asked him where Elizabeth was, and he replied,
+‘Poor child, yes! I am told she is pale, but I cannot, believe I am so
+perfectly, I say so perfectly ridiculous, when I join the responses.’
+He drew forth half a dozen sheets, and showed them sketches that Lady
+Camper had taken in church, caricaturing him in the sitting down and the
+standing up. She had torn them out of the book, and presented them to
+him when driving off. ‘I was saying, worship in the ordinary sense will
+be interdicted to me if her ladyship...,’ said the General, woefully
+shuffling the sketch-paper sheets in which he figured.
+
+He made the following odd confession to Mr. and Mrs. Gosling on the
+road:--that he had gone to his chest, and taken out his sword-belt
+to measure his girth, and found himself thinner than when he left the
+service, which had not been the case before his attendance at the last
+levee of the foregoing season. So the deduction was obvious, that
+Lady Camper had reduced him. She had reduced him as effectually as a
+harassing siege.
+
+‘But why do you pay attention to her? Why...!’ exclaimed Mr. Gosling, a
+gentleman of the City, whose roundness would have turned a rifle-shot.
+
+‘To allow her to wound you so seriously!’ exclaimed Mrs. Gosling.
+
+‘Madam, if she were my wife,’ the General explained, ‘I should feel
+it. I say it is the fact of it; I feel it, if I appear so extremely
+ridiculous to a human eye, to any one eye.’
+
+‘To Lady Camper’s eye.’
+
+He admitted it might be that. He had not thought of ascribing the
+acuteness of his pain to the miserable image he presented in this
+particular lady’s eye. No; it really was true, curiously true: another
+lady’s eye might have transformed him to a pumpkin shape, exaggerated
+all his foibles fifty-fold, and he, though not liking it, of course not,
+would yet have preserved a certain manly equanimity. How was it Lady
+Camper had such power over him?--a lady concealing seventy years with a
+rouge-box or paint-pot! It was witchcraft in its worst character. He had
+for six months at her bidding been actually living the life of a beast,
+degraded in his own esteem; scorched by every laugh he heard; running,
+pursued, overtaken, and as it were scored or branded, and then let go
+for the process to be repeated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Our young barbarians have it all their own way with us when they fall
+into love-liking; they lead us whither they please, and interest us
+in their wishings, their weepings, and that fine performance, their
+kissings. But when we see our veterans tottering to their fall, we
+scarcely consent to their having a wish; as for a kiss, we halloo at
+them if we discover them on a byway to the sacred grove where such
+things are supposed to be done by the venerable. And this piece of rank
+injustice, not to say impoliteness, is entirely because of an unsound
+opinion that Nature is not in it, as though it were our esteem for
+Nature which caused us to disrespect them. They, in truth, show her to
+us discreet, civilized, in a decent moral aspect: vistas of real life,
+views of the mind’s eye, are opened by their touching little emotions;
+whereas those bully youngsters who come bellowing at us and catch us by
+the senses plainly prove either that we are no better than they, or that
+we give our attention to Nature only when she makes us afraid of her.
+If we cared for her, we should be up and after her reverentially in her
+sedater steps, deeply studying her in her slower paces. She teaches
+them nothing when they are whirling. Our closest instructors, the true
+philosophers--the story-tellers, in short-will learn in time that Nature
+is not of necessity always roaring, and as soon as they do, the world
+may be said to be enlightened. Meantime, in the contemplation of a pair
+of white whiskers fluttering round a pair of manifestly painted cheeks,
+be assured that Nature is in it: not that hectoring wanton--but let the
+young have their fun. Let the superior interest of the passions of the
+aged be conceded, and not a word shall be said against the young.
+
+If, then, Nature is in it, how has she been made active? The reason
+of her launch upon this last adventure is, that she has perceived
+the person who can supply the virtue known to her by experience to be
+wanting. Thus, in the broader instance, many who have journeyed far down
+the road, turn back to the worship of youth, which they have lost. Some
+are for the graceful worldliness of wit, of which they have just share
+enough to admire it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield the
+rod, which in earlier days they escaped to their cost. In the case
+of General Ople, it was partly her whippings of him, partly her
+penetration; her ability, that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her
+indifference to conventional manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born
+one, and more than all, her correction of his little weaknesses and
+incompetencies, in spite of his dislike of it, won him. He began to feel
+a sort of nibbling pleasure in her grotesque sketches of his person; a
+tendency to recur to the old ones while dreading the arrival of new. You
+hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the swish; and they are not attached
+to pain, but the instrument revives their feeling of youth; and General
+Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking, Lady Camper’s foregone outlines of
+him. For in the distance, the whip’s-end may look like a clinging caress
+instead of a stinging flick. But this craven melting in his heart was
+rebuked by a very worthy pride, that flew for support to the injury she
+had done to his devotions, and the offence to the sacred edifice. After
+thinking over it, he decided that he must quit his residence; and as
+it appeared to him in the light of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish,
+commissioned the house-agent of his town to sell his lease or let the
+house furnished, without further parley.
+
+From the house-agent’s shop he turned into the chemist’s, for a tonic--a
+foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he
+had just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently,
+imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former
+careless happiness that they were likely to restore. So he requested to
+have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.
+
+Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and
+beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud
+under Lady Camper’s windows, his insurgency was of such violence. He
+talked of it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was
+looking pale, the reason why its modest merits touched him so. He longed
+for the hour of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he
+might drink and defy it. A caricature was really due to him, he thought;
+otherwise why had he abandoned his bijou dwelling? Lady Camper, however,
+sent none. He had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was
+rather a likeness, and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain
+disorderliness in his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him. Still
+it despatched him to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of
+facts in evidence against the sketch. While sitting there he heard the
+housemaid’s knock at the door, and the strange intelligence that his
+daughter was with Lady Camper, and had left word that she hoped he would
+not forget his engagement to go to Mrs. Baerens’ lawn-party.
+
+The General jumped away from the glass, shouting at the absent Elizabeth
+in a fit of wrath so foreign to him, that he returned hurriedly to have
+another look at himself, and exclaimed at the pitch of his voice, ‘I
+say I attribute it to an indigestion of that tonic. Do you hear?’ The
+housemaid faintly answered outside the door that she did, alarming him,
+for there seemed to be confusion somewhere. His hope was that no one
+would mention Lady Camper’s name, for the mere thought of her caused a
+rush to his head. ‘I believe I am in for a touch of apoplexy,’ he
+said to the rector, who greeted him, in advance of the ladies, on Mr.
+Baerens’ lawn. He said it smilingly, but wanting some show of sympathy,
+instead of the whisper and meaningless hand at his clerical band, with
+which the rector responded, he cried, ‘Apoplexy,’ and his friend seemed
+then to understand, and disappeared among the ladies.
+
+Several of them surrounded the General, and one inquired whether the
+series was being continued. He drew forth his pocket-book, handed
+her the latest, and remarked on the gross injustice of it; for, as he
+requested them to take note, her ladyship now sketched him as a person
+inattentive to his dress, and he begged them to observe that she had
+drawn him with his necktie hanging loose. ‘And that, I say that has
+never been known of me since I first entered society.’
+
+The ladies exchanged looks of profound concern; for the fact was, the
+General had come without any necktie and any collar, and he appeared to
+be unaware of the circumstance. The rector had told them, that in
+answer to a hint he had dropped on the subject of neckties, General Ople
+expressed a slight apprehension of apoplexy; but his careless or merely
+partial observance of the laws of buttonment could have nothing to do
+with such fears. They signified rather a disorder of the intelligence.
+Elizabeth was condemned for leaving him to go about alone. The situation
+was really most painful, for a word to so sensitive a man would drive
+him away in shame and for good; and still, to let him parade the ground
+in the state, compared with his natural self, of scarecrow, and with
+the dreadful habit of talking to himself quite rageing, was a horrible
+alternative. Mrs. Baerens at last directed her husband upon the General,
+trembling as though she watched for the operations of a fish torpedo;
+and other ladies shared her excessive anxiousness, for Mr. Baerens had
+the manner and the look of artillery, and on this occasion carried a
+surcharge of powder.
+
+The General bent his ear to Mr. Baerens, whose German-English and
+repeated remark, ‘I am to do it wid delicassy,’ did not assist his
+comprehension; and when he might have been enlightened, he was petrified
+by seeing Lady Camper walk on the lawn with Elizabeth. The great lady
+stood a moment beside Mrs. Baerens; she came straight over to him,
+contemplating him in silence.
+
+Then she said, ‘Your arm, General Ople,’ and she made one circuit of the
+lawn with him, barely speaking.
+
+At her request, he conducted her to her carriage. He took a seat beside
+her, obediently. He felt that he was being sketched, and comported
+himself like a child’s flat man, that jumps at the pulling of a string.
+
+‘Where have you left your girl, General?’
+
+Before he could rally his wits to answer the question, he was asked:
+
+‘And what have you done with your necktie and collar?’
+
+He touched his throat.
+
+‘I am rather nervous to-day, I forgot Elizabeth,’ he said, sending his
+fingers in a dotting run of wonderment round his neck.
+
+Lady Camper smiled with a triumphing humour on her close-drawn lips.
+
+The verified absence of necktie and collar seemed to be choking him.
+
+‘Never mind, you have been abroad without them,’ said Lady Camper, ‘and
+that is a victory for me. And you thought of Elizabeth first when I drew
+your attention to it, and that is a victory for you. It is a very
+great victory. Pray, do not be dismayed, General. You have a handsome
+campaigning air. And no apologies, if you please; I like you well enough
+as you are. There is my hand.’
+
+General Ople understood her last remark. He pressed the lady’s hand in
+silence, very nervously.
+
+‘But do not shrug your head into your shoulders as if there were any
+possibility of concealing the thunderingly evident,’ said Lady Camper,
+electrifying him, what with her cordial squeeze, her kind eyes, and her
+singular language. ‘You have omitted the collar. Well? The collar is
+the fatal finishing touch in men’s dress; it would make Apollo look
+bourgeois.’
+
+Her hand was in his: and watching the play of her features, a spark
+entered General Ople’s brain, causing him, in forgetfulness of collar
+and caricatures, to ejaculate, ‘Seventy? Did your ladyship say seventy?
+Utterly impossible! You trifle with me.’
+
+‘We will talk when we are free of this accompaniment of carriage-wheels,
+General,’ said Lady Camper.
+
+‘I will beg permission to go and fetch Elizabeth, madam.’
+
+‘Rightly thought of. Fetch her in my carriage. And, by the way, Mrs.
+Baerens was my old music-mistress, and is, I think, one year older than
+I. She can tell you on which side of seventy I am.’
+
+‘I shall not require to ask, my lady,’ he said, sighing.
+
+‘Then we will send the carriage for Elizabeth, and have it out
+together at once. I am impatient; yes, General, impatient: for
+what?--forgiveness.’
+
+‘Of me, my lady?’ The General breathed profoundly.
+
+‘Of whom else? Do you know what it is?-I don’t think you do. You English
+have the smallest experience of humanity. I mean this: to strike so hard
+that, in the end, you soften your heart to the victim. Well, that is my
+weakness. And we of our blood put no restraint on the blows we strike
+when we think them wanted, so we are always overdoing it.’
+
+General Ople assisted Lady Camper to alight from the carriage, which was
+forthwith despatched for Elizabeth.
+
+He prepared to listen to her with a disconnected smile of acute
+attentiveness.
+
+She had changed. She spoke of money. Ten thousand pounds must be settled
+on his daughter. ‘And now,’ said she, ‘you will remember that you are
+wanting a collar.’
+
+He acquiesced. He craved permission to retire for ten minutes.
+
+‘Simplest of men! what will cover you?’ she exclaimed, and peremptorily
+bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took one of the famous
+pair of pistols in her hand, and said, ‘If I put myself in a similar
+position, and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you? You see
+these murderous weapons. Well, I am a coward. I dread fire-arms. They
+are laid there to impose on the world, and I believe they do. They have
+imposed on you. Now, you would never think of pretending to a moral
+quality you do not possess. But, silly, simple man that you are! You can
+give yourself the airs of wealth, buy horses to conceal your nakedness,
+and when you are taken upon the standard of your apparent income, you
+would rather seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave frankly
+and honestly. I have a little overstated it, but I am near the mark.’
+
+‘Your ladyship wanting courage!’ cried the General.
+
+‘Refresh yourself by meditating on it,’ said she. ‘And to prove it to
+you, I was glad to take this house when I knew I was to have a gallant
+gentleman for a neighbour. No visitors will be admitted, General Ople,
+so you are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly. One day you speculated
+on the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:--I had
+said that I freckled easily. Your look signified that you really could
+not detect a single freckle for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not.
+But when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your
+daughter’s happiness as you had been to her reputation...’
+
+‘My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!’
+
+General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.
+
+‘So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk
+with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless of the
+girl’s happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her
+behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own
+affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of
+what my sisters used to call my spice. You would not honestly state the
+proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman
+of seventy. Most preposterous! Could any caricature of mine exceed in
+grotesqueness your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a generous
+man all the same: and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism--or
+extreme egotism--that blinds you. A certain amount you must have to be
+a man. You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity;
+you were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were
+horrified by the age of seventy, and you were credulous--General
+Ople, listen to me, and remember that you have no collar on--you were
+credulous of my statement of my great age, or you chose to be so, or
+chose to seem so, because I had brushed your cat’s coat against the fur.
+And then, full of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth, but to withdraw
+in the chivalrous attitude of the man true to his word to the old woman,
+only stickling to bring a certain independence to the common stock,
+because--I quote you! and you have no collar on, mind--“you could not
+be at your wife’s mercy,” you broke from your proposal on the money
+question. Where was your consideration for Elizabeth then?
+
+‘Well, General, you were fond of thinking of yourself, and I thought I
+would assist you. I gave you plenty of subject matter. I will not say
+I meant to work a homoeopathic cure. But if I drive you to forget your
+collar, is it or is it not a triumph?
+
+‘No,’ added Lady Camper, ‘it is no triumph for me, but it is one for
+you, if you like to make the most of it. Your fault has been to quit
+active service, General, and love your ease too well. It is the fault
+of your countrymen. You must get a militia regiment, or inspectorship of
+militia. You are ten times the man in exercise. Why, do you mean to tell
+me that you would have cared for those drawings of mine when marching?’
+
+‘I think so, I say I think so,’ remarked the General seriously.
+
+‘I doubt it,’ said she. ‘But to the point; here comes Elizabeth. If
+you have not much money to spare for her, according to your prudent
+calculation, reflect how this money has enfeebled you and reduced you to
+the level of the people round about us here--who are, what? Inhabitants
+of gentlemanly residences, yes! But what kind of creature? They have
+no mental standard, no moral aim, no native chivalry. You were rapidly
+becoming one of them, only, fortunately for you, you were sensitive to
+ridicule.’
+
+‘Elizabeth shall have half my money settled on her,’ said the General;
+‘though I fear it is not much. And if I can find occupation, my lady...’
+
+‘Something worthier than that,’ said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines
+rapidly on the margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony; ‘or
+that,’ and he was plucking at a cabbage; ‘or that,’ and he was bowing to
+three petticoated posts.
+
+‘The likeness is exact,’ General Ople groaned.
+
+‘So you may suppose I have studied you,’ said she. ‘But there is no
+real likeness. Slight exaggerations do more harm to truth than reckless
+violations of it.
+
+You would not have cared one bit for a caricature, if you had not nursed
+the absurd idea of being one of our conquerors. It is the very tragedy
+of modesty for a man like you to have such notions, my poor dear good
+friend. The modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at
+vanity. And reflect whether you have not been intoxicated, for these
+young people have been wretched, and you have not observed it, though
+one of them was living with you, and is the child you love. There, I
+have done. Pray show a good face to Elizabeth.’
+
+The General obeyed as well as he could. He felt very like a sheep that
+has come from a shearing, and when released he wished to run away. But
+hardly had he escaped before he had a desire for the renewal of the
+operation. ‘She sees me through, she sees me through,’ he was heard
+saying to himself, and in the end he taught himself, to say it with a
+secret exultation, for as it was on her part an extraordinary piece
+of insight to see him through, it struck him that in acknowledging the
+truth of it, he made a discovery of new powers in human nature.
+
+General Ople studied Lady Camper diligently for fresh proofs of her
+penetration of the mysteries in his bosom; by which means, as it
+happened that she was diligently observing the two betrothed young ones,
+he began to watch them likewise, and took a pleasure in the sight. Their
+meetings, their partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes
+of converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and previously, as he
+remembered, he had never sustained a conversation of any length with
+composure and the beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds, to
+which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for Elizabeth’s dowry, he
+signed over to his dear girl gladly, and came out with the confession to
+her ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised his fortune.
+She shrugged she had left off pulling him this way and that, so his
+chains were enjoyable, and he said to himself: ‘If ever she should
+in the dead of night want a man to defend her!’ He mentioned it to
+Reginald, who had been the repository of Elizabeth’s lamentations about
+her father being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived a
+scheme for causing his aunt’s great bell to be rung at midnight,
+which would certainly have led to a dramatic issue and the happy
+re-establishment of our masculine ascendancy at the close of this
+history. But he forgot it in his bridegroom’s delight, until he was
+making his miserable official speech at the wedding-breakfast, and set
+Elizabeth winking over a tear. As she stood in the hall ready to depart,
+a great van was observed in the road at the gates of Douro Lodge; and
+this, the men in custody declared to contain the goods and knick-knacks
+of the people who had taken the house furnished for a year, and were
+coming in that very afternoon.
+
+‘I remember, I say now I remember, I had a notice,’ the General said
+cheerily to his troubled daughter.
+
+‘But where are you to go, papa?’ the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.
+
+‘I shall get employment of some sort,’ said he. ‘I was saying I want it,
+I need it, I require it.’
+
+‘You are saying three times what once would have sufficed for,’ said
+Lady Camper, and she asked him a few questions, frowned with a smile,
+and offered him a lodgement in his neighbour’s house.
+
+‘Really, dearest Aunt Angela?’ said Elizabeth.
+
+‘What else can I do, child? I have, it seems, driven him out of a
+gentlemanly residence, and I must give him a ladylike one. True, I would
+rather have had him at call, but as I have always wished for a policeman
+in the house, I may as well be satisfied with a soldier.’
+
+‘But if you lose your character, my lady?’ said Reginald.
+
+‘Then I must look to the General to restore it.’
+
+General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady Camper’s fingers.
+
+‘An odd thing to happen to a woman of forty-one!’ she said to her great
+people, and they submitted with the best grace in the world, while the
+General’s ears tingled till he felt younger than Reginald. This, his
+reflections ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this is the
+result of painting!--that you can believe a woman to be any age when her
+cheeks are tinted!
+
+As for Lady Camper, she had been floated accidentally over the ridicule
+of the bruit of a marriage at a time of life as terrible to her as her
+fiction of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself to
+let things go with the tide. She had not been blissful in her first
+marriage, she had abandoned the chase of an ideal man, and she had found
+one who was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever to be a
+fund of amusement for her humour, good, impressible, and above all, very
+picturesque. There is the secret of her, and of how it came to pass
+that a simple man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest
+division.
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
+     Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
+     Nature is not of necessity always roaring
+     Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
+     Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
+     She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
+     Spare me that word “female” as long as you live
+     The mildness of assured dictatorship
+     When we see our veterans tottering to their fall
+
+
+
+
+THE TALE OF CHLOE AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF BEAU BEAMISH
+
+By George Meredith
+
+       ‘Fair Chloe, we toasted of old,
+         As the Queen of our festival meeting;
+        Now Chloe is lifeless and cold;
+         You must go to the grave for her greeting.
+        Her beauty and talents were framed
+         To enkindle the proudest to win her;
+        Then let not the mem’ry be blamed
+         Of the purest that e’er was a sinner!’
+
+                    Captain Chanter’s Collection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A proper tenderness for the Peerage will continue to pass current the
+illustrious gentleman who was inflamed by Cupid’s darts to espouse the
+milkmaid, or dairymaid, under his ballad title of Duke of Dewlap: nor
+was it the smallest of the services rendered him by Beau Beamish, that
+he clapped the name upon her rustic Grace, the young duchess, the very
+first day of her arrival at the Wells. This happy inspiration of a wit
+never failing at a pinch has rescued one of our princeliest houses from
+the assaults of the vulgar, who are ever too rejoiced to bespatter and
+disfigure a brilliant coat-of-arms; insomuch that the ballad, to which
+we are indebted for the narrative of the meeting and marriage of the
+ducal pair, speaks of Dewlap in good faith--
+
+        O the ninth Duke of Dewlap I am, Susie dear!
+
+without a hint of a domino title. So likewise the pictorial historian is
+merry over ‘Dewlap alliances’ in his description of the society of that
+period. He has read the ballad, but disregarded the memoirs of the beau.
+Writers of pretension would seem to have an animus against individuals
+of the character of Mr. Beamish. They will treat of the habits and
+manners of highwaymen, and quote obscure broadsheets and songs of the
+people to colour their story, yet decline to bestow more than a passing
+remark upon our domestic kings: because they are not hereditary, we
+may suppose. The ballad of ‘The Duke and the Dairymaid,’ ascribed with
+questionable authority to the pen of Mr. Beamish himself in a freak
+of his gaiety, was once popular enough to provoke the moralist to
+animadversions upon an order of composition that ‘tempted every bouncing
+country lass to sidle an eye in a blowsy cheek’ in expectation of a
+coronet for her pains--and a wet ditch as the result! We may doubt it to
+have been such an occasion of mischief. But that mischief may have been
+done by it to a nobility-loving people, even to the love of our nobility
+among the people, must be granted; and for the particular reason,
+that the hero of the ballad behaved so handsomely. We perceive a
+susceptibility to adulteration in their worship at the sight of one of
+their number, a young maid, suddenly snatched up to the gaping heights
+of Luxury and Fashion through sheer good looks. Remembering that they
+are accustomed to a totally reverse effect from that possession, it is
+very perceptible how a breach in their reverence may come of the change.
+
+Otherwise the ballad is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design.
+A fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has
+never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and
+redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear.
+It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it,
+but is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A
+sample will show, for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:
+
+     Sweet Susie she tripped on a shiny May morn,
+     As blithe as the lark from the green-springing corn,
+     When, hard by a stile, ‘twas her luck to behold
+     A wonderful gentleman covered with gold!
+
+     There was gold on his breeches and gold on his coat,
+     His shirt-frill was grand as a fifty-pound note;
+     The diamonds glittered all up him so bright,
+     She thought him the Milky Way clothing a Sprite!
+
+     ‘Fear not, pretty maiden,’ he said with a smile;
+     ‘And, pray, let me help you in crossing the stile.
+     She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,
+     It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.
+
+     As light as a robin she hopped to the stone,
+     But fast was her hand in the gentleman’s own;
+     And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,
+     When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!
+
+With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a
+flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He
+cannot wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a
+characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended
+to us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been
+sounded; they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they
+are as legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in
+a page of old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as
+heathendom knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the
+moment they have taken fire they must wed, though the lady’s finger
+be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain.
+Vainly, as becomes a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that
+she is but a poor dairymaid. He has been a student of women at Courts,
+in which furnace the sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her
+the catalogue of material advantages he has to offer. Finally, after
+his assurances that she is to be married by the parson, really by the
+parson, and a real parson--
+
+     Sweet Susie is off for her parents’ consent,
+     And long must the old folk debate what it meant.
+     She left them the eve of that happy May morn,
+     To shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!
+
+Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an example to poets
+of our day, who fly to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid
+mediaevalism, or--save the mark!--abstract ideas, for themes of song,
+of what may be done to make our English life poetically interesting, if
+they would but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside;
+and Nature being now as then the passport to popularity, they have
+themselves to thank for their little hold on the heart of the people. A
+living native duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and
+a buxom young lass of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the
+estate of duchess, a more romantic object than troops of your visionary
+Yseults and Guineveres.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A certain time after the marriage, his Grace alighted at the Wells,
+and did himself the honour to call on Mr. Beamish. Addressing that
+gentleman, to whom he was no stranger, he communicated the purport of
+his visit.
+
+‘Sir, and my very good friend,’ he said, ‘first let me beg you to abate
+the severity of your countenance, for if I am here in breach of your
+prohibition, I shall presently depart in compliance with it. I could
+indeed deplore the loss of the passion for play of which you effectually
+cured me. I was then armed against a crueller, that allows of no
+interval for a man to make his vow to recover!’
+
+‘The disease which is all crisis, I apprehend,’ Mr. Beamish remarked.
+
+‘Which, sir, when it takes hold of dry wood, burns to the last splinter.
+It is now’--the duke fetched a tender groan--‘three years ago that I had
+a caprice to marry a grandchild!’
+
+‘Of Adam’s,’ Mr. Beamish said cheerfully. ‘There was no legitimate bar
+to the union.’
+
+‘Unhappily none. Yet you are not to suppose I regret it. A most
+admirable creature, Mr. Beamish, a real divinity! And the better known,
+the more adored. There is the misfortune. At my season of life, when the
+greater and the minor organs are in a conspiracy to tell me I am mortal,
+the passion of love must be welcomed as a calamity, though one would not
+be free of it for the renewal of youth. You are to understand, that with
+a little awakening taste for dissipation, she is the most innocent of
+angels. Hitherto we have lived... To her it has been a new world. But
+she is beginning to find it a narrow one. No, no, she is not tired of my
+society. Very far from that. But in her present station an inclination
+for such gatherings as you have here, for example, is like a desire to
+take the air: and the healthy habits of my duchess have not accustomed
+her to be immured. And in fine, devote ourselves as we will, a term
+approaches when the enthusiasm for serving as your wife’s playfellow all
+day, running round tables and flying along corridors before a knotted
+handkerchief, is mightily relaxed. Yet the dread of a separation from
+her has kept me at these pastimes for a considerable period beyond my
+relish of them. Not that I acknowledge fatigue. I have, it seems, a
+taste for reflection; I am now much disposed to read and meditate, which
+cannot be done without repose. I settle myself, and I receive a worsted
+ball in my face, and I am expected to return it. I comply; and then you
+would say a nursery in arms. It would else be the deplorable spectacle
+of a beautiful young woman yawning.’
+
+‘Earthquake and saltpetre threaten us less terribly,’ said Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘In fine, she has extracted a promise that ‘this summer she shall visit
+the Wells for a month, and I fear I cannot break my pledge of my word; I
+fear I cannot.’
+
+‘Very certainly I would not,’ said Mr. Beamish.
+
+The duke heaved a sigh. ‘There are reasons, family reasons, why my
+company and protection must be denied to her here. I have no wish...
+indeed my name, for the present, until such time as she shall have
+found her feet... and there is ever a penalty to pay for that. Ah, Mr.
+Beamish, pictures are ours, when we have bought them and hung them up;
+but who insures us possession of a beautiful work of Nature? I have
+latterly betaken me to reflect much and seriously. I am tempted to side
+with the Divines in the sermons I have read; the flesh is the habitation
+of a rebellious devil.’
+
+‘To whom we object in proportion as we ourselves become quit of him,’
+Mr. Beamish acquiesced.
+
+‘But this mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure, is one
+of the wonders. It does not pall on them; they are insatiate.’
+
+‘There is the cataract, and there is the cliff. Potentate to potentate,
+duke--so long as you are on my territory, be it understood. Upon my way
+to a place of worship once, I passed a Puritan, who was complaining of
+a butterfly that fluttered prettily abroad in desecration of the Day of
+Rest. “Friend,” said I to him, “conclusively you prove to me that you
+are not a butterfly.” Surly did no more than favour me with the anathema
+of his countenance.’
+
+‘Cousin Beamish, my complaint of these young people is, that they miss
+their pleasure in pursuing it. I have lectured my duchess--’
+
+‘Ha!’
+
+‘Foolish, I own,’ said the duke. ‘But suppose, now, you had caught your
+butterfly, and you could neither let it go nor consent to follow its
+vagaries. That poses you.’
+
+‘Young people,’ said Mr. Beamish, ‘come under my observation in this
+poor realm of mine--young and old. I find them prodigiously alike in
+their love of pleasure, differing mainly in their capacity to satisfy
+it. That is no uncommon observation. The young, have an edge which they
+are desirous of blunting; the old contrariwise. The cry of the young for
+pleasure is actually--I have studied their language--a cry for burdens.
+Curious! And the old ones cry for having too many on their shoulders:
+which is not astonishing. Between them they make an agreeable concert
+both to charm the ears and guide the steps of the philosopher, whose
+wisdom it is to avoid their tracks.’
+
+‘Good. But I have asked you for practical advice, and you give me an
+essay.’
+
+‘For the reason, duke, that you propose a case that suggests hanging.
+You mention two things impossible to be done. The alternative is, a
+garter and the bedpost. When we have come upon crossways, and we can
+decide neither to take the right hand nor the left, neither forward nor
+back, the index of the board which would direct us points to itself, and
+emphatically says, Gallows.’
+
+‘Beamish, I am distracted. If I refuse her the visit, I foresee
+dissensions, tears, games at ball, romps, not one day of rest remaining
+to me. I could be of a mind with your Puritan, positively. If I allow
+it, so innocent a creature in the atmosphere of a place like this must
+suffer some corruption. You should know that the station I took her from
+was ... it was modest. She was absolutely a buttercup of the fields. She
+has had various masters. She dances... she dances prettily, I could say
+bewitchingly. And so she is now for airing her accomplishments: such are
+women!’
+
+‘Have you heard of Chloe?’ said Mr. Beamish. ‘There you have an example
+of a young lady uncorrupted by this place--of which I would only remark
+that it is best unvisited, but better tasted than longed for.’
+
+‘Chloe? A lady who squandered her fortune to redeem some ill-requiting
+rascal: I remember to have heard of her. She is here still? And ruined,
+of course?’
+
+‘In purse.’
+
+‘That cannot be without the loss of reputation.’
+
+‘Chloe’s champion will grant that she is exposed to the evils of
+improvidence. The more brightly shine her native purity, her goodness
+of heart, her trustfulness. She is a lady whose exaltation glows in her
+abasement.’
+
+‘She has, I see, preserved her comeliness,’ observed the duke, with a
+smile.
+
+‘Despite the flying of the roses, which had not her heart’s patience.
+‘Tis now the lily that reigns. So, then, Chloe shall be attached to the
+duchess during her stay, and unless the devil himself should interfere,
+I guarantee her Grace against any worse harm than experience; and that,’
+Mr. Beamish added, as the duke raised his arms at the fearful word,
+‘that shall be mild. Play she will; she is sure to play. Put it down
+at a thousand. We map her out a course of permissible follies, and she
+plays to lose the thousand by degrees, with as telling an effect upon a
+connubial conscience as we can produce.’
+
+‘A thousand,’ said the duke, ‘will be cheap indeed. I think now I have
+had a description of this fair Chloe, and from an enthusiast; a brune?
+elegantly mannered and of a good landed family; though she has thought
+proper to conceal her name. And that will be our difficulty, cousin
+Beamish.’
+
+‘She was, under my dominion, Miss Martinsward,’ Mr. Beamish pursued.
+‘She came here very young, and at once her suitors were legion. In the
+way of women, she chose the worst among them; and for the fellow Caseldy
+she sacrificed the fortune she had inherited of a maternal uncle. To
+release him from prison, she paid all his debts; a mountain of bills,
+with the lawyers piled above--Pelion upon Ossa, to quote our poets.
+In fact, obeying the dictates of a soul steeped in generosity, she
+committed the indiscretion to strip herself, scandalizing propriety.
+This was immediately on her coming of age; and it was the death-blow to
+her relations with her family. Since then, honoured even by rakes, she
+has lived impoverished at the Wells. I dubbed her Chloe, and man
+or woman disrespectful to Chloe packs. From being the victim of her
+generous disposition, I could not save her; I can protect her from the
+shafts of malice.’
+
+‘She has no passion for play?’ inquired the duke.
+
+‘She nourishes a passion for the man for whom she bled, to the exclusion
+of the other passions. She lives, and I believe I may say that it is the
+motive of her rising and dressing daily, in expectation of his advent.’
+
+‘He may be dead.’
+
+‘The dog is alive. And he has not ceased to be Handsome Caseldy, they
+say. Between ourselves, duke, there is matter to break her heart. He has
+been the Count Caseldy of Continental gaming tables, and he is recently
+Sir Martin Caseldy, settled on the estate she made him free to take up
+intact on his father’s decease.’
+
+‘Pah! a villain!’
+
+‘With a blacker brand upon him every morning that he looks forth across
+his property, and leaves her to languish! She still--I say it to the
+redemption of our sex--has offers. Her incomparable attractions of mind
+and person exercise the natural empire of beauty. But she will none of
+them. I call her the Fair Suicide. She has died for love; and she is a
+ghost, a good ghost, and a pleasing ghost, but an apparition, a taper.
+
+The duke fidgeted, and expressed a hope to hear that she was not of
+melancholy conversation; and again, that the subject of her discourse
+was not confined to love and lovers, happy or unhappy. He wished his
+duchess, he said, to be entertained upon gayer topics: love being
+a theme he desired to reserve to himself. ‘This month!’ he said,
+prognostically shaking and moaning. ‘I would this month were over, and
+that we were well purged of it.’
+
+Mr. Beamish reassured him. The wit and sprightliness of Chloe were so
+famous as to be considered medical, he affirmed; she was besieged for
+her company; she composed and sang impromptu verses, she played harp and
+harpsichord divinely, and touched the guitar, and danced, danced like
+the silvery moon on the waters of the mill pool. He concluded by saying
+that she was both humane and wise, humble-minded and amusing, virtuous
+yet not a Tartar; the best of companions for her Grace the young
+duchess. Moreover, he boldly engaged to carry the duchess through the
+term of her visit under a name that should be as good as a masquerade
+for concealing his Grace’s, while giving her all the honours due to her
+rank.
+
+‘You strictly interpret my wishes,’ said the duke; ‘all honours, the
+foremost place, and my wrath upon man or woman gainsaying them!’
+
+‘Mine! if you please, duke,’ said Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘A thousand pardons! I leave it to you, cousin. I could not be in safer
+hands. I am heartily bounders to you. Chloe, then. By the way, she has a
+decent respect for age?’
+
+‘She is reverentially inclined.’
+
+‘Not that. She is, I would ask, no wanton prattler of the charms and
+advantages of youth?’
+
+‘She has a young adorer that I have dubbed Alonzo, whom she scarce
+notices.’
+
+‘Nothing could be better. Alonzo: h’m! A faithful swain?’
+
+‘Life is his tree, upon which unceasingly he carves his mistress’s
+initials.’
+
+‘She should not be too cruel. I recollect myself formerly: I was...
+Young men will, when long slighted, transfer their affections, and be
+warmer to the second flame than to the first. I put you on your guard.
+He follows her much? These lovers’ paintings and puffings in the
+neighbourhood of the most innocent of women are contagious.’
+
+‘Her Grace will be running home all the sooner.’
+
+‘Or off!--may she forgive me! I am like a King John’s Jew, forced to
+lend his treasure without security. What a world is ours! Nothing,
+Beamish, nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted! Catch a
+prize, and you will find you are at war with your species. You have
+to be on the defensive from that moment. There is no such thing as
+peaceable procession on earth. Let it be a beautiful young woman!--Ah!’
+
+Mr. Beamish replied bracingly, ‘The champion wrestler challenges all
+comers while he wears the belt.’
+
+The duke dejectedly assented. ‘True; or he is challenged, say. Is there
+any tale we could tell her of this Alonzo? You could deport him for the
+month, my dear Beamish.’
+
+‘I commit no injustice unless with sufficient reason. It is an estimable
+youth, as shown by his devotion to a peerless woman. To endow her with
+his name and fortune is his only thought.’
+
+‘I perceive; an excellent young fellow! I have an incipient liking
+for this young Alonzo. You must not permit my duchess to laugh at him.
+Encourage her rather to advance his suit. The silliness of a young man
+will be no bad spectacle. Chloe, then. You have set my mind at rest,
+Beamish, and it is but another obligation added to the heap; so, if I
+do not speak of payment, the reason is that I know you would not have me
+bankrupt.’
+
+The remainder of the colloquy of the duke and Mr. Beamish referred to
+the date of her Grace’s coming to the Wells, the lodgement she was
+to receive, and other minor arrangements bearing upon her state and
+comfort; the duke perpetually observing, ‘But I leave it all to you,
+Beamish,’ when he had laid down precise instructions in these respects,
+even to the specification of the shopkeepers, the confectioner and the
+apothecary, who were to balance or cancel one another in the opposite
+nature of their supplies, and the haberdasher and the jeweller, with
+whom she was to make her purchases. For the duke had a recollection of
+giddy shops, and of giddy shopmen too; and it was by serving as one for
+a day that a certain great nobleman came to victory with a jealously
+guarded dame beautiful as Venus. ‘I would have challenged the goddess!’
+he cried, and subsided from his enthusiasm plaintively, like a weak wind
+instrument. ‘So there you see the prudence of a choice of shops. But
+I leave it to you, Beamish.’ Similarly the great military commander,
+having done whatsoever a careful prevision may suggest to insure him
+victory, casts himself upon Providence, with the hope of propitiating
+the unanticipated and darkly possible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The splendid equipage of a coach and six, with footmen in scarlet and
+green, carried Beau Beamish five miles along the road on a sunny day to
+meet the young duchess at the boundary of his territory, and conduct
+her in state to the Wells. Chloe sat beside him, receiving counsel with
+regard to her prospective duties. He was this day the consummate beau,
+suave, but monarchical, and his manner of speech partook of his
+external grandeur. ‘Spy me the horizon, and apprise me if somewhere you
+distinguish a chariot,’ he said, as they drew up on the rise of a hill
+of long descent, where the dusty roadway sank between its brown hedges,
+and crawled mounting from dry rush-spotted hollows to corn fields on
+a companion height directly facing them, at a remove of about
+three-quarters of a mile. Chloe looked forth, while the beau passingly
+raised his hat for coolness, and murmured, with a glance down the sultry
+track: ‘It sweats the eye to see!’
+
+Presently Chloe said, ‘Now a dust blows. Something approaches. Now I
+discern horses, now a vehicle; and it is a chariot!’
+
+Orders were issued to the outriders for horns to be sounded.
+
+Both Chloe and Beau Beamish wrinkled their foreheads at the disorderly
+notes of triple horns, whose pealing made an acid in the air instead of
+sweetness.
+
+‘You would say, kennel dogs that bay the moon!’ said the wincing beau.
+‘Yet, as you know, these fellows have been exercised. I have had them
+out in a meadow for hours, baked and drenched, to get them rid of their
+native cacophony. But they love it, as they love bacon and beans. The
+musical taste of our people is in the stage of the primitive appetite
+for noise, and for that they are gluttons.’
+
+‘It will be pleasant to hear in the distance,’ Chloe replied.
+
+‘Ay, the extremer the distance, the pleasanter to hear. Are they
+advancing?’
+
+‘They stop. There is a cavalier at the window. Now he doffs his hat.’
+
+‘Sweepingly?’
+
+Chloe described a semicircle in the grand manner.
+
+The beau’s eyebrows rose. ‘Powers divine!’ he muttered. ‘She is let
+loose from hand to hand, and midway comes a cavalier. We did not count
+on the hawks. So I have to deal with a cavalier! It signifies, my dear
+Chloe, that I must incontinently affect the passion if I am to be his
+match: nothing less.’
+
+‘He has flown,’ said Chloe.
+
+‘Whom she encounters after meeting me, I care not,’ quoth the beau,
+snapping a finger. ‘But there has been an interval for damage with a
+lady innocent as Eve. Is she advancing?’
+
+‘The chariot is trotting down the hill. He has ridden back. She has no
+attendant horseman.’
+
+‘They were dismissed at my injunction ten miles off particularly to
+the benefit of the cavaliering horde, it would appear. In the case of a
+woman, Chloe, one blink of the eyelids is an omission of watchfulness.’
+
+‘That is an axiom fit for the harem of the Grand Signior.’
+
+‘The Grand Signior might give us profitable lessons for dealing with the
+sex.’
+
+‘Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war!’
+
+‘Trust you, and the stopper is out of the smelling-bottle.’
+
+‘Mr. Beamish, we are women, but we have souls.’
+
+‘The pip in the apple whose ruddy cheek allures little Tommy to rob the
+orchard is as good a preservative.’
+
+‘You admit that men are our enemies?’
+
+‘I maintain that they carry the banner of virtue.’
+
+‘Oh, Mr. Beamish, I shall expire.’
+
+‘I forbid it in my lifetime, Chloe, for I wish to die believing in one
+woman.’
+
+‘No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters!’
+
+‘Then fly to a hermitage; for all flattery is at somebody’s expense,
+child. ‘Tis an essence-extract of humanity! To live on it, in the
+fashion of some people, is bad--it is downright cannibal. But we may
+sprinkle our handkerchiefs with it, and we should, if we would caress
+our noses with an air. Society, my Chloe, is a recommencement upon an
+upper level of the savage system; we must have our sacrifices. As, for
+instance, what say you of myself beside our booted bumpkin squires?’
+
+‘Hundreds of them, Mr. Beamish!’
+
+‘That is a holocaust of squires reduced to make an incense for me,
+though you have not performed Druid rites and packed them in gigantic
+osier ribs. Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues. Grant us
+ours too. I have a serious intention to preserve this young duchess, and
+I expect my task to be severe. I carry the banner aforesaid; verily and
+penitentially I do. It is an error of the vulgar to suppose that all is
+dragon in the dragon’s jaws.’
+
+‘Men are his fangs and claws.’
+
+‘Ay, but the passion for his fiery breath is in woman. She will take her
+leap and have her jump, will and will! And at the point where she will
+and she won’t, the dragon gulps and down she goes! However, the business
+is to keep our buttercup duchess from that same point. Is she near?’
+
+‘I can see her,’ said Chloe.
+
+Beau Beamish requested a sketch of her, and Chloe began: ‘She is
+ravishing.’
+
+Upon which he commented, ‘Every woman is ravishing at forty paces, and
+still more so in imagination.’
+
+‘Beautiful auburn hair, and a dazzling red and white complexion, set in
+a blue coif.’
+
+‘Her eyes?’
+
+‘Melting blue.’
+
+‘‘Tis an English witch!’ exclaimed the beau, and he compassionately
+invoked her absent lord.
+
+Chloe’s optics were no longer tasked to discern the fair lady’s
+lineaments, for the chariot windows came flush with those of the beau
+on the broad plateau of the hill. His coach door was opened. He sat
+upright, levelling his privileged stare at Duchess Susan until she
+blushed.
+
+‘Ay, madam,’ quoth he, ‘I am not the first.’
+
+‘La, sir!’ said she; ‘who are you?’
+
+The beau deliberately raised his hat and bowed. ‘He, madam, of whose
+approach the gentleman who took his leave of you on yonder elevation
+informed you.’
+
+She looked artlessly over her shoulder, and at the beau alighting from
+his carriage. ‘A gentleman?’
+
+‘On horseback.’
+
+The duchess popped her head through the window on an impulse to measure
+the distance between the two hills.
+
+‘Never!’ she cried.
+
+‘Why, madam, did he deliver no message to announce me?’ said the beau,
+ruffling.
+
+‘Goodness gracious! You must be Mr. Beamish,’ she replied.
+
+He laid his hat on his bosom, and invited her to quit her carriage for
+a seat beside him. She stipulated, ‘If you are really Mr. Beamish?’
+He frowned, and raised his head to convince her; but she would not be
+impressed, and he applied to Chloe to establish his identity. Hearing
+Chloe’s name, the duchess called out, ‘Oh! there, now, that’s enough,
+for Chloe’s my maid here, and I know she’s a lady born, and we’re going
+to be friends. Hand me to Chloe. And you are Chloe?’ she said, after a
+frank stride from step to step of the carriages. ‘And don’t mind being
+my maid? You do look a nice, kind creature. And I see you’re a lady
+born; I know in a minute. You’re dark, I’m fair; we shall suit. And tell
+me--hush!--what dreadful long eyes he has! I shall ask you presently
+what you think of me. I was never at the Wells before. Dear me! the
+coach has turned. How far off shall we hear the bells to say I’m coming?
+I know I’m to have bells. Mr. Beamish, Mr. Beamish! I must have a
+chatter with a woman, and I’m in awe of you, sir, that I am, but men and
+men I see to talk to for a lift of my finger, by the dozen, in my duke’s
+palace--though they’re old ones, that’s true--but a woman who’s a lady,
+and kind enough to be my maid, I haven’t met yet since I had the right
+to wear a coronet. There, I’ll hold Chloe’s hand, and that’ll do. You
+would tell me at once, Chloe, if I was not dressed to your taste; now,
+wouldn’t you? As for talkative, that’s a sign with me of my liking
+people. I really don’t know what to say to my duke sometimes. I sit and
+think it so funny to be having a duke instead of a husband. You’re off!’
+
+The duchess laughed at Chloe’s laughter. Chloe excused herself, but was
+informed by her mistress that it was what she liked.
+
+‘For the first two years,’ she resumed, ‘I could hardly speak a
+syllable. I stammered, I reddened, I longed to be up in my room brushing
+and curling my hair, and was ready to curtsey to everybody. Now I’m
+quite at home, for I’ve plenty of courage--except about death, and I’m
+worse about death than I was when I was a simple body with a gawk’s
+“lawks!” in her round eyes and mouth for an egg. I wonder why that is?
+But isn’t death horrible? And skeletons!’ The duchess shuddered.
+
+‘It depends upon the skeleton,’ said Beau Beamish, who had joined the
+conversation. ‘Yours, madam, I would rather not meet, because she would
+precipitate me into transports of regret for the loss of the flesh. I
+have, however, met mine own and had reason for satisfaction with the
+interview.’
+
+‘Your own skeleton, sir!’ said the duchess wonderingly and appalled.
+
+‘Unmistakably mine. I will call you to witness by an account of him.’
+
+Duchess Susan gaped, and, ‘Oh, don’t!’ she cried out; but added, ‘It
+‘s broad day, and I’ve got some one to sleep anigh me after dark’; with
+which she smiled on Chloe, who promised her there was no matter for
+alarm.
+
+‘I encountered my gentleman as I was proceeding to my room at night,’
+said the beau, ‘along a narrow corridor, where it was imperative that
+one of us should yield the ‘pas;’ and, I must confess it, we are all so
+amazingly alike in our bones, that I stood prepared to demand place of
+him. For indubitably the fellow was an obstruction, and at the first
+glance repulsive. I took him for anybody’s skeleton, Death’s
+ensign, with his cachinnatory skull, and the numbered ribs, and
+the extraordinary splay feet--in fact, the whole ungainly and shaky
+hobbledehoy which man is built on, and by whose image in his weaker
+moments he is haunted. I had, to be frank, been dancing on a supper with
+certain of our choicest Wits and Beauties. It is a recipe for conjuring
+apparitions. Now, then, thinks I, my fine fellow, I will bounce you; and
+without a salutation I pressed forward. Madam, I give you my word, he
+behaved to the full pitch as I myself should have done under similar
+circumstances. Retiring upon an inclination of his structure, he draws
+up and fetches me a bow of the exact middle nick between dignity
+and service. I advance, he withdraws, and again the bow, devoid of
+obsequiousness, majestically condescending. These, thinks I, be royal
+manners. I could have taken him for the Sable King in person, stripped
+of his mantle. On my soul, he put me to the blush.’
+
+‘And is that all?’ asked the duchess, relieving herself with a sigh.
+
+‘Why, madam,’ quoth the beau, ‘do you not see that he could have been
+none other than mine own, who could comport himself with that grand air
+and gracefulness when wounded by his closest relative? Upon his opening
+my door for me, and accepting the ‘pas,’ which I now right heartily
+accorded him, I recognized at once both him and the reproof he had
+designedly dealt me--or the wine supper I had danced on, perhaps
+I should say’ and I protest that by such a display of supreme good
+breeding he managed to convey the highest compliment ever received by
+man, namely the assurance, that after the withering away of this mortal
+garb, I shall still be noted for urbanity and elegancy. Nay, and more,
+immortally, without the slip I was guilty of when I carried the bag of
+wine.’
+
+Duchess Susan fanned herself to assist her digestion of the anecdote.
+
+‘Well, it’s not so frightful a story, and I know you are the great Mr.
+Beamish;’ she said.
+
+He questioned her whether the gentleman had signalled him to her on the
+hill.
+
+‘What can he mean about a gentleman?’ she turned to Chloe. ‘My duke told
+me you would meet me, sir. And you are to protect me. And if anything
+happens, it is to be your fault.’
+
+‘Entirely,’ said the beau. ‘I shall therefore maintain a vigilant
+guard.’
+
+‘Except leaving me free. Oof! I’ve been boxed up so long. I declare,
+Chloe, I feel like a best dress out for a holiday, and a bit afraid of
+spoiling. I’m a real child, more than I was when my duke married me. I
+seemed to go in and grow up again, after I was raised to fortune. And
+nobody to tell of it! Fancy that! For you can’t talk to old gentlemen
+about what’s going on in your heart.’
+
+‘How of young gentlemen?’ she was asked by the beau.
+
+And she replied, ‘They find it out.’
+
+‘Not if you do not assist them,’ said he.
+
+Duchess Susan let her eyelids and her underlie half drop, as she looked
+at him with the simple shyness of one of nature’s thoughts in her head
+at peep on the pastures of the world. The melting blue eyes and the
+cherry lip made an exceedingly quickening picture. ‘Now, I wonder if
+that is true?’ she transferred her slyness to speech.
+
+‘Beware the middle-aged!’ he exclaimed.
+
+She appealed to Chloe. ‘And I’m sure they’re the nicest.’
+
+Chloe agreed that they were.
+
+The duchess measured Chloe and the beau together, with a mind swift in
+apprehending all that it hungered for.
+
+She would have pursued the pleasing theme had she not been directed to
+gaze below upon the towers and roofs of the Wells, shining sleepily in a
+siesta of afternoon Summer sunlight.
+
+With a spread of her silken robe, she touched the edifice of her hair,
+murmuring to Chloe, ‘I can’t abide that powder. You shall see me walk
+in a hoop. I can. I’ve done it to slow music till my duke clapped hands.
+I’m nothing sitting to what I am on my feet. That’s because I haven’t
+got fine language yet. I shall. It seems to come last. So, there ‘s the
+place. And whereabouts do all the great people meet and prommy--?’
+
+‘They promenade where you see the trees, madam,’ said Chloe.
+
+‘And where is it where the ladies sit and eat jam tarts with whipped
+cream on ‘em, while the gentlemen stand and pay compliments?’
+
+Chloe said it was at a shop near the pump room.
+
+Duchess Susan looked out over the house-tops, beyond the dusty hedges.
+
+‘Oh, and that powder!’ she cried. ‘I hate to be out of the fashion and a
+spectacle. But I do love my own hair, and I have such a lot, and I like
+the colour, and so does my duke. Only, don’t let me be fingered at.
+If once I begin to blush before people, my courage is gone; my singing
+inside me is choked; and I’ve a real lark going on in me all day long,
+rain or sunshine--hush, all about love and amusement.’
+
+Chloe smiled, and Duchess Susan said, ‘Just like a bird, for I don’t
+know what it is.’
+
+She looked for Chloe to say that she did.
+
+At the moment a pair of mounted squires rode up, and the coach stopped,
+while Beau Beamish gave orders for the church bells to be set ringing,
+and the band to meet and precede his equipage at the head of the bath
+avenue: ‘in honour of the arrival of her Grace the Duchess of Dewlap.’
+
+He delivered these words loudly to his men, and turned an effulgent gaze
+upon the duchess, so that for a minute she was fascinated and did not
+consult her hearing; but presently she fell into an uneasiness; the
+signs increased, she bit her lip, and after breathing short once or
+twice, ‘Was it meaning me, Mr. Beamish?’ she said.
+
+‘You, madam, are the person whom we ‘delight to honour,’ he replied.
+
+‘Duchess of what?’ she screwed uneasy features to hear.
+
+‘Duchess of Dewlap,’ said he.
+
+‘It’s not my title, sir.’
+
+‘It is your title on my territory, madam.’
+
+She made her pretty nose and upper lip ugly with a sneer of ‘Dew--!
+And enter that town before all those people as Duchess of... Oh, no,
+I won’t; I just won’t! Call back those men now, please; now, if you
+please. Pray, Mr. Beamish! You’ll offend me, sir. I’m not going to be a
+mock. You’ll offend my duke, sir. He’d die rather than have my feelings
+hurt. Here’s all my pleasure spoilt. I won’t and I sha’n’t enter the
+town as duchess of that stupid name, so call ‘em back, call ‘em back
+this instant. I know who I am and what I am, and I know what’s due to
+me, I do.’
+
+Beau Beamish rejoined, ‘I too. Chloe will tell you I am lord here.’
+
+‘Then I’ll go home, I will. I won’t be laughed at for a great lady
+ninny. I’m a real lady of high rank, and such I’ll appear. What ‘s a
+Duchess of Dewlap? One might as well be Duchess of Cowstail, Duchess of
+Mopsend. And those people! But I won’t be that. I won’t be played with.
+I see them staring! No, I can make up my mind, and I beg you to call
+back your men, or I’ll go back home.’ She muttered, ‘Be made fun
+of--made a fool of!’
+
+‘Your Grace’s chariot is behind,’ said the beau.
+
+His despotic coolness provoked her to an outcry and weeping: she
+repeated, ‘Dewlap! Dewlap!’ in sobs; she shook her shoulders and hid her
+face.
+
+‘You are proud of your title, are you, madam?’ said he.
+
+‘I am.’ She came out of her hands to answer him proudly. ‘That I am!’
+she meant for a stronger affirmation.
+
+‘Then mark me,’ he said impressively; ‘I am your duke’s friend, and you
+are under my charge here. I am your guardian and you are my ward, and
+you can enter the town only on the condition of obedience to me. Now,
+mark me, madam; no one can rob you of your real name and title saving
+yourself. But you are entering a place where you will encounter a
+thousand temptations to tarnish, and haply forfeit it. Be warned do
+nothing that will.’
+
+‘Then I’m to have my own title?’ said she, clearing up.
+
+‘For the month of your visit you are Duchess of Dewlap.’
+
+‘I say I sha’n’t!’
+
+‘You shall.’
+
+‘Never, sir!’
+
+‘I command it.’
+
+She flung herself forward, with a wail, upon Chloe’s bosom. ‘Can’t you
+do something for me?’ she whimpered.
+
+‘It is impossible to move Mr. Beamish,’ Chloe said.
+
+Out of a pause, composed of sobs and sighs, the duchess let loose in a
+broken voice: ‘Then I ‘m sure I think--I think I’d rather have met--have
+met his skeleton!’
+
+Her sincerity was equal to wit.
+
+Beau Beamish shouted. He cordially applauded her, and in the genuine
+kindness of an admiration that surprised him, he permitted himself
+the liberty of taking and saluting her fingers. She fancied there was
+another chance for her, but he frowned at the mention of it.
+
+Upon these proceedings the exhilarating sound of the band was heard;
+simultaneously a festival peal of bells burst forth; and an admonishment
+of the necessity for concealing her chagrin and exhibiting both station
+and a countenance to the people, combined with the excitement of the
+new scenes and the marching music to banish the acuter sense of
+disappointment from Duchess Susan’s mind; so she very soon held herself
+erect, and wore a face open to every wonder, impressionable as the blue
+lake-surface, crisped here and there by fitful breezes against a level
+sun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+It was an axiom with Mr. Beamish, our first, if not our only
+philosophical beau and a gentleman of some thoughtfulness, that the
+social English require tyrannical government as much as the political
+are able to dispense with it: and this he explained by an exposition of
+the character of a race possessed of the eminent virtue of individual
+self-assertion, which causes them to insist on good elbowroom wherever
+they gather together. Society, however, not being tolerable where the
+smoothness of intercourse is disturbed by a perpetual punching of sides,
+the merits of the free citizen in them become their demerits when a
+fraternal circle is established, and they who have shown an example of
+civilization too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often to
+be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism in the other. They must
+therefore be reduced to accept laws not of their own making, and of an
+extreme rigidity.
+
+Here too is a further peril; for the gallant spirits distinguishing them
+in the state of independence may (he foresaw the melancholy experience
+of a later age) abandon them utterly in subjection, and the glorious
+boisterousness befitting the village green forsake them even in their
+haunts of liberal association, should they once be thoroughly tamed
+by authority. Our ‘merrie England’ will then be long-faced England, an
+England of fallen chaps, like a boar’s head, bearing for speech a lemon
+in the mouth: good to feast on, mayhap; not with!
+
+Mr. Beamish would actually seem to have foreseen the danger of a
+transition that he could watch over only in his time; and, as he said,
+‘I go, as I came, on a flash’; he had neither ancestry nor descendants:
+he was a genius, he knew himself a solitary, therefore, in spite of his
+efforts to create his like. Within his district he did effect something,
+enough to give him fame as one of the princely fathers of our domestic
+civilization, though we now appear to have lost by it more than formerly
+we gained. The chasing of the natural is ever fraught with dubious
+hazards. If it gallops back, according to the proverb, it will do so at
+the charge: commonly it gallops off, quite off; and then for any kind of
+animation our precarious dependence is upon brains: we have to live on
+our wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land, and cannot be
+remitted in entail.
+
+Rightly or wrongly (there are differences of opinion about it) Mr.
+Beamish repressed the chthonic natural with a rod of iron beneath his
+rule. The hoyden and the bumpkin had no peace until they had given
+public imitations of the lady and the gentleman; nor were the lady and
+the gentleman privileged to be what he called ‘free flags.’ He could be
+charitable to the passion, but he bellowed the very word itself (hauled
+up smoking from the brimstone lake) against them that pretended to be
+shamelessly guilty of the peccadilloes of gallantry. His famous accost
+of a lady threatening to sink, and already performing like a vessel in
+that situation: ‘So, madam, I hear you are preparing to enrol yourself
+in the very ancient order?’... (he named it) was a piece of insolence
+that involved him in some discord with the lady’s husband and ‘the
+rascal steward,’ as he chose to term the third party in these affairs:
+yet it is reputed to have saved the lady.
+
+Furthermore, he attacked the vulgarity of persons of quality, and he has
+told a fashionable dame who was indulging herself in a marked sneer of
+disdain, not improving to her features, ‘that he would be pleased
+to have her assurance it was her face she presented to mankind’: a
+thing--thanks perhaps to him chiefly--no longer possible of utterance.
+One of the sex asking him why he addressed his persecutions particularly
+to women: ‘Because I fight your battles,’ says he, ‘and I find you in
+the ranks of the enemy.’ He treated them as traitors.
+
+He was nevertheless well supported by a sex that compensates for dislike
+of its friend before a certain age by a cordial recognition of him when
+it has touched the period. A phalanx of great dames gave him the terrors
+of Olympus for all except the natively audacious, the truculent and the
+insufferably obtuse; and from the midst of them he launched decree and
+bolt to good effect: not, of course, without receiving return missiles,
+and not without subsequent question whether the work of that man was
+beneficial to the country, who indeed tamed the bumpkin squire and his
+brood, but at the cost of their animal spirits and their gift of speech;
+viz. by making petrifactions of them. In the surgical operation of
+tracheotomy, a successful treatment of the patient hangs, we believe, on
+the promptness and skill of the introduction of the artificial windpipe;
+and it may be that our unhappy countrymen when cut off from the source
+of their breath were not neatly handled; or else that there is a
+physical opposition in them to anything artificial, and it must be
+nature or nothing. The dispute shall be left where it stands.
+
+Now, to venture upon parading a beautiful young Duchess of Dewlap, with
+an odour of the shepherdess about her notwithstanding her acquired art
+of stepping conformably in a hoop, and to demand full homage of respect
+for a lady bearing such a title, who had the intoxicating attractions
+of the ruddy orchard apple on the tree next the roadside wall, when the
+owner is absent, was bold in Mr. Beamish, passing temerity; nor would
+even he have attempted it had he not been assured of the support of his
+phalanx of great ladies. They indeed, after being taken into the
+secret, had stipulated that first they must have an inspection of the
+transformed dairymaid; and the review was not unfavourable. Duchess
+Susan came out of it more scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied,
+and her tutored walking and really admirable stature helped her to
+appease, the critics of her sex; by whom her too readily blushful
+innocence was praised, with a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she
+was a monstrous fine toy for a duke’s second childhood, and should never
+have been let fly from his nursery. Her milliner was approved. The duke
+was a notorious connoisseur of female charms, and would see, of course,
+to the decorous adornment of her person by the best of modistes. Her
+smiling was pretty, her eyes were soft; she might turn out good, if well
+guarded for a time; but these merits of the woman are not those of the
+great lady, and her title was too strong a beam on her character to give
+it a fair chance with her critics. They one and all recommended
+powder for her hair and cheeks. That odour of the shepherdess could be
+exorcised by no other means, they declared. Her blushing was indecent.
+
+Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the
+blushes to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
+sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her
+loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer’s
+breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest
+her inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the
+insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we
+are to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly stifled,
+absolutely stifled upon occasion. The natural woman does not move a
+foot without striking earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the
+natural man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage. To be the light
+which leads, it is her business to don the misty vesture of an idea,
+that she may dwell as an idea in men’s minds, very dim, very powerful,
+but abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted to her on the
+subject, and she understood a little, and echoed hollow to the
+remainder, willing to show entire docility as far as her intelligence
+consented to be awake. She was in that stage of the dainty, faintly
+tinged innocence of the amorousness of themselves when beautiful young
+women who have not been caught for schooling in infancy deem it a
+defilement to be made to appear other than the blessed nature has made
+them, which has made them beautiful, and surely therefore deserves to be
+worshipped. The lectures of the great ladies and Chloe’s counsels failed
+to persuade her to use the powder puff-ball. Perhaps too, as timidity
+quitted her, she enjoyed her distinctiveness in their midst.
+
+But the distinctiveness of a Duchess of Dewlap with the hair and cheeks
+of our native fields, was fraught with troubles outrunning Mr. Beamish’s
+calculations. He had perceived that she would be attractive; he had
+not reckoned on the homogeneousness of her particular English charms.
+A beauty in red, white, and blue is our goddess Venus with the apple
+of Paris in her hand; and after two visits to the Pump Room, and one
+promenade in the walks about the Assembly House, she had as completely
+divided the ordinary guests of the Wells into male and female in opinion
+as her mother Nature had done in it sex. And the men would not be
+silenced; they had gazed on their divinest, and it was for the women
+to succumb to that unwholesome state, so full of thunder. Knights and
+squires, military and rural, threw up their allegiance right and left
+to devote themselves to this robust new vision, and in their peculiar
+manner, with a general View-halloo, and Yoicks, Tally-ho, and away we
+go, pelt ahead! Unexampled as it is in England for Beauty to kindle the
+ardours of the scent of the fox, Duchess Susan did more--she turned all
+her followers into hounds; they were madmen: within a very few days of
+her entrance bets raged about her, and there were brawls, jolly flings
+at her character in the form of lusty encomium, givings of the lie, and
+upon one occasion a knock-down blow in public, as though the place had
+never known the polishing touch of Mr. Beamish.
+
+He was thrown into great perplexity by that blow. Discountenancing the
+duel as much as he could, an affair of the sword was nevertheless more
+tolerable than the brutal fist: and of all men to be guilty of it, who
+would have anticipated the young Alonzo, Chloe’s quiet, modest lover!
+He it was. The case came before Mr. Beamish for his decision; he had
+to pronounce an impartial judgement, and for some time, during the
+examination of evidence, he suffered, as he assures us in his Memoirs, a
+royal agony. To have to strike with the glaive of Justice them whom they
+most esteem, is the greatest affliction known to kings. He would
+have done it: he deserved to reign. Happily the evidence against the
+gentleman who was tumbled, Mr. Ralph Shepster, excused Mr. Augustus
+Camwell, otherwise Alonzo, for dealing with him promptly to shut his
+mouth.
+
+This Shepster, a raw young squire, ‘reeking,’ Beau Beamish writes of
+him, ‘one half of the soil, and t’ other half of the town,’ had involved
+Chloe in his familiar remarks upon the Duchess of Dewlap; and the
+personal respect entertained by Mr. Beamish for Chloe so strongly
+approved Alonzo’s championship of her, that in giving judgement he
+laid stress on young Alonzo’s passion for Chloe, to prove at once the
+disinterestedness of the assailant, and the judicial nature of the
+sentence: which was, that Mr. Ralph Shepster should undergo banishment,
+and had the right to demand reparation. The latter part of this decree
+assisted in effecting the execution of the former. Shepster declined
+cold steel, calling it murder, and was effusive of nature’s logic on the
+subject.
+
+‘Because a man comes and knocks me down, I’m to go up to him and ask him
+to run me through!’
+
+His shake of the head signified that he was not such a noodle. Voluble
+and prolific of illustration, as is no one so much as a son of nature
+inspired to speak her words of wisdom, he defied the mandate, and
+refused himself satisfaction, until in the strangest manner possible
+flights of white feathers beset him, and he became a mark for
+persecution too trying for the friendship of his friends. He fled,
+repeating his tale, that he had seen ‘Beamish’s Duchess,’ and Chloe
+attending her, at an assignation in the South Grove, where a gentleman,
+unknown to the Wells, presented himself to the adventurous ladies, and
+they walked together--a tale ending with nods.
+
+Shepster’s banishment was one of those victories of justice upon which
+mankind might be congratulated if they left no commotion behind. But,
+as when a boy has been horsed before his comrades, dread may visit them,
+yet is there likewise devilry in the school; and everywhere over earth
+a summary punishment that does not sweep the place clear is likely to
+infect whom it leaves remaining. The great law-givers, Lycurgus, Draco,
+Solon, Beamish, sorrowfully acknowledge that they have had recourse
+to infernal agents, after they have thus purified their circle of an
+offender. Doctors confess to the same of their physic. The expelling
+agency has next to be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our
+spirits. Duchess Susan had now the incense of a victim to heighten her
+charms; like the treasure-laden Spanish galleon for whom, on her voyage
+home from South American waters, our enterprising light-craft privateers
+lay in wait, she had the double attraction of being desirable and an
+enemy. To watch above her conscientiously was a harassing business.
+
+Mr. Beamish sent for Chloe, and she came to him at once. Her look
+was curious; he studied it while they conversed. So looks one who is
+watching the sure flight of an arrow, or the happy combinations of an
+intrigue. Saying, ‘I am no inquisitor, child,’ he ventured upon two or
+three modest inquisitions with regard to her mistress. The title he
+had disguised Duchess Susan in, he confessed to rueing as the principal
+cause of the agitation of his principality. ‘She is courted,’ he said,
+‘less like a citadel waving a flag than a hostelry where the demand is
+for sitting room and a tankard! These be our manners. Yet, I must own,
+a Duchess of Dewlap is a provocation, and my exclusive desire to protect
+the name of my lord stands corrected by the perils environing his lady.
+She is other than I supposed her; she is, we will hope, an excellent
+good creature, but too attractive for most and drawbridge and the
+customary defences to be neglected.
+
+Chloe met his interrogatory with a ready report of the young duchess’s
+innocence and good nature that pacified Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘And you?’ said he.
+
+She smiled for answer.
+
+That smile was not the common smile; it was one of an eager
+exultingness, producing as he gazed the twitch of an inquisitive
+reflection of it on his lips. Such a smile bids us guess and quickens us
+to guess, warns us we burn and speeds our burning, and so, like an angel
+wafting us to some heaven-feasting promontory, lifts us out of ourselves
+to see in the universe of colour what the mouth has but pallid speech
+to tell. That is the very heart’s language; the years are in a look, as
+mount and vale of the dark land spring up in lightning.
+
+He checked himself: he scarce dared to say it.
+
+She nodded.
+
+‘You have seen the man, Chloe?’
+
+Her smiling broke up in the hard lines of an ecstasy neighbouring pain.
+‘He has come; he is here; he is faithful; he has not forgotten me. I was
+right. I knew! I knew!’
+
+‘Caseldy has come?’
+
+‘He has come. Do not ask. To have him! to see him! Mr. Beamish, he is
+here.’
+
+‘At last!’
+
+‘Cruel!’
+
+‘Well, Caseldy has come, then! But now, friend Chloe, you should be made
+aware that the man--’
+
+She stopped her ears. As she did so, Mr. Beamish observed a thick silken
+skein dangling from one hand. Part of it was plaited, and at the upper
+end there was a knot. It resembled the commencement of her manufactory
+of a whip: she swayed it to and fro, allowing him to catch and lift the
+threads on his fingers for the purpose of examining her work. There was
+no special compliment to pay, so he dropped it without remark.
+
+Their faces had expressed her wish to hear nothing from him of Caseldy
+and his submission to say nothing. Her happiness was too big; she
+appeared to beg to lie down with it on her bosom, in the manner of an
+outworn, young mother who has now first received her infant in her arms
+from the nurse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Humouring Chloe with his usual considerateness, Mr. Beamish forbore to
+cast a shadow on her new-born joy, and even within himself to doubt the
+security of its foundation. Caseldy’s return to the Wells was at least
+some assurance of his constancy, seeing that here they appointed to
+meet when he and Chloe last parted. All might be well, though it was
+unexplained why he had not presented himself earlier. To the lightest
+inquiry Chloe’s reply was a shiver of happiness.
+
+Moreover, Mr. Beamish calculated that Caseldy would be a serviceable
+ally in commanding a proper respect for her Grace the Duchess of Dewlap.
+So he betook himself cheerfully to Caseldy’s lodgings to deliver a
+message of welcome, meeting, on his way thither, Mr. Augustus Camwell,
+with whom he had a short conversation, greatly to his admiration of the
+enamoured young gentleman’s goodness and self-compression in speaking of
+Caseldy and Chloe’s better fortune. Mr. Camwell seemed hurried.
+
+Caseldy was not at home, and Mr. Beamish proceeded to the lodgings of
+the duchess. Chloe had found her absent. The two consulted. Mr. Beamish
+put on a serious air, until Chloe mentioned the pastrycook’s shop, for
+Duchess Susan had a sweet tooth; she loved a visit to the pastrycook’s,
+whose jam tarts were dearer to her than his more famous hot mutton pies.
+The pastry cook informed Mr. Beamish that her Grace had been in
+his shop, earlier than usual, as it happened, and accompanied by a
+foreign-looking gentleman wearing moustachois. Her Grace, the pastrycook
+said, had partaken of several tarts, in common with the gentleman, who
+complimented him upon his excelling the Continental confectioner. Mr.
+Beamish glanced at Chloe. He pursued his researches down at the Pump
+Room, while she looked round the ladies’ coffee house. Encountering
+again, they walked back to the duchess’s lodgings, where a band stood
+playing in the road, by order of her Grace; but the duchess was away,
+and had not been seen since her morning’s departure.
+
+‘What sort of character would you give mistress Susan of Dewlap, from
+your personal acquaintance with it?’ said Mr. Beamish to Chloe, as they
+stepped from the door.
+
+Chloe mused and said, ‘I would add “good” to the unkindest comparison
+you could find for her.’
+
+‘But accepting the comparison!’ Mr. Beamish nodded, and revolved upon
+the circumstance of their being very much in nature’s hands with Duchess
+Susan, of whom it might be said that her character was good, yet all
+the more alive to the temptations besetting the Spring season. He allied
+Chloe’s adjective to a number of epithets equally applicable to nature
+and to women, according to current ideas, concluding: ‘Count, they call
+your Caseldy at his lodgings. “The Count he is out for an airing.” He is
+counted out. Ah! you will make him drop that “Count” when he takes you
+from here.’
+
+‘Do not speak of the time beyond the month,’ said Chloe, so urgently on
+a rapid breath as to cause Mr. Beamish to cast an inquiring look at her.
+
+She answered it, ‘Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask
+for?’
+
+The beau clapped his elbows complacently to his sides in philosophical
+concord with her sentiment.
+
+In the afternoon, on the parade, they were joined by Mr. Camwell, among
+groups of fashionable ladies and their escorts, pacing serenely, by
+medical prescription, for an appetite. As he did not comment on the
+absence of the duchess, Mr. Beamish alluded to it; whereupon he was
+informed that she was about the meadows, and had been there for some
+hours.
+
+‘Not unguarded,’ he replied to Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘Aha!’ quoth the latter; ‘we have an Argus!’ and as the duchess was not
+on the heights, and the sun’s rays were mild in cloud, he agreed to
+his young friend’s proposal that they should advance to meet her. Chloe
+walked with them, but her face was disdainful; at the stiles she gave
+her hand to Mr. Beamish; she did not address a word to Mr. Camwell,
+and he knew the reason. Nevertheless he maintained his air of soldierly
+resignation to the performance of duty, and held his head like a
+gentleman unable to conceive the ignominy of having played spy. Chloe
+shrank from him.
+
+Duchess Susan was distinguished coming across a broad uncut meadow,
+tirra-lirraing beneath a lark, Caseldy in attendance on her. She stopped
+short and spoke to him; then came forward, crying ingenuously. ‘Oh, Mr.
+Beamish, isn’t this just what you wanted me to do?’
+
+‘No, madam,’ said he, ‘you had my injunctions to the contrary.’
+
+‘La!’ she exclaimed, ‘I thought I was to run about in the fields now and
+then to preserve my simplicity. I know I was told so, and who told me!’
+
+Mr. Beamish bowed effusively to the introduction of Caseldy, whose
+fingers he touched in sign of the renewal of acquaintance, and with a
+laugh addressed the duchess:
+
+‘Madam, you remind me of a tale of my infancy. I had a juvenile comrade
+of the tenderest age, by name Tommy Plumston, and he enjoyed the
+privilege of intimacy with a component urchin yclept Jimmy Clungeon,
+with which adventurous roamer, in defiance of his mother’s interdict
+against his leaving the house for a minute during her absence from
+home, he departed on a tour of the district, resulting, perhaps as a
+consequence of its completeness, in this, that at a distance computed at
+four miles from the maternal mansion, he perceived his beloved mama with
+sufficient clearness to feel sure that she likewise had seen him.
+Tommy consulted with Jimmy, and then he sprang forward on a run to his
+frowning mama, and delivered himself in these artless words, which I
+repeat as they were uttered, to give you the flavour of the innocent
+babe: he said, “I frink I frought I hear you call me, ma! and Jimmy
+Clungeon, he frought he frink so too!” So, you see, the pair of them
+were under the impression that they were doing right. There is a
+delicate distinction in the tenses of each frinking where the other
+frought, enough in itself to stamp sincerity upon the statement.’
+
+Caseldy said, ‘The veracity of a boy possessing a friend named Clungeon
+is beyond contest.’
+
+Duchess Susan opened her eyes. ‘Four miles from home! And what did his
+mother do to him?’
+
+‘Tommy’s mama,’ said Mr. Beamish, and with the resplendent licence of
+the period which continued still upon tolerable terms with nature under
+the compromise of decorous ‘Oh-fie!’ flatly declared the thing she did.
+
+‘I fancy, sir, that I caught sight of your figure on the hill yonder
+about an hour or so earlier,’ said Caseldy to Mr. Camwell.
+
+‘If it was at the time when you were issuing from that wood, sir, your
+surmise is correct,’ said the young gentleman.
+
+‘You are long-sighted, sir!’
+
+‘I am, sir.’
+
+‘And so am I.’
+
+‘And I,’ said Chloe.
+
+‘Our Chloe will distinguish you accurately at a mile, and has done it,’
+observed Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘One guesses tiptoe on a suspicion, and if one is wrong it passes, and
+if one is right it is a miracle,’ she said, and raised her voice on a
+song to quit the subject.
+
+‘Ay, ay, Chloe; so then you had a suspicion, you rogue, the day we had
+the pleasure of meeting the duchess, had you?’ Mr. Beamish persisted.
+
+Duchess Susan interposed. ‘Such a pretty song! and you to stop her,
+sir!’
+
+Caseldy took up the air.
+
+‘Oh, you two together!’ she cried. ‘I do love hearing music in the
+fields; it is heavenly. Bands in the town and voices in the green
+fields, I say! Couldn’t you join Chloe, Mr.... Count, sir, before we
+come among the people, here where it ‘s all so nice and still. Music!
+and my heart does begin so to pit-a-pat. Do you sing, Mr. Alonzo?’
+
+‘Poorly,’ the young gentleman replied.
+
+‘But the Count can sing, and Chloe’s a real angel when she sings;
+and won’t you, dear?’ she implored Chloe, to whom Caseldy addressed a
+prelude with a bow and a flourish of the hand.
+
+Chloe’s voice flew forth. Caseldy’s rich masculine matched it. The song
+was gay; he snapped his finger at intervals in foreign style, singing
+big-chested, with full notes and a fine abandonment, and the quickest
+susceptibility to his fair companion’s cunning modulations, and an eye
+for Duchess Susan’s rapture.
+
+Mr. Beamish and Mr. Camwell applauded them.
+
+‘I never can tell what to say when I’m brimming’; the duchess let fall
+a sigh. ‘And he can play the flute, Mr. Beamish. He promised me he
+would go into the orchestra and play a bit at one of your nice evening
+delicious concerts, and that will be nice--Oh!’
+
+‘He promised you, madam, did he so?’ said the beau. ‘Was it on your way
+to the Wells that he promised you?’
+
+‘On my way to the Wells!’ she exclaimed softly. ‘Why, how could anybody
+promise me a thing before ever he saw me? I call that a strange thing to
+ask a person. No, to-day, while we were promenading; and I should hear
+him sing, he said. He does admire his Chloe so. Why, no wonder, is it,
+now? She can do everything; knit, sew, sing, dance--and talk! She’s
+never uneasy for a word. She makes whole scenes of things go round you,
+like a picture peep-show, I tell her. And always cheerful. She hasn’t
+a minute of grumps; and I’m sometimes a dish of stale milk fit only for
+pigs.
+
+With your late hours here, I’m sure I want tickling in the morning, and
+Chloe carols me one of her songs, and I say, “There’s my bird!”’
+
+Mr. Beamish added, ‘And you will remember she has a heart.’
+
+‘I should think so!’ said the duchess.
+
+‘A heart, madam!’
+
+‘Why, what else?’
+
+Nothing other, the beau, by his aspect, was constrained to admit.
+
+He appeared puzzled by this daughter of nature in a coronet; and more on
+her remarking, ‘You know about her heart, Mr. Beamish.’
+
+He acquiesced, for of course he knew of her life-long devotion to
+Caseldy; but there was archness in her tone. However, he did not expect
+a woman of her education to have the tone perfectly concordant with
+the circumstances. Speaking tentatively of Caseldy’s handsome face and
+figure, he was pleased to hear the duchess say, ‘So I tell Chloe.’
+
+‘Well,’ said he, ‘we must consider them united; they are one.’
+
+Duchess Susan replied, ‘That’s what I tell him; she will do anything you
+wish.’
+
+He repeated these words with an interjection, and decided in his mind
+that they were merely silly. She was a real shepherdess by birth and
+nature, requiring a strong guard over her attractions on account of her
+simplicity; such was his reading of the problem; he had conceived it at
+the first sight of her, and always recurred to it under the influence
+of her artless eyes, though his theories upon men and women were astute,
+and that cavalier perceived by long-sighted Chloe at Duchess Susan’s
+coach window perturbed him at whiles. Habitually to be anticipating the
+simpleton in a particular person is the sure way of being sometimes
+the dupe, as he would not have been the last to warn a neophyte; but
+abstract wisdom is in need of an unappeased suspicion of much keenness
+of edge, if we would have it alive to cope with artless eyes and our
+prepossessed fancy of their artlessness.
+
+‘You talk of Chloe to him?’ he said.
+
+She answered. ‘Yes, that I do. And he does love her! I like to hear him.
+He is one of the gentlemen who don’t make me feel timid with them.’
+
+She received a short lecture on the virtues of timidity in preserving
+the sex from danger; after which, considering that the lady who does not
+feel timid with a particular cavalier has had no sentiment awakened, he
+relinquished his place to Mr. Camwell, and proceeded to administer the
+probe to Caseldy.
+
+That gentleman was communicatively candid. Chloe had left him, and he
+related how, summoned home to England and compelled to settle a dispute
+threatening a lawsuit, he had regretfully to abstain from visiting
+the Wells for a season, not because of any fear of the attractions of
+play--he had subdued the frailty of the desire to play--but because
+he deemed it due to his Chloe to bring her an untroubled face, and he
+wished first to be the better of the serious annoyances besetting him.
+For some similar reason he had not written; he wished to feast on her
+surprise. ‘And I had my reward,’ he said, as if he had been the person
+principally to suffer through that abstinence. ‘I found--I may say it to
+you, Mr. Beamish love in her eyes. Divine by nature, she is one of the
+immortals, both in appearance and in steadfastness.’
+
+They referred to Duchess Susan. Caseldy reluctantly owned that it would
+be an unkindness to remove Chloe from attendance on her during the short
+remaining term of her stay at the Wells; and so he had not proposed it,
+he said, for the duchess was a child, an innocent, not stupid by any
+means; but, of course, her transplanting from an inferior to an exalted
+position put her under disadvantages.
+
+Mr. Beamish spoke of the difficulties of his post as guardian, and also
+of the strange cavalier seen at her carriage window by Chloe.
+
+Caseldy smiled and said, ‘If there was one--and Chloe is rather
+long--sighted--we can hardly expect her to confess it.’
+
+‘Why not, sir, if she be this piece of innocence?’ Mr. Beamish was led
+to inquire.
+
+‘She fears you, sir,’ Caseldy answered. ‘You have inspired her with an
+extraordinary fear of you.’
+
+‘I have?’ said the beau: it had been his endeavour to inspire it, and he
+swelled somewhat, rather with relief at the thought of his possessing a
+power to control his delicate charge, than with our vanity; yet would
+it be audacious to say that there was not a dose of the latter. He was a
+very human man; and he had, as we have seen, his ideas of the effect of
+the impression of fear upon the hearts of women. Something, in any case,
+caused him to forget the cavalier.
+
+They were drawn to the three preceding them, by a lively dissension
+between Chloe and Mr. Camwell.
+
+Duchess Susan explained it in her blunt style: ‘She wants him to go away
+home, and he says he will, if she’ll give him that double skein of silk
+she swings about, and she says she won’t, let him ask as long as he
+pleases; so he says he sha’n’t go, and I’m sure I don’t see why he
+should; and she says he may stay, but he sha’n’t have her necklace, she
+calls it. So Mr. Camwell snatches, and Chloe fires up. Gracious, can’t
+she frown!--at him. She never frowns at anybody but him.’
+
+Caseldy attempted persuasion on Mr. Camwell’s behalf. With his mouth at
+Chloe’s ear, he said, ‘Give it; let the poor fellow have his memento;
+despatch him with it.’
+
+‘I can hear! and that is really kind,’ exclaimed Duchess Susan.
+
+‘Rather a missy-missy schoolgirl sort of necklace,’ Mr. Beamish
+observed; ‘but he might have it, without the dismissal, for I cannot
+consent to lose Alonzo. No, madam,’ he nodded at the duchess.
+
+Caseldy continued his whisper: ‘You can’t think of wearing a thing like
+that about your neck?’
+
+‘Indeed,’ said Chloe, ‘I think of it.’
+
+‘Why, what fashion have you over here?’
+
+‘It is not yet a fashion,’ she said.
+
+‘A silken circlet will not well become any precious pendant that I know
+of.’
+
+‘A bag of dust is not a very precious pendant,’ she said.
+
+‘Oh, a memento mori!’ cried he.
+
+And she answered, ‘Yes.’
+
+He rallied her for her superstition, pursuing, ‘Surely, my love, ‘tis a
+cheap riddance of a pestilent, intrusive jaloux. Whip it into his hands
+for a mittimus.’
+
+‘Does his presence distress you?’ she asked.
+
+‘I will own that to be always having the fellow dogging us, with his
+dejected leer, is not agreeable. He watches us now, because my lips are
+close by your cheek. He should be absent; he is one too many. Speed him
+on his voyage with the souvenir he asks for.’
+
+‘I keep it for a journey of my own, which I may have to take,’ said
+Chloe.
+
+‘With me?’
+
+‘You will follow; you cannot help following me, Caseldy.’
+
+He speculated on her front. She was tenderly smiling. ‘You are happy,
+Chloe?’
+
+‘I have never known such happiness,’ she said. The brilliancy of her
+eyes confirmed it.
+
+He glanced over at Duchess Susan, who was like a sunflower in the sun.
+His glance lingered a moment. Her abundant and glowing young charms were
+the richest fascination an eye like his could dwell on. ‘That is right,’
+said he. ‘We will be perfectly happy till the month ends. And after it?
+But get us rid of Monsieur le Jeune; toss him that trifle; I spare him
+that. ‘Twill be bliss to him, at the cost of a bit of silk thread to us.
+Besides, if we keep him to cure him of his passion here, might it not
+be--these boys veer suddenly, like the winds of Albion, from one fair
+object to t’ other--at the cost of the precious and simple lady you
+are guarding? I merely hint. These two affect one another, as though
+it could be. She speaks of him. It shall be as you please, but a trifle
+like that, my Chloe, to be rid of a green eye!’
+
+‘You much wish him gone?’ she said.
+
+He shrugged. ‘The fellow is in our way.’
+
+‘You think him a little perilous for my innocent lady?’
+
+‘Candidly, I do.’
+
+She stretched the half-plaited silken rope in her two hands to try the
+strength of it, made a second knot, and consigned it to her pocket.
+
+At once she wore her liveliest playfellow air, in which character no one
+was so enchanting as Chloe could be, for she became the comrade of men
+without forfeit of her station among sage sweet ladies, and was like a
+well-mannered sparkling boy, to whom his admiring seniors have given the
+lead in sallies, whims, and fights; but pleasanter than a boy, the soft
+hues of her sex toned her frolic spirit; she seemed her sex’s deputy, to
+tell the coarser where they could meet, as on a bridge above the torrent
+separating them, gaily for interchange of the best of either, unfired
+and untempted by fire, yet with all the elements which make fire burn to
+animate their hearts.
+
+‘Lucky the man who wins for himself that life-long cordial!’ Mr. Beamish
+said to Duchess Susan.
+
+She had small comprehension of metaphorical phrases, but she was quick
+at reading faces; and comparing the enthusiasm on the face of the beau
+with Caseldy’s look of troubled wonderment and regret, she pitied
+the lover conscious of not having the larger share of his mistress’s
+affections. When presently he looked at her, the tender-hearted woman
+could have cried for very compassion, so sensible did he show himself of
+Chloe’s preference of the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+That evening Duchess Susan played at the Pharaoh table and lost eight
+hundred pounds, through desperation at the loss of twenty. After
+encouraging her to proceed to this extremity, Caseldy checked her. He
+was conducting her out of the Play room when a couple of young squires
+of the Shepster order, and primed with wine, intercepted her to present
+their condolences, which they performed with exaggerated gestures,
+intended for broad mimicry of the courtliness imported from the
+Continent, and a very dulcet harping on the popular variations of her
+Christian name, not forgetting her singular title, ‘my lovely, lovely
+Dewlap!’
+
+She was excited and stunned by her immediate experience in the transfer
+of money, and she said, ‘I ‘m sure I don’t know what you want.’
+
+‘Yes!’ cried they, striking their bosoms as guitars, and attempting the
+posture of the thrummer on the instrument; ‘she knows. She does know.
+Handsome Susie knows what we want.’ And one ejaculated, mellifluously,
+‘Oh!’ and the other ‘Ah!’ in flagrant derision of the foreign ways they
+produced in boorish burlesque--a self-consolatory and a common trick of
+the boor.
+
+Caseldy was behind. He pushed forward and bowed to them. ‘Sirs, will you
+mention to me what you want?’
+
+He said it with a look that meant steel. It cooled them sufficiently to
+let him place the duchess under the protectorship of Mr. Beamish, then
+entering from another room with Chloe; whereupon the pair of rustic
+bucks retired to reinvigorate their valiant blood.
+
+Mr. Beamish had seen that there was cause for gratitude to Caseldy, to
+whom he said, ‘She has lost?’ and he seemed satisfied on hearing the
+amount of the loss, and commissioned Caseldy to escort the ladies to
+their lodgings at once, observing, ‘Adieu, Count!’
+
+‘You will find my foreign title of use to you here, after a bout or
+two,’ was the reply.
+
+‘No bouts, if possibly to be avoided; though I perceive how the flavour
+of your countship may spread a wholesome alarm among our rurals, who
+will readily have at you with fists, but relish not the tricky cold
+weapon.’
+
+Mr. Beamish haughtily bowed the duchess away.
+
+Caseldy seized the opportunity while handing her into her sedan to say,
+‘We will try the fortune-teller for a lucky day to have our revenge.’
+
+She answered: ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about playing again ever; I’m nigh
+on a clean pocket, and never knew such a sinful place as this. I feel
+I’ve tumbled into a ditch. And there’s Mr. Beamish, all top when he bows
+to me. You’re keeping Chloe waiting, sir.’
+
+‘Where was she while we were at the table?’
+
+‘Sure she was with Mr. Beamish.’
+
+‘Ah!’ he groaned.
+
+‘The poor soul is in despair over her losses to-night,’ he turned from
+the boxed-up duchess to remark to Chloe. ‘Give her a comfortable cry and
+a few moral maxims.’
+
+‘I will,’ she said. ‘You love me, Caseldy?’
+
+‘Love you? I? Your own? What assurance would you have?’
+
+‘None, dear friend.’
+
+Here was a woman easily deceived.
+
+In the hearts of certain men, owing to an intellectual contempt of easy
+dupes, compunction in deceiving is diminished by the lightness of their
+task; and that soft confidence which will often, if but passingly, bid
+betrayers reconsider the charms of the fair soul they are abandoning,
+commends these armoured knights to pursue with redoubled earnest the
+fruitful ways of treachery. Their feelings are warm for their prey,
+moreover; and choosing to judge their victim by the present warmth of
+their feelings, they can at will be hurt, even to being scandalized,
+by a coldness that does not waken one suspicion of them. Jealousy would
+have a chance of arresting, for it is not impossible to tease them back
+to avowed allegiance; but sheer indifference also has a stronger hold on
+them than a, dull, blind trustfulness. They hate the burden it imposes;
+the blind aspect is only touching enough to remind them of the burden,
+and they hate if for that, and for the enormous presumption of the
+belief that they are everlastingly bound to such an imbecile. She walks
+about with her eyes shut, expecting not to stumble, and when she does,
+am I to blame? The injured man asks it in the course of his reasoning.
+
+He recurs to his victim’s merits, but only compassionately, and the
+compassion is chilled by the thought that she may in the end start
+across his path to thwart him. Thereat he is drawn to think of the prize
+she may rob him of; and when one woman is an obstacle, the other shines
+desirable as life beyond death; he must have her; he sees her in the
+hue of his desire for her, and the obstacle in that of his repulsion.
+Cruelty is no more than the man’s effort to win the wished object.
+
+She should not leave it to his imagination to conceive that in the end
+the blind may awaken to thwart him. Better for her to cast him hence,
+or let him know that she will do battle to keep him. But the pride of a
+love that has hardened in the faithfulness of love cannot always be wise
+on trial.
+
+Caseldy walked considerably in the rear of the couple of chairs. He saw
+on his way what was coming. His two young squires were posted at Duchess
+Susan’s door when she arrived, and he received a blow from one of them
+in clearing a way for her. She plucked at his hand. ‘Have they hurt
+you?’ she asked.
+
+‘Think of me to-night thanking them and heaven for this, my darling,’ he
+replied, with a pressure that lit the flying moment to kindle the after
+hours.
+
+Chloe had taken help of one of her bearers to jump out. She stretched
+a finger at the unruly intruders, crying sternly, ‘There is blood on
+you--come not nigh me!’ The loftiest harangue would not have been so
+cunning to touch their wits. They stared at one another in the clear
+moonlight. Which of them had blood on him? As they had not been for
+blood, but for rough fun, and something to boast of next day, they
+gesticulated according to the first instructions of the dancing master,
+by way of gallantry, and were out of Caseldy’s path when he placed
+himself at his liege lady’s service. ‘Take no notice of them, dear,’ she
+said.
+
+‘No, no,’ said he; and ‘What is it?’ and his hoarse accent and shaking
+clasp of her arm sickened her to the sensation of approaching death.
+
+Upstairs Duchess Susan made a show of embracing her. Both were
+trembling. The duchess ascribed her condition to those dreadful men.
+‘What makes them be at me so?’ she said.
+
+And Chloe said, ‘Because you are beautiful.’
+
+‘Am I?’
+
+‘You are.’
+
+‘I am?’
+
+‘Very beautiful; young and beautiful; beautiful in the bud. You will
+learn to excuse them, madam.’
+
+‘But, Chloe--’ The duchess shut her mouth. Out of a languid reverie, she
+sighed: ‘I suppose I must be! My duke--oh, don’t talk of him. Dear man!
+he’s in bed and fast asleep long before this. I wonder how he came to
+let me come here.
+
+I did bother him, I know. Am I very, very beautiful, Chloe, so that men
+can’t help themselves?’
+
+‘Very, madam.’
+
+‘There, good-night. I want to be in bed, and I can’t kiss you because
+you keep calling me madam, and freeze me to icicles; but I do love you,
+Chloe.’
+
+‘I am sure you do.’
+
+‘I’m quite certain I do. I know I never mean harm. But how are we women
+expected to behave, then? Oh, I’m unhappy, I am.’
+
+‘You must abstain from playing.’
+
+‘It’s that! I’ve lost my money--I forgot. And I shall have to confess it
+to my duke, though he warned me. Old men hold their fingers up--so!
+One finger: and you never forget the sight of it, never. It’s a round
+finger, like the handle of a jug, and won’t point at you when they’re
+lecturing, and the skin’s like an old coat on gaffer’s shoulders--or,
+Chloe! just like, when you look at the nail, a rumpled counterpane up to
+the face of a corpse. I declare, it’s just like! I feel as if I didn’t
+a bit mind talking of corpses tonight. And my money’s gone, and I don’t
+much mind. I’m a wild girl again, handsomer than when that----he is
+a dear, kind, good old nobleman, with his funny old finger: “Susan!
+Susan!” I’m no worse than others. Everybody plays here; everybody
+superior. Why, you have played, Chloe.’
+
+‘Never!’
+
+‘I’ve heard you say you played once, and a bigger stake it was, you
+said, than anybody ever did play.’
+
+‘Not money.’
+
+‘What then?’
+
+‘My life.’
+
+‘Goodness--yes! I understand. I understand everything to-night-men too.
+So you did!--They’re not so shamefully wicked, Chloe. Because I can’t
+see the wrong of human nature--if we’re discreet, I mean. Now and then a
+country dance and a game, and home to bed and dreams. There’s no harm
+in that, I vow. And that’s why you stayed at this place. You like it,
+Chloe?’
+
+‘I am used to it.’
+
+‘But when you’re married to Count Caseldy you’ll go?’
+
+‘Yes, then.’
+
+She uttered it so joylessly that Duchess Susan added, with intense
+affectionateness, ‘You’re not obliged to marry him, dear Chloe.’
+
+‘Nor he me, madam.’
+
+The duchess caught at her impulsively to kiss her, and said she would
+undress herself, as she wished to be alone.
+
+From that night she was a creature inflamed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The total disappearance of the pair of heroes who had been the latest
+in the conspiracy to vex his delicate charge, gave Mr. Beamish a high
+opinion of Caseldy as an assistant in such an office as he held. They
+had gone, and nothing more was heard of them. Caseldy confined his
+observations on the subject to the remark that he had employed the best
+means to be rid of that kind of worthies; and whether their souls had
+fled, or only their bodies, was unknown. But the duchess had quiet
+promenades with Caseldy to guard her, while Mr. Beamish counted the
+remaining days of her visit with the impatience of a man having cause to
+cast eye on a clock. For Duchess Susan was not very manageable now; she
+had fits of insurgency, and plainly said that her time was short, and
+she meant to do as she liked, go where she liked, play when she liked,
+and be an independent woman--if she was so soon to be taken away and
+boxed in a castle that was only a bigger sedan.
+
+Caseldy protested he was as helpless as the beau. He described the
+annoyance of his incessant running about at her heels in all directions
+amusingly, and suggested that she must be beating the district to
+recover her ‘strange cavalier,’ of whom, or of one that had ridden
+beside her carriage half a day on her journey to the Wells, he said she
+had dropped a sort of hint. He complained of the impossibility of his
+getting an hour in privacy with his Chloe.
+
+‘And I, accustomed to consult with her, see too little of her,’ said Mr.
+Beamish. ‘I shall presently be seeing nothing, and already I am sensible
+of my loss.’
+
+He represented his case to Duchess Susan:--that she was for ever driving
+out long distances and taking Chloe from him, when his occupation
+precluded his accompanying them; and as Chloe soon was to be lost to him
+for good, he deeply felt her absence.
+
+The duchess flung him enigmatical rejoinders: ‘You can change all that,
+Mr. Beamish, if you like, and you know you can. Oh, yes, you can. But
+you like being a butterfly, and when you’ve made ladies pale you’re
+happy: and there they’re to stick and wither for you. Never!--I’ve that
+pride. I may be worried, but I’ll never sink to green and melancholy for
+a man.’
+
+She bridled at herself in a mirror, wherein not a sign of paleness was
+reflected.
+
+Mr. Beamish meditated, and he thought it prudent to speak to Caseldy
+manfully of her childish suspicions, lest she should perchance in like
+manner perturb the lover’s mind.
+
+‘Oh, make your mind easy, my dear sir, as far as I am concerned,’ said
+Caseldy. ‘But, to tell you the truth, I think I can interpret her creamy
+ladyship’s innuendos a little differently and quite as clearly. For
+my part, I prefer the pale to the blowsy, and I stake my right hand
+on Chloe’s fidelity. Whatever harm I may have the senseless
+cruelty--misfortune, I may rather call it--to do that heavenly-minded
+woman in our days to come, none shall say of me that I was ever for an
+instant guilty of the baseness of doubting her purity and constancy.
+And, sir, I will add that I could perfectly rely also on your honour.’
+
+Mr. Beamish bowed. ‘You do but do me justice. But, say, what
+interpretation?’
+
+‘She began by fearing you,’ said Caseldy, creating a stare that was
+followed by a frown. ‘She fancies you neglect her. Perhaps she has a
+woman’s suspicion that you do it to try her.’
+
+Mr. Beamish frenetically cited his many occupations. ‘How can I be ever
+dancing attendance on her?’ Then he said, ‘Pooh,’ and tenderly fingered
+the ruffles of his wrist. ‘Tush, tush,’ said he, ‘no, no: though if
+it came to a struggle between us, I might in the interests of my old
+friend, her lord, whom I have reasons for esteeming, interpose an
+influence that would make the exercise of my authority agreeable.
+Hitherto I have seen no actual need of it, and I watch keenly. Her eye
+has been on Colonel Poltermore once or twice his on her. The woman is
+a rose in June, sir, and I forgive the whole world for looking--and for
+longing too. But I have observed nothing serious.’
+
+‘He is of our party to the beacon-head to-morrow,’ said Caseldy. ‘She
+insisted that she would have him; and at least it will grant me furlough
+for an hour.’
+
+‘Do me the service to report to me,’ said Mr. Beamish.
+
+In this fashion he engaged Caseldy to supply him with inventions, and
+prepared himself to swallow them. It was Poltermore and Poltermore, the
+Colonel here, the Colonel there until the chase grew so hot that Mr.
+Beamish could no longer listen to young Mr. Camwell’s fatiguing drone
+upon his one theme of the double-dealing of Chloe’s betrothed. He became
+of her way of thinking, and treated the young gentleman almost as coldly
+as she. In time he was ready to guess of his own acuteness that the
+‘strange cavalier’ could have been no other than Colonel Poltermore.
+When Caseldy hinted it, Mr. Beamish said, ‘I have marked him.’ He added,
+in highly self-satisfied style, ‘With all your foreign training, my
+friend, you will learn that we English are not so far behind you in the
+art of unravelling an intrigue in the dark.’ To which Caseldy replied,
+that the Continental world had little to teach Mr. Beamish.
+
+Poor Colonel Poltermore, as he came to be called, was clearly a victim
+of the sudden affability of Duchess Susan. The transformation of a stiff
+military officer into a nimble Puck, a runner of errands and a sprightly
+attendant, could not pass without notice. The first effect of her
+discriminating condescension on this unfortunate gentleman was to make
+him the champion of her claims to breeding. She had it by nature, she
+was Nature’s great lady, he would protest to the noble dames of the
+circle he moved in; and they admitted that she was different in every
+way from a bourgeoise elevated by marriage to lofty rank: she was not
+vulgar. But they remained doubtful of the perfect simplicity of a young
+woman who worked such changes in men as to render one of the famous
+conquerors of the day her agitated humble servant. By rapid degrees the
+Colonel had fallen to that. When not by her side, he was ever marching
+with sharp strides, hurrying through rooms and down alleys and groves
+until he had discovered and attached himself to her skirts. And,
+curiously, the object of his jealousy was the devoted Alonzo! Mr.
+Beamish laughed when he heard of it. The lady’s excitement and giddy
+mien, however, accused Poltermore of a stage of success requiring to be
+combated immediately. There was mention of Duchess Susan’s mighty wish
+to pay a visit to the popular fortune-teller of the hut on the heath,
+and Mr. Beamish put his veto on the expedition. She had obeyed him by
+abstaining from play of late, so he fully expected, that his interdict
+would be obeyed; and besides the fortune-teller was a rogue of a sham
+astrologer known to have foretold to certain tender ladies things
+they were only too desirous to imagine predestined by an extraordinary
+indication of the course of planets through the zodiac, thus causing
+them to sin by the example of celestial conjunctions--a piece of wanton
+impiety. The beau took high ground in his objections to the adventure.
+Nevertheless, Duchess Susan did go. She drove to the heath at an early
+hour of the morning, attended by Chloe, Colonel Poltermore, and Caseldy.
+They subsequently breakfasted at an inn where gipsy repasts were
+occasionally served to the fashion, and they were back at the wells as
+soon as the world was abroad. Their surprise then was prodigious when
+Mr. Beamish, accosting them full in assembly, inquired whether they
+were satisfied with the report of their fortunes, and yet more when he
+positively proved himself acquainted with the fortunes which had been
+recounted to each of them in privacy.
+
+‘You, Colonel Poltermore, are to be in luck’s way up to the tenth
+milestone,--where your chariot will overset and you will be lamed for
+life.’
+
+‘Not quite so bad,’ said the Colonel cheerfully, he having been informed
+of much better.
+
+‘And you, Count Caseldy, are to have it all your own way with good
+luck, after committing a deed of slaughter, with the solitary penalty of
+undergoing a visit every night from the corpse.’
+
+‘Ghost,’ Caseldy smilingly corrected him.
+
+‘And Chloe would not have her fortune told, because she knew it!’ Mr.
+Beamish cast a paternal glance at her. ‘And you, madam,’ he bent his
+brows on the duchess, ‘received the communication that “All for Love”
+ will sink you as it raised you, put you down as it took you up, furnish
+the feast to the raven gentleman which belongs of right to the golden
+eagle?’
+
+‘Nothing of the sort! And I don’t believe in any of their stories,’
+cried the duchess, with a burning face.
+
+‘You deny it, madam?’
+
+‘I do. There was never a word of a raven or an eagle, that I’ll swear,
+now.’
+
+‘You deny that there was ever a word of “All for Love”? Speak, madam.’
+
+‘Their conjuror’s rigmarole!’ she murmured, huffing. ‘As if I listened
+to their nonsense!’
+
+‘Does the Duchess of Dewlap dare to give me the lie?’ said Mr. Beamish.
+
+‘That’s not my title, and you know it,’ she retorted.
+
+‘What’s this?’ the angry beau sang out. ‘What stuff is this you wear?’
+He towered and laid hand on a border of lace of her morning dress, tore
+it furiously and swung a length of it round him: and while the duchess
+panted and trembled at an outrage that won for her the sympathy of every
+lady present as well as the championship of the gentlemen, he tossed the
+lace to the floor and trampled on it, making his big voice intelligible
+over the uproar: ‘Hear what she does! ‘Tis a felony! She wears the stuff
+with Betty Worcester’s yellow starch on it for mock antique! And let
+who else wears it strip it off before the town shall say we are
+disgraced--when I tell you that Betty Worcester was hanged at Tyburn
+yesterday morning for murder!’
+
+There were shrieks.
+
+Hardly had he finished speaking before the assembly began to melt; he
+stood in the centre like a pole unwinding streamers, amid a confusion of
+hurrying dresses, the sound and whirl and drift whereof was as that of
+the autumnal strewn leaves on a wind rising in November. The troops of
+ladies were off to bereave themselves of their fashionable imitation
+old lace adornment, which denounced them in some sort abettors and
+associates of the sanguinary loathed wretch, Mrs. Elizabeth Worcester,
+their benefactress of the previous day, now hanged and dangling on the
+gallows-tree.
+
+Those ladies who wore not imitation lace or any lace in the morning,
+were scarcely displeased with the beau for his exposure of them that
+did. The gentlemen were confounded by his exhibition of audacious power.
+The two gentlemen nighest upon violently resenting his brutality to
+Duchess Susan, led her from the room in company with Chloe.
+
+‘The woman shall fear me to good purpose,’ Mr. Beamish said to himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Mr. Camwell was in the ante-room as Chloe passed out behind the two
+incensed supporters of Duchess Susan.
+
+‘I shall be by the fir-trees on the Mount at eight this evening,’ she
+said.
+
+‘I will be there,’ he replied.
+
+‘Drive Mr. Beamish into the country, that these gentlemen may have time
+to cool.’
+
+He promised her it should be done.
+
+Close on the hour of her appointment, he stood under the fir-trees,
+admiring the sunset along the western line of hills, and when Chloe
+joined him he spoke of the beauty of the scene.
+
+‘Though nothing seems more eloquently to say farewell,’ he added, with a
+sinking voice.
+
+‘We could say it now, and be friends,’ she answered.
+
+‘Later than now, you think it unlikely that you could forgive me,
+Chloe.’
+
+‘In truth, sir, you are making it hard for me.’
+
+‘I have stayed here to keep watch; for no pleasure of my own,’ said he.
+
+‘Mr. Beamish is an excellent protector of the duchess.’
+
+‘Excellent; and he is cleverly taught to suppose she fears him greatly;
+and when she offends him, he makes a display of his Jupiter’s awfulness,
+with the effect on woman of natural spirit which you have seen, and
+others had foreseen, that she is exasperated and grows reckless. Tie
+another knot in your string, Chloe.’
+
+She looked away, saying, ‘Were you not the cause? You were in collusion
+with that charlatan of the heath, who told them their fortunes this
+morning. I see far, both in the dark and in the light.’
+
+‘But not through a curtain. I was present.’
+
+‘Hateful, hateful business of the spy! You have worked a great mischief
+Mr. Camwell. And how can you reconcile it to, your conscience that you
+should play so base a part?’
+
+‘I have but performed my duty, dear madam.’
+
+‘You pretend that it is your devotion to me! I might be flattered if I
+saw not so abject a figure in my service. Now have I but four days of
+my month of happiness remaining, and my request to you is, leave me to
+enjoy them. I beseech you to go. Very humbly, most earnestly, I beg your
+departure. Grant it to me, and do not stay to poison my last days here.
+Leave us to-morrow. I will admit your good intentions. I give you my
+hand in gratitude. Adieu, Mr. Camwell.’
+
+He took her hand. ‘Adieu. I foresee an early separation, and this dear
+hand is mine while I have it in mine. Adieu. It is a word to be repeated
+at a parting like ours. We do not blow out our light with one breath: we
+let it fade gradually, like yonder sunset.’
+
+‘Speak so,’ said she.
+
+‘Ah, Chloe, to give one’s life! And it is your happiness I have sought
+more than your favor.’
+
+‘I believe it; but I have not liked the means. You leave us to-morrow?’
+
+‘It seems to me that to-morrow is the term.’
+
+Her face clouded. ‘That tells me a very uncertain promise.’
+
+‘You looked forth to a month of happiness--meaning a month of delusion.
+The delusion expires to-night. You will awaken to see your end of it in
+the morning. You have never looked beyond the month since the day of his
+arrival.’
+
+‘Let him not be named, I supplicate you.’
+
+‘Then you consent that another shall be sacrificed for you to enjoy your
+state of deception an hour longer?’
+
+‘I am not deceived, sir. I wish for peace, and crave it, and that is all
+I would have.’
+
+‘And you make her your peace-offering, whom you have engaged to serve!
+Too surely your eyes have been open as well as mine. Knot by knot--I
+have watched you--where is it?--you have marked the points in that
+silken string where the confirmation of a just suspicion was too strong
+for you.’
+
+‘I did it, and still I continued merry?’ She subsided from her
+scornfulness on an involuntary ‘Ah!’ that was a shudder.
+
+‘You acted Light Heart, madam, and too well to hoodwink me. Meanwhile
+you allowed that mischief to proceed, rather than have your crazy
+lullaby disturbed.’
+
+‘Indeed, Mr. Camwell, you presume.’
+
+‘The time, and my knowledge of what it is fraught with, demand it and
+excuse it. You and I, my dear and one only love on earth, stand outside
+of ordinary rules. We are between life and death.’
+
+‘We are so always.’
+
+‘Listen further to the preacher: We have them close on us, with the
+question, Which it shall be to-morrow. You are for sleeping on, but I
+say no; nor shall that iniquity of double treachery be committed because
+of your desire to be rocked in a cradle. Hear me out. The drug you
+have swallowed to cheat yourself will not bear the shock awaiting you
+tomorrow with the first light. Hear these birds! When next they sing,
+you will be broad awake, and of me, and the worship and service I would
+have dedicated to you, I do not... it is a spectral sunset of a day
+that was never to be!--awake, and looking on what? Back from a monstrous
+villainy to the forlorn wretch who winked at it with knots in a string.
+Count them then, and where will be your answer to heaven? I begged it of
+you, to save you from those blows of remorse; yes, terrible!’
+
+‘Oh, no!’
+
+‘Terrible, I say!’
+
+‘You are mistaken, Mr. Camwell. It is my soother. I tell my beads on
+it.’
+
+‘See how a persistent residence in this place has made a Pagan of the
+purest soul among us! Had you... but that day was not to lighten me!
+More adorable in your errors that you are than others by their virtues,
+you have sinned through excess of the qualities men prize. Oh, you have
+a boundless generosity, unhappily enwound with a pride as great. There
+is your fault, that is the cause of your misery. Too generous! too
+proud! You have trusted, and you will not cease to trust; you have vowed
+yourself to love, never to remonstrate, never to seem to doubt; it
+is too much your religion, rare verily. But bethink you of that
+inexperienced and most silly good creature who is on the rapids to her
+destruction. Is she not--you will cry it aloud to-morrow--your victim?
+You hear it within you now.’
+
+‘Friend, my dear, true friend,’ Chloe said in her deeper voice of
+melody, ‘set your mind at ease about to-morrow and her. Her safety is
+assured. I stake my life on it. She shall not be a victim. At the worst
+she will but have learnt a lesson. So, then, adieu! The West hangs like
+a garland of unwatered flowers, neglected by the mistress they adorned.
+Remember the scene, and that here we parted, and that Chloe wished you
+the happiness it was out of her power to bestow, because she was of
+another world, with her history written out to the last red streak
+before ever you knew her. Adieu; this time adieu for good!
+
+Mr. Camwell stood in her path. ‘Blind eyes, if you like,’ he said, ‘but
+you shall not hear blind language. I forfeit the poor consideration
+for me that I have treasured; hate me; better hated by you than shun my
+duty! Your duchess is away at the first dawn this next morning; it has
+come to that. I speak with full knowledge. Question her.’
+
+Chloe threw a faltering scorn of him into her voice, as much as her
+heart’s sharp throbs would allow. ‘I question you, sir, how you came to
+this full knowledge you boast of?’
+
+‘I have it; let that suffice. Nay, I will be particular; his coach is
+ordered for the time I name to you; her maid is already at a station on
+the road of the flight.’
+
+‘You have their servants in your pay?’
+
+‘For the mine--the countermine. We must grub dirt to match deceivers.
+You, madam, have chosen to be delicate to excess, and have thrown it
+upon me to be gross, and if you please, abominable, in my means of
+defending you. It is not too late for you to save the lady, nor too late
+to bring him to the sense of honour.’
+
+‘I cannot think Colonel Poltermore so dishonourable.’
+
+‘Poor Colonel Poltermore! The office he is made to fill is an old one.
+Are you not ashamed, Chloe?’
+
+‘I have listened too long,’ she replied.
+
+‘Then, if it is your pleasure, depart.’
+
+He made way for her. She passed him. Taking two hurried steps in the
+gloom of the twilight, she stopped, held at her heart, and painfully
+turning to him, threw her arms out, and let herself be seized and
+kissed.
+
+On his asking pardon of her, which his long habit of respect forced him
+to do in the thick of rapture and repetitions, she said, ‘You rob no
+one.’
+
+‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘there is a reward, then, for faithful love. But am I
+the man I was a minute back? I have you; I embrace you; and I doubt that
+I am I. Or is it Chloe’s ghost?’
+
+‘She has died and visits you.’
+
+‘And will again?’
+
+Chloe could not speak for languor.
+
+The intensity of the happiness she gave by resting mutely where she was,
+charmed her senses. But so long had the frost been on them that their
+awakening to warmth was haunted by speculations on the sweet taste of
+this reward of faithfulness to him, and the strange taste of her own
+unfaithfulness to her. And reflecting on the cold act of speculation
+while strong arm and glowing mouth were pressing her, she thought her
+senses might really be dead, and she a ghost visiting the good youth for
+his comfort. So feel ghosts, she thought, and what we call happiness
+in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance. Another thought flew
+through her like a mortal shot: ‘Not so with those two! with them it
+will be ecstasy meeting ecstasy; they will take and give happiness in
+equal portions.’ A pang of jealousy traversed her frame. She made the
+shrewdness of it help to nerve her fervour in a last strain of him to
+her bosom, and gently releasing herself, she said, ‘No one is robbed.
+And now, dear friend, promise me that you will not disturb Mr. Beamish.’
+
+‘Chloe,’ said he, ‘have you bribed me?’
+
+‘I do not wish him to be troubled.’
+
+‘The duchess, I have told you--’
+
+‘I know. But you have Chloe’s word that she will watch over the duchess
+and die to save her. It is an oath. You have heard of some arrangements.
+I say they shall lead to nothing: it shall not take place. Indeed, my
+friend, I am awake; I see as much as you see. And those... after being
+where I have been, can you suppose I have a regret? But she is my dear
+and peculiar charge, and if she runs a risk, trust to me that there
+shall be no catastrophe; I swear it; so, now, adieu. We sup in company
+to-night. They will be expecting some of Chloe’s verses, and she must
+sing to herself for a few minutes to stir the bed her songs take wing
+from; therefore, we will part, and for her sake avoid her; do not be
+present at our table, or in the room, or anywhere there. Yes, you rob
+no one,’ she said, in a voice that curled through him deliciously by
+wavering; but I think I may blush at recollections, and I would rather
+have you absent. Adieu! I will not ask for obedience from you beyond
+to-night. Your word?’
+
+He gave it in a stupor of felicity, and she fled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Chloe drew the silken string from her bosom, as she descended the dim
+pathway through the furies, and set her fingers travelling along it for
+the number of the knots. ‘I have no right to be living,’ she said. Seven
+was the number; seven years she had awaited her lover’s return; she
+counted her age and completed it in sevens. Fatalism had sustained her
+during her lover’s absence; it had fast hold of her now. Thereby had
+she been enabled to say, ‘He will come’; and saying, ‘He has come,’
+her touch rested on the first knot in the string. She had no power
+to displace her fingers, and the cause of the tying of the knot stood
+across her brain marked in dull red characters, legible neither to her
+eye nor to her understanding, but a reviving of the hour that brought it
+on her spirit with human distinctness, except of the light of day: she
+had a sense of having forfeited light, and seeing perhaps more clearly.
+Everything assured her that she saw more clearly than others; she saw
+too when it was good to cease to live.
+
+Hers was the unhappy lot of one gifted with poet-imagination to throb
+with the woman supplanting her and share the fascination of the man who
+deceived. At their first meeting, in her presence, she had seen that
+they were not strangers; she pitied them for speaking falsely, and when
+she vowed to thwart this course of evil it to save a younger creature of
+her sex, not in rivalry. She treated them both with a proud generosity
+surpassing gentleness. All that there was of selfishness in her bosom
+resolved to the enjoyment of her one month of strongly willed delusion.
+
+The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body’s purity, for
+when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become
+a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications;
+this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt
+it to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us,
+where all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished
+by testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since,
+exhausting her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness,
+which was nothing other than the carrying on of her emotion of the
+moment of sharp sour sweet--such as it may be, the doomed below attain
+for their knowledge of joy--when, at the first meeting with her lover,
+the perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her
+she had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility
+to her for her heritage.
+
+She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew
+her. ‘Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,’ she said:--Her
+lover would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman.
+
+She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the
+fields: pardoned her likewise. ‘He when I saw him first was as beautiful
+to me. For him I might have done as much.’
+
+Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family raised hands of
+reproach. They were minute objects, keenly discerned as diminished
+figures cut in steel. Feeling could not be very warm for them, they were
+so small, and a sea that had drowned her ran between; and looking
+that way she had scarce any warmth of feeling save for a white rhaiadr
+leaping out of broken cloud through branched rocks, where she had
+climbed and dreamed when a child. The dream was then of the coloured
+days to come; now she was more infant in her mind, and she watched the
+scattered water broaden, and tasted the spray, sat there drinking the
+scene, untroubled by hopes as a lamb, different only from an infant in
+knowing that she had thrown off life to travel back to her home and be
+refreshed. She heard her people talk; they were unending babblers in the
+waterfall. Truth was with them, and wisdom. How, then, could she pretend
+to any right to live? Already she had no name; she was less living than
+a tombstone. For who was Chloe? Her family might pass the grave of Chloe
+without weeping, without moralizing. They had foreseen her ruin, they
+had foretold it, they noised it in the waters, and on they sped to the
+plains, telling the world of their prophecy, and making what was untold
+as yet a lighter thing to do.
+
+The lamps in an irregularly dotted line underneath the hill beckoned her
+to her task of appearing as the gayest of them that draw their breath
+for the day and have pulses for the morrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+At midnight the great supper party to celebrate the reconciliation of
+Mr. Beamish and Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky the
+ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude for amusement, caught
+Chloe in their arms to kiss her, rendering it natural for their
+cavaliers to exclaim that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess
+preferred to walk. Her spirits were excited, and her language smelt of
+her origin, but the superb fleshly beauty of the woman was aglow, and
+crying, ‘I declare I should burst in one of those boxes--just as if
+you’d stalled me!’ she fanned a wind on her face, and sumptuously spread
+her spherical skirts, attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel
+Poltermore, a gentleman manifestly bent on insinuating sly slips of
+speech to serve for here a pinch of powder, there a match. ‘Am I?’ she
+was heard to say. She blew prodigious deep-chested sighs of a coquette
+that has taken to roaring.
+
+Presently her voice tossed out: ‘As if I would!’ These vivid
+illuminations of the Colonel’s proceedings were a pasture to the
+rearward groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr.
+Beamish, a lord, and Chloe.
+
+‘You man! Oh!’ sprang from the duchess. ‘What do I hear? I won’t listen;
+I can’t, I mustn’t, I oughtn’t.’
+
+So she said, but her head careened, she gave him her coy reluctant ear,
+with total abandonment to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord
+let fly a peal of laughter. It had been a supper of copious wine, and
+the songs which rise from wine. Nature was excused by our midnight
+naturalists.
+
+The two great dames, admonished by the violence of the nobleman’s
+laughter, laid claim on Mr. Beamish to accompany them at their parting
+with Chloe and Duchess Susan.
+
+In the momentary shuffling of couples incident to adieux among a
+company, the duchess murmured to Caseldy:
+
+‘Have I done it well.’
+
+He praised her for perfection in her acting. ‘I am at your door at
+three, remember.’
+
+‘My heart’s in my mouth,’ said she.
+
+Colonel Poltermore still had the privilege of conducting her the few
+farther steps to her lodgings.
+
+Caseldy walked beside Chloe, and silently, until he said, ‘If I have not
+yet mentioned the subject--’
+
+‘If it is an allusion to money let me not hear it to-night,’ she
+replied.
+
+‘I can only say that my lawyers have instructions. But my lawyers cannot
+pay you in gratitude. Do not think me in your hardest review of my
+misconduct ungrateful. I have ever esteemed you above all women; I do,
+and I shall; you are too much above me. I am afraid I am a composition
+of bad stuff; I did not win a very particularly good name on the
+Continent; I begin to know myself, and in comparison with you, dear
+Catherine----’
+
+‘You speak to Chloe,’ she said. ‘Catherine is a buried person. She died
+without pain. She is by this time dust.’
+
+The man heaved his breast. ‘Women have not an idea of our temptations.’
+
+‘You are excused by me for all your errors, Caseldy. Always remember
+that.’
+
+He sighed profoundly. ‘Ay, you have a Christian’s heart.’
+
+She answered, ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is a Pagan’s.’
+
+‘As for me,’ he rejoined, ‘I am a fatalist. Through life I have seen my
+destiny. What is to be, will be; we can do nothing.’
+
+‘I have heard of one who expired of a surfeit that he anticipated, nay
+proclaimed, when indulging in the last desired morsel,’ said Chloe.
+
+‘He was driven to it.’
+
+‘From within.’
+
+Caseldy acquiesced; his wits were clouded, and an illustration even
+coarser and more grotesque would have won a serious nod and a sigh from
+him. ‘Yes, we are moved by other hands!’
+
+‘It is pleasant to think so: and think it of me tomorrow. Will you!’
+said Chloe.
+
+He promised it heartily, to induce her to think the same of him.
+
+Their separation was in no way remarkable. The pretty formalities were
+executed at the door, and the pair of gentlemen departed.
+
+‘It’s quite dark still,’ Duchess Susan said, looking up at the sky, and
+she ran upstairs, and sank, complaining of the weakness of her legs, in
+a chair of the ante-chamber of her bedroom, where Chloe slept. Then she
+asked the time of the night. She could not suppress her hushed ‘Oh!’
+of heavy throbbing from minute to minute. Suddenly she started off at
+a quick stride to her own room, saying that it must be sleepiness which
+affected her so.
+
+Her bedroom had a door to the sitting-room, and thence, as also from
+Chloe’s room, the landing on the stairs was reached, for the room ran
+parallel with both bed-chambers. She walked in it and threw the window
+open, but closed it immediately; opened and shut the door, and returned
+and called for Chloe. She wanted to be read to. Chloe named certain
+composing books. The duchess chose a book of sermons. ‘But we’re all
+such dreadful sinners, it’s better not to bother ourselves late at
+night.’ She dismissed that suggestion. Chloe proposed books of poetry.
+‘Only I don’t understand them except about larks, and buttercups, and
+hayfields, and that’s no comfort to a woman burning,’ was the answer.
+
+‘Are you feverish, madam?’ said Chloe. And the duchess was sharp on her:
+‘Yes, madam, I am.’
+
+She reproved herself in a change of tone: ‘No, Chloe, not feverish, only
+this air of yours here is such an exciting air, as the doctor says; and
+they made me drink wine, and I played before supper--Oh! my money; I
+used to say I could get more, but now!’ she sighed--‘but there’s better
+in the world than money. You know that, don’t you, you dear? Tell me.
+And I want you to be happy; that you’ll find. I do wish we could all
+be!’ She wept, and spoke of requiring a little music to compose her.
+
+Chloe stretched a hand for her guitar. Duchess Susan listened to some
+notes, and cried that it went to her heart and hurt her. ‘Everything we
+like a lot has a fence and a board against trespassers, because of such
+a lot of people in the world,’ she moaned. ‘Don’t play, put down that
+thing, please, dear. You’re the cleverest creature anybody has ever met;
+they all say so. I wish I----Lovely women catch men, and clever women
+keep them: I’ve heard that said in this wretched place, and it ‘s a nice
+prospect for me, next door to a fool! I know I am.’
+
+‘The duke adores you, madam.’
+
+‘Poor duke! Do let him be--sleeping so woebegone with his mouth so,
+and that chin of a baby, like as if he dreamed of a penny whistle. He
+shouldn’t have let me come here. Talk of Mr. Beamish. How he will miss
+you, Chloe!’
+
+‘He will,’ Chloe said sadly.
+
+‘If you go, dear.’
+
+‘I am going.’
+
+‘Why should you leave him, Chloe?’
+
+‘I must.’
+
+‘And there, the thought of it makes you miserable!’
+
+‘It does.’
+
+‘You needn’t, I’m sure.’
+
+Chloe looked at her.
+
+The duchess turned her head. ‘Why can’t you be gay, as you were at the
+supper-table, Chloe? You’re out to him like a flower when the sun jumps
+over the hill; you’re up like a lark in the dews; as I used to be when I
+thought of nothing. Oh, the early morning; and I’m sleepy. What a beast
+I feel, with my grandeur, and the time in an hour or two for the birds
+to sing, and me ready to drop. I must go and undress.’
+
+She rushed on Chloe, kissed her hastily, declaring that she was quite
+dead of fatigue, and dismissed her. ‘I don’t want help, I can undress
+myself. As if Susan Barley couldn’t do that for herself! and you may
+shut your door, I sha’n’t have any frights to-night, I’m so tired out.’
+
+‘Another kiss,’ Chloe said tenderly.
+
+‘Yes, take it’--the duchess leaned her cheek--‘but I’m so tired I don’t
+know what I’m doing.’
+
+‘It will not be on your conscience,’ Chloe answered, kissing her warmly.
+
+Will those words she withdrew, and the duchess closed the door. She ran
+a bolt in it immediately.
+
+‘I’m too tired to know anything I’m doing,’ she said to herself,
+and stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which set her bosom
+heaving.
+
+There was the bed, there was the clock. She had the option of lying down
+and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a
+minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill,
+without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed
+proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The
+clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute,
+commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on
+the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the clock,
+that she might see it at will, and considering it necessary for the bed
+to appear to have been lain on. Considering also that she ought to be
+heard moving about in the process of undressing, she rose from the bed
+to make sure of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and twenty
+minutes! she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her
+various preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and
+taken a box of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess had to change
+her shoes and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of
+her mind, a sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her
+complexion, for so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and
+they let the blood have its way. Having so short a space of time, she
+thought the matter decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on
+the bed, and lay down for good with her duke. In a little while her head
+was at work reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately
+than the male moralist charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the
+bed, with a spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had
+felt him to be there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was
+flatter to her idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print
+on the pages, and without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted
+with the life waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system
+rageing; she burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a
+pillow, and threw the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the
+world that her limbs had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with
+her. She then proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself that she could
+stop now, and could stop now, at each stage of the advance to a fresh
+dressing of her person, and moralizing on her singular fate, in the
+mouth of an observer. ‘She was shot up suddenly over everybody’s head,
+and suddenly down she went.’ Susan whispered to herself: ‘But it was
+for love!’ Possessed by the rosiness of love, she finished her business,
+with an attention to everything needed that was equal to perfect
+serenity of mind. After which there was nothing to do, save to sit
+humped in a chair, cover her face and count the clock-tickings, that
+said, Yes--no; do--don’t; fly--stay; fly--fly! It seemed to her she
+heard a moving. Well she might with that dreadful heart of hers!
+
+Chloe was asleep, at peace by this time, she thought; and how she envied
+Chloe! She might be as happy, if she pleased. Why not? But what kind of
+happiness was it? She likened it to that of the corpse underground, and
+shrank distastefully.
+
+Susan stood at her glass to have a look at the creature about whom there
+was all this disturbance, and she threw up her arms high for a languid,
+not unlovely yawn, that closed in blissful shuddering with the sensation
+of her lover’s arms having wormed round her waist and taken her while
+she was defenceless. For surely they would. She took a jewelled ring,
+his gift, from her purse, and kissed it, and drew it on and off her
+finger, leaving it on. Now she might wear it without fear of inquiries
+and virtuous eyebrows. O heavenly now--if only it were an hour hence;
+and going behind galloping horses!
+
+The clock was at the terrible moment. She hesitated internally and
+hastened; once her feet stuck fast, and firmly she said, ‘No’; but the
+clock was her lord. The clock was her lover and her lord; and obeying
+it, she managed to get into the sitting-room, on the pretext that she
+merely wished to see through the front window whether daylight was
+coming.
+
+How well she knew that half-light of the ebb of the wave of darkness.
+
+Strange enough it was to see it showing houses regaining their solidity
+of the foregone day, instead of still fields, black hedges, familiar
+shapes of trees. The houses had no wakefulness, they were but seen to
+stand, and the light was a revelation of emptiness. Susan’s heart was
+cunning to reproach her duke for the difference of the scene she beheld
+from that of the innocent open-breasted land. Yes, it was dawn in a
+wicked place that she never should have been allowed to visit. But where
+was he whom she looked for? There! The cloaked figure of a man was at
+the corner of the street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her limbs
+were strung to throw off the house, and reach air, breathe, and (as her
+thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected. To her senses the house was a house
+on fire, and crying to her to escape.
+
+Yet she stepped deliberately, to be sure-footed in a dusky room; she
+touched along the wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly
+tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for though she knew she must
+be close by the door, she was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and
+the door seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find the handle;
+something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a
+gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the
+touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it
+very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety
+to pass it without noise, ‘If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!’
+Her alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had
+struck her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth
+gaped, her throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the
+effort to swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation
+while she felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh,
+ready to shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round
+white top. Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm
+too! this was an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her.
+She pulled it to release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a
+lump descended, and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her
+that a dead human body was upon her.
+
+At a quarter to four o’clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish
+relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman’s voice, in
+piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which
+were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep,
+in obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes
+previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman’s lacquey. On
+his reaching the street of the house inhabited by Duchess Susan, he
+perceived many night-capped heads at windows, and one window of the
+house in question lifted but vacant. His first impression accused the
+pair of gentlemen, whom he saw bearing drawn swords in no friendly
+attitude of an ugly brawl that had probably affrighted her Grace, or
+her personal attendant, a woman capable of screaming, for he was well
+assured that it could not have been Chloe, the least likely of her sex
+to abandon herself to the use of their weapons either in terror or in
+jeopardy. The antagonists were Mr. Camwell and Count Caseldy. On his
+approaching them, Mr. Camwell sheathed his sword, saying that his work
+was done. Caseldy was convulsed with wrath, to such a degree as to make
+the part of an intermediary perilous. There had been passes between
+them, and Caseldy cried aloud that he would have his enemy’s blood.
+The night-watch was nowhere. Soon, however, certain shopmen and their
+apprentices assisted Mr. Beamish to preserve the peace, despite the
+fury of Caseldy and the provocations--‘not easy to withstand,’ says
+the chronicler--offered by him to young Camwell. The latter said to Mr.
+Beamish: ‘I knew I should be no match, so I sent for you,’ causing his
+friend astonishment, inasmuch as he was assured of the youth’s natural
+valour.
+
+Mr. Beamish was about to deliver an allocution of reproof to them in
+equal shares, being entirely unsuspicious of any other reason for the
+alarum than this palpable outbreak of a rivalry that he would have
+inclined to attribute to the charms of Chloe, when the house-door swung
+wide for them to enter, and the landlady of the house, holding clasped
+hands at full stretch, implored them to run up to the poor lady: ‘Oh,
+she’s dead; she’s dead, dead!’
+
+Caseldy rushed past her.
+
+‘How, dead! good woman?’ Mr. Beamish questioned her most incredulously,
+half-smiling.
+
+She answered among her moans: ‘Dead by the neck; off the door--Oh!’
+
+Young Camwell pressed his forehead, with a call on his Maker’s name. As
+they reached the landing upstairs, Caseldy came out of the sitting-room.
+
+‘Which?’ said Camwell to the speaking of his face.
+
+‘She!’ said the other.
+
+‘The duchess?’ Mr. Beamish exclaimed.
+
+But Camwell walked into the room. He had nothing to ask after that
+reply.
+
+The figure stretched along the floor was covered with a sheet. The young
+man fell at his length beside it, and his face was downward.
+
+Mr. Beamish relates: ‘To this day, when I write at an interval of
+fifteen years, I have the tragic ague of that hour in my blood, and I
+behold the shrouded form of the most admirable of women, whose heart was
+broken by a faithless man ere she devoted her wreck of life to arrest
+one weaker than herself on the descent to perdition. Therein it was
+beneficently granted her to be of the service she prayed to be
+through her death. She died to save. In a last letter, found upon her
+pincushion, addressed to me under seal of secrecy toward the parties
+principally concerned, she anticipates the whole confession of the
+unhappy duchess. Nay, she prophesies: “The duchess will tell you truly
+she has had enough of love!” Those actual words were reiterated to me
+by the poor lady daily until her lord arrived to head the funeral
+procession, and assist in nursing back the shattered health of his wife
+to a state that should fit her for travelling. To me, at least, she was
+constant in repeating, “No more of love!” By her behaviour to her duke,
+I can judge her to have been sincere. She spoke of feeling Chloe’s eyes
+go through her with every word of hers that she recollected. Nor was the
+end of Chloe less effective upon the traitor. He was in the procession
+to her grave. He spoke to none. There is a line of the verse bearing
+the superscription, “My Reasons for Dying,” that shows her to have been
+apprehensive to secure the safety of Mr. Camwell:
+
+          I die because my heart is dead
+          To warn a soul from sin I die:
+          I die that blood may not be shed, etc.
+
+She feared he would be somewhere on the road to mar the fugitives, and
+she knew him, as indeed he knew himself, no match for one trained in the
+foreign tricks of steel, ready though he was to dispute the traitor’s
+way. She remembers Mr. Camwell’s petition for the knotted silken string
+in her request that it shall be cut from her throat and given to him.’
+
+Mr. Beamish indulges in verses above the grave of Chloe. They are of a
+character to cool emotion. But when we find a man, who is commonly of
+the quickest susceptibility to ridicule as well as to what is befitting,
+careless of exposure, we may reflect on the truthfulness of feeling by
+which he is drawn to pass his own guard and come forth in his nakedness;
+something of the poet’s tongue may breathe to us through his mortal
+stammering, even if we have to acknowledge that a quotation would
+scatter pathos.
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     All flattery is at somebody’s expense
+     Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues
+     But I leave it to you
+     Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war
+     Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance
+     If I do not speak of payment
+     Intellectual contempt of easy dupes
+     Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples
+     Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?
+     No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters
+     Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted
+     Primitive appetite for noise
+     She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time
+     The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost
+     They miss their pleasure in pursuing it
+     This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure
+     Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH
+
+By George Meredith A REALISTIC TALE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+The experience of great officials who have laid down their dignities
+before death, or have had the philosophic mind to review themselves
+while still wielding the deputy sceptre, teaches them that in the
+exercise of authority over men an eccentric behaviour in trifles has
+most exposed them to hostile criticism and gone farthest to jeopardize
+their popularity. It is their Achilles’ heel; the place where
+their mother Nature holds them as she dips them in our waters. The
+eccentricity of common persons is the entertainment of the multitude,
+and the maternal hand is perceived for a cherishing and endearing sign
+upon them; but rarely can this be found suitable for the august in
+station; only, indeed, when their sceptre is no more fearful than a
+grandmother’s birch; and these must learn from it sooner or later that
+they are uncomfortably mortal.
+
+When herrings are at auction on a beach, for example, the man of chief
+distinction in the town should not step in among a poor fraternity to
+take advantage of an occasion of cheapness, though it be done, as he
+may protest, to relieve the fishermen of a burden; nor should such
+a dignitary as the bailiff of a Cinque Port carry home the spoil of
+victorious bargaining on his arm in a basket. It is not that his
+conduct is in itself objectionable, so much as that it causes him to be
+popularly weighed; and during life, until the best of all advocates can
+plead before our fellow Englishmen that we are out of their way, it is
+prudent to avoid the process.
+
+Mr. Tinman, however, this high-stepping person in question, happened to
+have come of a marketing mother. She had started him from a small shop
+to a big one. He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to
+start himself as a gentleman. He was a man of this ambition, and prouder
+behind it. But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among
+independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the
+perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the
+source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our
+time in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate
+the splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that
+prodigious nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of
+Helmstone, he retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of
+Crikswich, where he rented the cheapest residence he could discover for
+his habitation, the House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not
+in total disaccord with his old mother’s principles. His income, as he
+observed to his widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in
+their privacy, was respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty
+to five per cent. cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting
+midnight bolster reflection for a man, turning over to the other side
+between a dream and a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one
+must pay to be addressed as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the
+ground in England and on the ladder. An esquire can offer his hand
+in marriage to a lady in her own right; plain esquires have married
+duchesses; they marry baronets’ daughters every day of the week.
+
+Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of
+the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled
+ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and
+he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he understood it.
+He knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have
+spoken out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women. The
+lightning, only to be warded by an esquire, was in them. He quitted
+business at the age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a
+born lady; or at least it was one of the ideas in his mind.
+
+And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over
+him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is
+necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner
+could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do
+like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class
+by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an--undertaker’s pathos
+is better than none at all--he was not a single-minded aspirant to our
+social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes,
+was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the
+man’s nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when
+he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek
+dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man
+who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that he may become important in
+his neighbourhood, while decreasing the price he pays for his wine, that
+he may miserably indemnify himself for the outlay. A sip of his wine
+fetched the breath, as when men are in the presence of the tremendous
+elements of nature. It sounded the constitution more darkly-awful, and
+with a profounder testimony to stubborn health, than the physician’s
+instruments. Most of the guests at Mr. Tinman’s table were so
+constructed that they admired him for its powerful quality the more at
+his announcement of the price of it; the combined strength and cheapness
+probably flattering them, as by another mystic instance of the national
+energy. It must have been so, since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as
+head of their town. Here and there a solitary esquire, fished out of the
+bathing season to dine at the house on the beach, was guilty of raising
+one of those clamours concerning subsequent headaches, which spread
+an evil reputation as a pall. A resident esquire or two, in whom a
+reminiscence of Tinman’s table may be likened to the hook which some old
+trout has borne away from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to
+him to beware for the future, caught up the black report and propagated
+it.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim,
+or hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at
+Tinman’s table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist’s
+shop; which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as
+it was right to do in a man devoted to his country. He dined with Tinman
+again. We try our best to be social. For eight months in our year he
+had little choice but to dine with Tinman or be a hermit attached to a
+telescope.
+
+“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” His frank reply to the question
+was, “I am going to be killed;” and it grew notorious that this meant
+Tinman’s table. We get on together as well as we can. Perhaps if we
+were an acutely calculating people we should find it preferable both for
+trade and our physical prosperity to turn and kill Tinman, in contempt
+of consequences. But we are not, and so he does the business gradually
+for us. A generous people we must be, for Tinman was not detested. The
+recollection of “next morning” caused him to be dimly feared.
+
+Tinman, meanwhile, was awake only to the Circumstance that he made no
+progress as an esquire, except on the envelopes of letters, and in his
+own esteem. That broad region he began to occupy to the exclusion of
+other inhabitants; and the result of such a state of princely isolation
+was a plunge of his whole being into deep thoughts. From the hour of his
+investiture as the town’s chief man, thoughts which were long shots took
+possession of him. He had his wits about him; he was alive to ridicule;
+he knew he was not popular below, or on easy terms with people above
+him, and he meditated a surpassing stroke as one of the Band of Esq.,
+that had nothing original about it to perplex and annoy the native mind,
+yet was dazzling. Few members of the privileged Band dare even imagine
+the thing.
+
+It will hardly be believed, but it is historical fact, that in the act
+of carrying fresh herrings home on his arm, he entertained the idea of
+a visit to the First Person and Head of the realm, and was indulging in
+pleasing visions of the charms of a personal acquaintance. Nay, he had
+already consulted with brother jurats. For you must know that one of
+the princesses had recently suffered betrothal in the newspapers, and
+supposing her to deign to ratify the engagement, what so reasonable
+on the part of a Cinque Port chieftain as to congratulate his liege
+mistress, her illustrious mother? These are thoughts and these are deeds
+>which give emotional warmth and colour to the ejecter members of a
+population wretchedly befogged. They are our sunlight, and our brighter
+theme of conversation. They are necessary to the climate and the Saxon
+mind; and it would be foolish to put them away, as it is foolish not to
+do our utmost to be intimate with terrestrial splendours while we have
+them--as it may be said of wardens, mayors, and bailiffs-at command.
+Tinman was quite of this opinion. They are there to relieve our dulness.
+We have them in the place of heavenly; and he would have argued that we
+have a right to bother them too. He had a notion, up in the clouds, of
+a Sailors’ Convalescent Hospital at Crikswich to seduce a prince with,
+hand him the trowel, make him “lay the stone,” and then poor prince!
+refresh him at table. But that was a matter for by and by.
+
+His purchase of herrings completed, Mr. Tinman walked across the mound
+of shingle to the house on the beach. He was rather a fresh-faced man,
+of the Saxon colouring, and at a distance looking good-humoured. That
+he should have been able to make such an appearance while doing daily
+battle with his wine, was a proof of great physical vigour. His pace
+was leisurely, as it must needs be over pebbles, where half a step is
+subtracted from each whole one in passing; and, besides, he was aware of
+a general breath at his departure that betokened a censorious assembly.
+Why should he not market for himself? He threw dignity into his
+retreating figure in response to the internal interrogation. The moment
+>was one when conscious rectitude =pliers man should have a tail for
+its just display. Philosophers have drawn attention to the power of the
+human face to express pure virtue, but no sooner has it passed on
+than the spirit erect within would seem helpless. The breadth of our
+shoulders is apparently presented for our critics to write on. Poor duty
+is done by the simple sense of moral worth, to supplant that absence of
+feature in the plain flat back. We are below the animals in this. How
+charged with language behind him is a dog! Everybody has noticed it. Let
+a dog turn away from a hostile circle, and his crisp and wary tail not
+merely defends him, it menaces; it is a weapon. Man has no choice but to
+surge and boil, or stiffen preposterously. Knowing the popular sentiment
+about his marketing--for men can see behind their backs, though they may
+have nothing to speak with--Tinman resembled those persons of
+principle who decline to pay for a “Bless your honour!” from a voluble
+beggar-woman, and obtain the reverse of it after they have gone by. He
+was sufficiently sensitive to feel that his back was chalked as on a
+slate. The only remark following him was, “There he goes!”
+
+He went to the seaward gate of the house on the beach, made practicable
+in a low flint wall, where he was met by his sister Martha, to whom
+he handed the basket. Apparently he named the cost of his purchase per
+dozen. She touched the fish and pressed the bellies of the topmost,
+it might be to question them tenderly concerning their roes. Then the
+couple passed out of sight. Herrings were soon after this despatching
+their odours through the chimneys of all Crikswich, and there was that
+much of concord and festive union among the inhabitants.
+
+The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for
+the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the
+town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and
+scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of
+recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting
+it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from
+a sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those
+virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not.
+Belle Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve,
+unashamed of its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling
+itself newly Hotel, fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of
+royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in
+bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the
+attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference.
+On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba
+nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff.
+Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed
+the outward expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to
+come from London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich
+to distract the naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating
+brine to the determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an
+appetite that rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite
+of certain frank whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the
+common to mingle with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and
+gentleman entering the town to take lodgings for a month, and that
+on the morrow they took a boat from the shore, saying in their faint
+English to a sailor veteran of the coastguard, whom they had consulted
+about the weather, “It is better zis zan zat,” as they shrugged between
+rough sea and corpselike land. And they were not seen again. Their
+meaning none knew. Having paid their bill at the lodging-house, their
+conduct was ascribed to systematic madness. English people came to
+Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did not expect it to be
+cooked and dressed and decorated for them. If these things are done to
+nature, it is nature no longer that you have, but something Frenchified.
+Those French are for trimming Neptune’s beard! Only wait, and you are
+sure to find variety in nature, more than you may like. You will find it
+in Neptune. What say you to a breach of the sea-wall, and an inundation
+of the aromatic grass-flat extending from the house on the beach to the
+tottering terraces, villas, cottages: and public-house transformed by
+its ensign to Hotel, along the frontage of the town? Such an event
+had occurred of old, and had given the house on the beach the serious
+shaking great Neptune in his wrath alone can give. But many years had
+intervened. Groynes had been run down to intercept him and divert him.
+He generally did his winter mischief on a mill and salt marshes lower
+westward. Mr. Tinman had always been extremely zealous in promoting the
+expenditure of what moneys the town had to spare upon the protection of
+the shore, as it were for the propitiation or defiance of the sea-god.
+There was a kindly joke against him an that subject among brother
+jurats. He retorted with the joke, that the first thing for Englishmen
+to look to were England’s defences.
+
+But it will not do to be dwelling too fondly on our eras of peace, for
+which we make such splendid sacrifices. Peace, saving for the advent of
+a German band, which troubled the repose of the town at intervals,
+had imparted to the inhabitants of Crikswich, within and without, the
+likeness to its most perfect image, together, it must be confessed, with
+a degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the
+terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the
+vernal equinox, something happened.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A carriage Stopped short in the ray of candlelight that was fitfully
+and feebly capering on the windy blackness outside the open workshop of
+Crickledon, the carpenter, fronting the sea-beach. Mr. Tinnnan’s house
+was inquired for. Crickledon left off planing; at half-sprawl over the
+board, he bawled out, “Turn to the right; right ahead; can’t mistake
+it.” He nodded to one of the cronies intent on watching his labours:
+“Not unless they mean to be bait for whiting-pout. Who’s that for
+Tinman, I wonder?” The speculations of Crickledon’s friends were lost in
+the scream of the plane.
+
+One cast an eye through the door and observed that the carriage was
+there still. “Gentleman’s got out and walked,” said Crickledon. He was
+informed that somebody was visible inside. “Gentleman’s wife, mayhap,”
+ he said. His friends indulged in their privilege of thinking what
+they liked, and there was the usual silence of tongues in the shop. He
+furnished them sound and motion for their amusement, and now and then a
+scrap of conversation; and the sedater spirits dwelling in his immediate
+neighbourhood were accustomed to step in and see him work up to
+supper-time, instead of resorting to the more turbid and costly
+excitement of the public-house.
+
+Crickledon looked up from the measurement of a thumb-line. In the
+doorway stood a bearded gentleman, who announced himself with the
+startling exclamation, “Here’s a pretty pickle!” and bustled to make way
+for a man well known to them as Ned Crummins, the upholsterer’s man, on
+whose back hung an article of furniture, the condition of which, with a
+condensed brevity of humour worthy of literary admiration, he displayed
+by mutely turning himself about as he entered.
+
+“Smashed!” was the general outcry.
+
+“I ran slap into him,” said the gentleman. “Who the deuce!--no bones
+broken, that’s one thing. The fellow--there, look at him: he’s like a
+glass tortoise.”
+
+“It’s a chiwal glass,” Crickledon remarked, and laid finger on the star
+in the centre.
+
+“Gentleman ran slap into me,” said Crummins, depositing the frame on the
+floor of the shop.
+
+“Never had such a shock in my life,” continued the gentleman. “Upon my
+soul, I took him for a door: I did indeed. A kind of light flashed from
+one of your houses here, and in the pitch dark I thought I was at the
+door of old Mart Tinman’s house, and dash me if I did n’t go in--crash!
+But what the deuce do you do, carrying that great big looking-glass at
+night, man? And, look here tell me; how was it you happened to be going
+glass foremost when you’d got the glass on your back?”
+
+“Well, ‘t ain’t my fault, I knows that,” rejoined Crummins. “I came
+along as careful as a man could. I was just going to bawl out to Master
+Tinman, ‘I knows the way, never fear me’; for I thinks I hears him call
+from his house, ‘Do ye see the way?’ and into me this gentleman runs all
+his might, and smash goes the glass. I was just ten steps from Master
+Tinman’s gate, and that careful, I reckoned every foot I put down, that
+I was; I knows I did, though.”
+
+“Why, it was me calling, ‘I’m sure I can’t see the way.’
+
+“You heard me, you donkey!” retorted the bearded gentleman. “What was
+the good of your turning that glass against me in the very nick when I
+dashed on you?”
+
+“Well, ‘t ain’t my fault, I swear,” said Crummins. “The wind catches
+voices so on a pitch dark night, you never can tell whether they be on
+one shoulder or the other. And if I’m to go and lose my place through no
+fault of mine----”
+
+“Have n’t I told you, sir, I’m going to pay the damage? Here,” said the
+gentleman, fumbling at his waistcoat, “here, take this card. Read it.”
+
+For the first time during the scene in the carpenter’s shop, a certain
+pomposity swelled the gentleman’s tone. His delivery of the card
+appeared to act on him like the flourish of a trumpet before great men.
+
+“Van Diemen Smith,” he proclaimed himself for the assistance of Ned
+Crummins in his task; the latter’s look of sad concern on receiving the
+card seeming to declare an unscholarly conscience.
+
+An anxious feminine voice was heard close beside Mr. Van Diemen Smith.
+
+“Oh, papa, has there been an accident? Are you hurt?”
+
+“Not a bit, Netty; not a bit. Walked into a big looking-glass in the
+dark, that’s all. A matter of eight or ten pound, and that won’t stump
+us. But these are what I call queer doings in Old England, when you
+can’t take a step in the dark, on the seashore without plunging bang
+into a glass. And it looks like bad luck to my visit to old Mart
+Tinman.”
+
+“Can you,” he addressed the company, “tell me of a clean, wholesome
+lodging-house? I was thinking of flinging myself, body and baggage, on
+your mayor, or whatever he is--my old schoolmate; but I don’t so much
+like this beginning. A couple of bed-rooms and sitting-room; clean
+sheets, well aired; good food, well cooked; payment per week in
+advance.”
+
+The pebble dropped into deep water speaks of its depth by the tardy
+arrival of bubbles on the surface, and, in like manner, the very simple
+question put by Mr. Van Diemen Smith pursued its course of penetration
+in the assembled mind in the carpenter’s shop for a considerable period,
+with no sign to show that it had reached the bottom.
+
+“Surely, papa, we can go to an inn? There must be some hotel,” said his
+daughter.
+
+“There’s good accommodation at the Cliff Hotel hard by,” said
+Crickledon.
+
+“But,” said one of his friends, “if you don’t want to go so far, sir,
+there’s Master Crickledon’s own house next door, and his wife lets
+lodgings, and there’s not a better cook along this coast.”
+
+“Then why did n’t the man mention it? Is he afraid of having me?”
+ asked Mr. Smith, a little thunderingly. “I may n’t be known much yet
+in England; but I’ll tell you, you inquire the route to Mr. Van Diemen
+Smith over there in Australia.”
+
+“Yes, papa,” interrupted his daughter, “only you must consider that it
+may not be convenient to take us in at this hour--so late.”
+
+“It’s not that, miss, begging your pardon,” said Crickledon. “I make a
+point of never recommending my own house. That’s where it is. Otherwise
+you’re welcome to try us.”
+
+“I was thinking of falling bounce on my old schoolmate, and putting Old
+English hospitality to the proof,” Mr. Smith meditated. “But it’s late.
+Yes, and that confounded glass! No, we’ll bide with you, Mr. Carpenter.
+I’ll send my card across to Mart Tinman to-morrow, and set him agog at
+his breakfast.”
+
+Mr. Van Diemen Smith waved his hand for Crickledon to lead the way.
+
+Hereupon Ned Crummins looked up from the card he had been turning over
+and over, more and more like one arriving at a condemnatory judgment of
+a fish.
+
+“I can’t go and give my master a card instead of his glass,” he
+remarked.
+
+“Yes, that reminds me; and I should like to know what you meant by
+bringing that glass away from Mr. Tinman’s house at night,” said Mr.
+Smith. “If I’m to pay for it, I’ve a right to know. What’s the meaning
+of moving it at night? Eh, let’s hear. Night’s not the time for moving
+big glasses like that. I’m not so sure I haven’t got a case.”
+
+“If you’ll step round to my master along o’ me, sir,” said Crummins,
+“perhaps he’ll explain.”
+
+Crummins was requested to state who his master was, and he replied,
+“Phippun and Company;” but Mr. Smith positively refused to go with him.
+
+“But here,” said he, “is a crown for you, for you’re a civil fellow.
+You’ll know where to find me in the morning; and mind, I shall expect
+Phippun and Company to give me a very good account of their reason for
+moving a big looking-glass on a night like this. There, be off.”
+
+The crown-piece in his hand effected a genial change in Crummins’
+disposition to communicate. Crickledon spoke to him about the glass; two
+or three of the others present jogged him. “What did Mr. Tinman want
+by having the glass moved so late in the day, Ned? Your master wasn’t
+nervous about his property, was he?”
+
+“Not he,” said Crummins, and began to suck down his upper lip and
+agitate his eyelids and stand uneasily, glimmering signs of the setting
+in of the tide of narration.
+
+He caught the eye of Mr. Smith, then looked abashed at Miss.
+
+Crickledon saw his dilemma. “Say what’s uppermost, Ned; never mind how
+you says it. English is English. Mr. Tinman sent for you to take the
+glass away, now, did n’t he?”
+
+“He did,” said Crummins.
+
+“And you went to him.”
+
+“Ay, that I did.”
+
+“And he fastened the chiwal glass upon your back”
+
+“He did that.”
+
+“That’s all plain sailing. Had he bought the glass?”
+
+“No, he had n’t bought it. He’d hired it.”
+
+As when upon an enforced visit to the dentist, people have had one
+tooth out, the remaining offenders are more willingly submitted to the
+operation, insomuch that a poetical licence might hazard the statement
+that they shed them like leaves of the tree, so Crummins, who had shrunk
+from speech, now volunteered whole sentences in succession, and how
+important they were deemed by his fellow-townsman, Mr. Smith, and
+especially Miss Annette Smith, could perceive in their ejaculations,
+before they themselves were drawn into the strong current of interest.
+
+And this was the matter: Tinman had hired the glass for three days.
+Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had
+despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass
+out of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there
+was a fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection;
+and he was at that moment awaiting the arrival of another chiwal-glass.
+
+“Cut along, Ned,” said Crickledon.
+
+“What the deuce does he want with a chiwal-glass at all?” cried Mr.
+Smith, endangering the flow of the story by suggesting to the narrator
+that he must “hark back,” which to him was equivalent to the jumping of
+a chasm hindward. Happily his brain had seized a picture:
+
+“Mr. Tinman, he’s a-standin’ in his best Court suit.”
+
+Mr. Tinmau’s old schoolmate gave a jump; and no wonder.
+
+“Standing?” he cried; and as the act of standing was really not
+extraordinary, he fixed upon the suit: “Court?”
+
+“So Mrs. Cavely told me, it was what he was standin’ in, and as I found
+‘m I left ‘m,” said Crummins.
+
+“He’s standing in it now?” said Mr. Van Diemen Smith, with a great gape.
+
+Crummins doggedly repeated the statement. Many would have ornamented it
+in the repetition, but he was for bare flat truth.
+
+“He must be precious proud of having a Court suit,” said Mr. Smith,
+and gazed at his daughter so glassily that she smiled, though she was
+impatient to proceed to Mrs. Crickledon’s lodgings.
+
+“Oh! there’s where it is?” interjected the carpenter, with a funny
+frown at a low word from Ned Crummins. “Practicing, is he? Mr. Tinman’s
+practicing before the glass preparatory to his going to the palace in
+London.”
+
+“He gave me a shillin’,” said Crummins.
+
+Crickledon comprehended him immediately. “We sha’n’t speak about it,
+Ned.”
+
+What did you see? was thus cautiously suggested.
+
+The shilling was on Crummins’ tongue to check his betrayal of the secret
+scene. But remembering that he had only witnessed it by accident, and
+that Mr. Tinman had not completely taken him into his confidence, he
+thrust his hand down his pocket to finger the crown-piece lying in
+fellowship with the coin it multiplied five times, and was inspired to
+think himself at liberty to say: “All I saw was when the door opened.
+Not the house-door. It was the parlour-door. I saw him walk up to the
+glass, and walk back from the glass. And when he’d got up to the glass
+he bowed, he did, and he went back’ards just so.”
+
+Doubtless the presence of a lady was the active agent that prevented
+Crummins from doubling his body entirely, and giving more than a rapid
+indication of the posture of Mr. Tinman in his retreat before the glass.
+But it was a glimpse of broad burlesque, and though it was received with
+becoming sobriety by the men in the carpenter’s shop, Annette plucked at
+her father’s arm.
+
+She could not get him to depart. That picture of his old schoolmate
+Martin Tinman practicing before a chiwal glass to present himself at the
+palace in his Court suit, seemed to stupefy his Australian intelligence.
+
+“What right has he got to go to Court?” Mr. Van Diemen Smith inquired,
+like the foreigner he had become through exile.
+
+“Mr. Tinman’s bailiff of the town,” said Crickledon.
+
+“And what was his objection to that glass I smashed?”
+
+“He’s rather an irritable gentleman,” Crickledon murmured, and turned to
+Crummins.
+
+Crummins growled: “He said it was misty, and gave him a twist.”
+
+“What a big fool he must be! eh?” Mr. Smith glanced at Crickledon and
+the other faces for the verdict of Tinman’s townsmen upon his character.
+
+They had grounds for thinking differently of Tinman.
+
+“He’s no fool,” said Crickledon.
+
+Another shook his head. “Sharp at a bargain.”
+
+“That he be,” said the chorus.
+
+Mr. Smith was informed that Mr. Tinman would probably end by buying up
+half the town.
+
+“Then,” said Mr. Smith, “he can afford to pay half the money for that
+glass, and pay he shall.”
+
+A serious view of the recent catastrophe was presented by his
+declaration.
+
+In the midst of a colloquy regarding the cost of the glass, during
+which it began to be seen by Mr. Tinman’s townsmen that there was
+laughing-stuff for a year or so in the scene witnessed by Crummins,
+if they postponed a bit their right to the laugh and took it in doses,
+Annette induced her father to signal to Crickledon his readiness to go
+and see the lodgings. No sooner had he done it than he said, “What
+on earth made us wait all this time here? I’m hungry, my dear; I want
+supper.”
+
+“That is because you have had a disappointment. I know you, papa,” said
+Annette.
+
+“Yes, it’s rather a damper about old Mart Tinman,” her father assented.
+“Or else I have n’t recovered the shock of smashing that glass, and
+visit it on him. But, upon my honour, he’s my only friend in England,
+I have n’t a single relative that I know of, and to come and find your
+only friend making a donkey of himself, is enough to make a man think of
+eating and drinking.”
+
+Annette murmured reproachfully: “We can hardly say he is our only friend
+in England, papa, can we?”
+
+“Do you mean that young fellow? You’ll take my appetite away if you talk
+of him. He’s a stranger. I don’t believe he’s worth a penny. He owns
+he’s what he calls a journalist.”
+
+These latter remarks were hurriedly exchanged at the threshold of
+Crickledon’s house.
+
+“It don’t look promising,” said Mr. Smith.
+
+“I didn’t recommend it,” said Crickledon.
+
+“Why the deuce do you let your lodgings, then?”
+
+“People who have come once come again.”
+
+“Oh! I am in England,” Annette sighed joyfully, feeling at home in some
+trait she had detected in Crickledon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The story of the shattered chiwal-glass and the visit of Tinman’s old
+schoolmate fresh from Australia, was at many a breakfast-table before.
+Tinman heard a word of it, and when he did he had no time to spare for
+such incidents, for he was reading to his widowed sister Martha, in
+an impressive tone, at a tolerably high pitch of the voice, and with a
+suppressed excitement that shook away all things external from his mind
+as violently as it agitated his body. Not the waves without but the
+engine within it is which gives the shock and tremor to the crazy
+steamer, forcing it to cut through the waves and scatter them to spray;
+and so did Martin Tinman make light of the external attack of the card
+of VAN DIEMEN SMITH, and its pencilled line: “An old chum of yours,
+eh, matey?” Even the communication of Phippun & Co. concerning the
+chiwal-glass, failed to divert him from his particular task. It was
+indeed a public duty; and the chiwal-glass, though pertaining to it, was
+a private business. He that has broken the glass, let that man pay for
+it, he pronounced--no doubt in simpler fashion, being at his ease in his
+home, but with the serenity of one uplifted. As to the name VAN DIEMEN
+SMITH, he knew it not, and so he said to himself while accurately
+recollecting the identity of the old chum who alone of men would have
+thought of writing eh, matey?
+
+Mr. Van Diemen Smith did not present the card in person. “At
+Crickledon’s,” he wrote, apparently expecting the bailiff of the town to
+rush over to him before knowing who he was.
+
+Tinman was far too busy. Anybody can read plain penmanship or print, but
+ask anybody not a Cabinet Minister or a Lord-in-Waiting to read out loud
+and clear in a Palace, before a Throne. Oh! the nature of reading is
+distorted in a trice, and as Tinman said to his worthy sister: “I can do
+it, but I must lose no time in preparing myself.” Again, at a reperusal,
+he informed her: “I must habituate myself.” For this purpose he had put
+on the suit overnight.
+
+The articulation of faultless English was his object. His sister Martha
+sat vice-regally to receive his loyal congratulations on the illustrious
+marriage, and she was pensive, less nervous than her brother from not
+having to speak continuously, yet somewhat perturbed. She also had her
+task, and it was to avoid thinking herself the Person addressed by her
+suppliant brother, while at the same time she took possession of
+the scholarly training and perfect knowledge of diction and rules of
+pronunciation which would infallibly be brought to bear on him in the
+terrible hour of the delivery of the Address. It was no small task
+moreover to be compelled to listen right through to the end of the
+Address, before the very gentlest word of criticism was allowed. She did
+not exactly complain of the renewal of the rehearsal: a fatigue can be
+endured when it is a joy. What vexed her was her failing memory for the
+points of objection, as in her imagined High Seat she conceived them;
+for, in painful truth, the instant her brother had finished she entirely
+lost her acuteness of ear, and with that her recollection: so there
+was nothing to do but to say: “Excellent! Quite unobjectionable, dear
+Martin, quite:” so she said, and emphatically; but the addition of the
+word “only” was printed on her contracted brow, and every faculty
+of Tinman’s mind and nature being at strain just then, he asked her
+testily: “What now? what’s the fault now?” She assured him with languor
+that there was not a fault. “It’s not your way of talking,” said he, and
+what he said was true. His discernment was extraordinary; generally he
+noticed nothing.
+
+Not only were his perceptions quickened by the preparations for the
+day of great splendour: day of a great furnace to be passed through
+likewise!--he, was learning English at an astonishing rate into the
+bargain. A pronouncing Dictionary lay open on his table. To this he flew
+at a hint of a contrary method, and disputes, verifications and triumphs
+on one side and the other ensued between brother and sister. In his
+heart the agitated man believed his sister to be a misleading guide.
+He dared not say it, he thought it, and previous to his African travel
+through the Dictionary he had thought his sister infallible on these
+points. He dared not say it, because he knew no one else before whom he
+could practice, and as it was confidence that he chiefly wanted--above
+all things, confidence and confidence comes of practice, he preferred
+the going on with his practice to an absolute certainty as to
+correctness.
+
+At midday came another card from Mr. Van Diemen Smith bearing the
+superscription: alias Phil R.
+
+“Can it be possible,” Tinman asked his sister, “that Philip Ribstone has
+had the audacity to return to this country? I think,” he added, “I am
+right in treating whoever sends me this card as a counterfeit.”
+
+Martha’s advice was, that he should take no notice of the card.
+
+“I am seriously engaged,” said Tinman. With a “Now then, dear,” he
+resumed his labours.
+
+Messages had passed between Tinman and Phippun; and in the afternoon
+Phippun appeared to broach the question of payment for the chiwal-glass.
+He had seen Mr. Van Diemen Smith, had found him very strange, rather
+impracticable. He was obliged to tell Tinman that he must hold him
+responsible for the glass; nor could he send a second until payment was
+made for the first. It really seemed as if Tinman would be compelled, by
+the force of circumstances, to go and shake his old friend by the hand.
+Otherwise one could clearly see the man might be off: he might be off
+at any minute, leaving a legal contention behind him. On the other hand,
+supposing he had come to Crikswich for assistance in money? Friendship
+is a good thing, and so is hospitality, which is an essentially English
+thing, and consequently one that it behoves an Englishman to think it
+his duty to perform, but we do not extend it to paupers. But should a
+pauper get so close to us as to lay hold of us, vowing he was once our
+friend, how shake him loose? Tinman foresaw that it might be a matter of
+five pounds thrown to the dogs, perhaps ten, counting the glass. He
+put on his hat, full of melancholy presentiments; and it was exactly
+half-past five o’clock of the spring afternoon when he knocked at
+Crickledon’s door.
+
+Had he looked into Crickledon’s shop as he went by, he would have
+perceived Van Diemen Smith astride a piece of timber, smoking a pipe.
+Van Diemen saw Tinman. His eyes cocked and watered. It is a disgraceful
+fact to record of him without periphrasis. In truth, the bearded fellow
+was almost a woman at heart, and had come from the Antipodes throbbing
+to slap Martin Tinman on the back, squeeze his hand, run over England
+with him, treat him, and talk of old times in the presence of a trotting
+regiment of champagne. That affair of the chiwal-glass had temporarily
+damped his enthusiasm. The absence of a reply to his double transmission
+of cards had wounded him; and something in the look of Tinman disgusted
+his rough taste. But the well-known features recalled the days of
+youth. Tinman was his one living link to the country he admired as the
+conqueror of the world, and imaginatively delighted in as the seat of
+pleasures, and he could not discard the feeling of some love for Tinman
+without losing his grasp of the reason why, he had longed so fervently
+and travelled so breathlessly to return hither. In the days of their
+youth, Van Diemen had been Tinman’s cordial spirit, at whom he sipped
+for cheerful visions of life, and a good honest glow of emotion now and
+then. Whether it was odd or not that the sipper should be oblivious, and
+the cordial spirit heartily reminiscent of those times, we will not stay
+to inquire.
+
+Their meeting took place in Crickledon’s shop. Tinman was led in by Mrs.
+Crickledon. His voice made a sound of metal in his throat, and his air
+was that of a man buttoned up to the palate, as he read from the card,
+glancing over his eyelids, “Mr. Van Diemen Smith, I believe.”
+
+“Phil Ribstone, if you like,” said the other, without rising.
+
+“Oh, ah, indeed!” Tinman temperately coughed.
+
+“Yes, dear me. So it is. It strikes you as odd?”
+
+“The change of name,” said Tinman.
+
+“Not nature, though!”
+
+“Ah! Have you been long in England?”
+
+“Time to run to Helmstone, and on here. You’ve been lucky in business, I
+hear.”
+
+“Thank you; as things go. Do you think of remaining in England?”
+
+“I’ve got to settle about a glass I broke last night.”
+
+“Ah! I have heard of it. Yes, I fear there will have to be a
+settlement.”
+
+“I shall pay half of the damage. You’ll have to stump up your part.”
+
+Van Diemen smiled roguishly.
+
+“We must discuss that,” said Tinman, smiling too, as a patient in bed
+may smile at a doctor’s joke; for he was, as Crickledon had said of
+him, no fool on practical points, and Van Diemen’s mention of the
+half-payment reassured him as to his old friend’s position in the world,
+and softly thawed him. “Will you dine with me to-day?”
+
+“I don’t mind if I do. I’ve a girl. You remember little Netty? She’s
+walking out on the beach with a young fellow named Fellingham, whose
+acquaintance we made on the voyage, and has n’t left us long to
+ourselves. Will you have her as well? And I suppose you must ask him.
+He’s a newspaper man; been round the world; seen a lot.”
+
+Tinman hesitated. An electrical idea of putting sherry at fifteen
+shillings per dozen on his table instead of the ceremonial wine at
+twenty-five shillings, assisted him to say hospitably, “Oh! ah! yes; any
+friend of yours.”
+
+“And now perhaps you’ll shake my fist,” said Van Diemen.
+
+“With pleasure,” said Tinman. “It was your change of name, you know,
+Philip.”
+
+“Look here, Martin. Van Diemen Smith was a convict, and my benefactor.
+Why the deuce he was so fond of that name, I can’t tell you; but
+his dying wish was for me to take it and carry it on. He left me his
+fortune, for Van Diemen Smith to enjoy life, as he never did, poor
+fellow, when he was alive. The money was got honestly, by hard labour
+at a store. He did evil once, and repented after. But, by Heaven!”--Van
+Diemen jumped up and thundered out of a broad chest--“the man was one of
+the finest hearts that ever beat. He was! and I’m proud of him. When he
+died, I turned my thoughts home to Old England and you, Martin.”
+
+“Oh!” said Tinman; and reminded by Van Diemen’s way of speaking, that
+cordiality was expected of him, he shook his limbs to some briskness,
+and continued, “Well, yes, we must all die in our native land if we can.
+I hope you’re comfortable in your lodgings?”
+
+“I’ll give you one of Mrs. Crickledon’s dinners to try. You’re as good
+as mayor of this town, I hear?”
+
+“I am the bailiff of the town,” said Mr. Tinman.
+
+“You’re going to Court, I’m told.”
+
+“The appointment,” replied Mr. Tinman, “will soon be made. I have not
+yet an appointed day.”
+
+On the great highroad of life there is Expectation, and there is
+Attainment, and also there is Envy. Mr. Tinman’s posture stood for
+Attainment shadowing Expectation, and sunning itself in the glass
+of Envy, as he spoke of the appointed day. It was involuntary, and
+naturally evanescent, a momentary view of the spirit.
+
+He unbent, and begged to be excused for the present, that he might go
+and apprise his sister of guests coming.
+
+“All right. I daresay we shall see, enough of one another,” said Van
+Diemen. And almost before the creak of Tinman’s heels was deadened on
+the road outside the shop, he put the funny question to Crickledon, “Do
+you box?”
+
+“I make ‘em,” Crickledon replied.
+
+“Because I should like to have a go in at something, my friend.”
+
+Van Diemen stretched and yawned.
+
+Crickledon recommended the taking of a walk.
+
+“I think I will,” said the other, and turned back abruptly. “How long do
+you work in the day?”
+
+“Generally, all the hours of light,” Crickledon replied; “and always up
+to supper-time.”
+
+“You’re healthy and happy?”
+
+“Nothing to complain of.”
+
+“Good appetite?”
+
+“Pretty regular.”
+
+“You never take a holiday?”
+
+“Except Sundays.”
+
+“You’d like to be working then?”
+
+“I won’t say that.”
+
+“But you’re glad to be up Monday morning?”
+
+“It feels cheerfuller in the shop.”
+
+“And carpentering’s your joy?”
+
+“I think I may say so.”
+
+Van Diemen slapped his thigh. “There’s life in Old England yet!”
+
+Crickledon eyed him as he walked away to the beach to look for his
+daughter, and conceived that there was a touch of the soldier in him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Annette Smith’s delight in her native England made her see beauty and
+kindness everywhere around her; it put a halo about the house on the
+beach, and thrilled her at Tinman’s table when she heard the thunder of
+the waves hard by. She fancied it had been a most agreeable dinner to
+her father and Mr. Herbert Fellingham--especially to the latter, who had
+laughed very much; and she was astonished to hear them at breakfast both
+complaining of their evening. In answer to which, she exclaimed, “Oh, I
+think the situation of the house is so romantic!”
+
+“The situation of the host is exceedingly so,” said Mr. Fellingham; “but
+I think his wine the most unromantic liquid I have ever tasted.”
+
+“It must be that!” cried Van Diemen, puzzled by novel pains in the head.
+“Old Martin woke up a little like his old self after dinner.”
+
+“He drank sparingly,” said Mr. Fellingham.
+
+“I am sure you were satirical last night,” Annette said reproachfully.
+
+“On the contrary, I told him I thought he was in a romantic situation.”
+
+“But I have had a French mademoiselle for my governess and an Oxford
+gentleman for my tutor; and I know you accepted French and English from
+Mr. Tinman and his sister that I should not have approved.”
+
+“Netty,” said Van Diemen, “has had the best instruction money could
+procure; and if she says you were satirical, you may depend on it you
+were.”
+
+“Oh, in that case, of course!” Mr. Fellingham rejoined. “Who could help
+it?”
+
+He thought himself warranted in giving the rein to his wicked satirical
+spirit, and talked lightly of the accidental character of the letter H
+in Tinman’s pronunciation; of how, like somebody else’s hat in a high
+wind, it descended on somebody else’s head, and of how his words walked
+about asking one another who they were and what they were doing, danced
+together madly, snapping their fingers at signification; and so forth.
+He was flippant.
+
+Annette glanced at her father, and dropped her eyelids.
+
+Mr. Fellingham perceived that he was enjoined to be on his guard.
+
+He went one step farther in his fun; upon which Van Diemen said, with a
+frown, “If you please!”
+
+Nothing could withstand that.
+
+“Hang old Mart Tinman’s wine!” Van Diemen burst out in the dead pause.
+“My head’s a bullet. I’m in a shocking bad temper. I can hardly see. I’m
+bilious.”
+
+Mr. Fellingham counselled his lying down for an hour, and he went
+grumbling, complaining of Mart Tinman’s incredulity about the towering
+beauty of a place in Australia called Gippsland.
+
+Annette confided to Mr. Fellingham, as soon as they were alone,
+the chivalrous nature of her father in his friendships, and his
+indisposition to hear a satirical remark upon his old schoolmate, the
+moment he understood it to be satire.
+
+Fellingham pleaded: “The man’s a perfect burlesque. He’s as distinctly
+made to be laughed at as a mask in a pantomime.”
+
+“Papa will not think so,” said Annette; “and papa has been told that he
+is not to be laughed at as a man of business.”
+
+“Do you prize him for that?”
+
+“I am no judge. I am too happy to be in England to be a judge of
+anything.”
+
+“You did not touch his wine!”
+
+“You men attach so much importance to wine!”
+
+“They do say that powders is a good thing after Mr. Tinman’s wine,”
+ observed Mrs. Crickledon, who had come into the sitting-room to take
+away the breakfast things.
+
+Mr. Fellingham gave a peal of laughter; but Mrs Crickledon bade him be
+hushed, for Mr. Van Diemen Smith had gone to lay down his poor aching
+head on his pillow. Annette ran upstairs to speak to her father about a
+doctor.
+
+During her absence, Mr. Fellingham received the popular portrait of Mr.
+Tinman from the lips of Mrs. Crickledon. He subsequently strolled to the
+carpenter’s shop, and endeavoured to get a confirmation of it.
+
+“My wife talks too much,” said Crickledon.
+
+When questioned by a gentleman, however, he was naturally bound to
+answer to the extent of his knowledge.
+
+“What a funny old country it is!” Mr. Fellingham said to Annette, on
+their walk to the beach.
+
+She implored him not to laugh at anything English.
+
+“I don’t, I assure you,” said he. “I love the country, too. But when
+one comes back from abroad, and plunges into their daily life, it’s
+difficult to retain the real figure of the old country seen from
+outside, and one has to remember half a dozen great names to right
+oneself. And Englishmen are so funny! Your father comes here to see his
+old friend, and begins boasting of the Gippsland he has left behind.
+Tinman immediately brags of Helvellyn, and they fling mountains at one
+another till, on their first evening together, there’s earthquake and
+rupture--they were nearly at fisticuffs at one time.”
+
+“Oh! surely no,” said Annette. “I did not hear them. They were good
+friends when you came to the drawingroom. Perhaps the wine did affect
+poor papa, if it was bad wine. I wish men would never drink any. How
+much happier they would be.”
+
+“But then there would cease to be social meetings in England. What
+should we do?”
+
+“I know that is a sneer; and you were nearly as enthusiastic as I was on
+board the vessel,” Annette said, sadly.
+
+“Quite true. I was. But see what quaint creatures we have about us!
+Tinman practicing in his Court suit before the chiwal-glass! And that
+good fellow, the carpenter, Crickledon, who has lived with the sea
+fronting him all his life, and has never been in a boat, and he
+confesses he has only once gone inland, and has never seen an acorn!”
+
+“I wish I could see one--of a real English oak,” said Annette.
+
+“And after being in England a few months you will be sighing for the
+Continent.”
+
+“Never!”
+
+“You think you will be quite contented here?”
+
+“I am sure I shall be. May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not
+feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia; but it would
+be like death to me now. Oh!” Annette shivered, as with the exile’s
+chill.
+
+“On my honour,” said Mr. Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind
+in his teeth, “I love the old country ten times more from your love of
+it.”
+
+“That is not how I want England to be loved,” returned Annette.
+
+“The love is in your hands.”
+
+She seemed indifferent on hearing it.
+
+He should have seen that the way to woo her was to humour her
+prepossession by another passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in
+the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account of his wine, to
+which he continued angrily to attribute as unwonted dizziness of the
+head and slight irascibility, made him urgent in his desire that she
+should separate herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division
+of derision.
+
+Annette declined to laugh at the most risible caricatures of Tinman. In
+her antagonism she forced her simplicity so far as to say that she did
+not think him absurd. And supposing Mr. Tinman to have proposed to the
+titled widow, Lady Ray, as she had heard, and to other ladies young and
+middle-aged in the neighbourhood, why should he not, if he wished to
+marry? If he was economical, surely he had a right to manage his own
+affairs. Her dread was lest Mr. Tinman and her father should quarrel
+over the payment for the broken chiwal-glass: that she honestly
+admitted, and Fellingham was so indiscreet as to roar aloud, not so very
+cordially.
+
+Annette thought him unkindly satirical; and his thoughts of her reduced
+her to the condition of a commonplace girl with expressive eyes.
+
+She had to return to her father. Mr. Fellingham took a walk on the
+springy turf along the cliffs; and “certainly she is a commonplace
+girl,” he began by reflecting; with a side eye at the fact that his
+meditations were excited by Tinman’s poisoning of his bile. “A girl
+who can’t see the absurdity of Tinman must be destitute of common
+intelligence.” After a while he sniffed the fine sharp air of mingled
+earth and sea delightedly, and he strode back to the town late in the
+afternoon, laughing at himself in scorn of his wretched susceptibility
+to bilious impressions, and really all but hating Tinman as the cause
+of his weakness--in the manner of the criminal hating the detective,
+perhaps. He cast it altogether on Tinman that Annette’s complexion
+of character had become discoloured to his mind; for, in spite of
+the physical freshness with which he returned to her society, he was
+incapable of throwing off the idea of her being commonplace; and it
+was with regret that he acknowledged he had gained from his walk only a
+higher opinion of himself.
+
+Her father was the victim of a sick headache, [Migraine--D.W.]and lay,
+a groaning man, on his bed, ministered to by Mrs. Crickledon chiefly.
+Annette had to conduct the business with Mr. Phippun and Mr. Tinman as
+to payment for the chiwal-glass. She was commissioned to offer half the
+price for the glass on her father’s part; more he would not pay. Tinman
+and Phippun sat with her in Crickledon’s cottage, and Mrs. Crickledon
+brought down two messages from her invalid, each positive, to the effect
+that he would fight with all the arms of English law rather than yield
+his point.
+
+Tinman declared it to be quite out of the question that he should pay
+a penny. Phippun vowed that from one or the other of them he would have
+the money.
+
+Annette naturally was in deep distress, and Fellingham postponed the
+discussion to the morrow.
+
+Even after such a taste of Tinman as that, Annette could not be induced
+to join in deriding him privately. She looked pained by Mr. Fellingham’s
+cruel jests. It was monstrous, Fellingham considered, that he should
+draw on himself a second reprimand from Van Diemen Smith, while they
+were consulting in entire agreement upon the case of the chiwal-glass.
+
+“I must tell you this, mister sir,” said Van Diemen, “I like you, but
+I’ll be straightforward and truthful, or I’m not worthy the name of
+Englishman; and I do like you, or I should n’t have given you leave to
+come down here after us two. You must respect my friend if you care for
+my respect. That’s it. There it is. Now you know my conditions.”
+
+“I ‘m afraid I can’t sign the treaty,” said Fellingham.
+
+“Here’s more,” said Van Diemen. “I’m a chilly man myself if I hear a
+laugh and think I know the aim of it. I’ll meet what you like except
+scorn. I can’t stand contempt. So I feel for another. And now you know.”
+
+“It puts a stopper on the play of fancy, and checks the throwing off of
+steam,” Fellingham remonstrated. “I promise to do my best, but of all
+the men I’ve ever met in my life--Tinman!--the ridiculous! Pray pardon
+me; but the donkey and his looking-glass! The glass was misty! He--as
+particular about his reflection in the glass as a poet with his verses!
+Advance, retire, bow; and such murder of the Queen’s English in the very
+presence! If I thought he was going to take his wine with him, I’d have
+him arrested for high treason.”
+
+“You’ve chosen, and you know what you best like,” said Van Diemen,
+pointing his accents--by which is produced the awkward pause, the
+pitfall of conversation, and sometimes of amity.
+
+Thus it happened that Mr. Herbert Fellingham journeyed back to London
+a day earlier than he had intended, and without saying what he meant to
+say.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A month later, after a night of sharp frost on the verge of the warmer
+days of spring, Mr. Fellingham entered Crikswich under a sky of perfect
+blue that was in brilliant harmony with the green downs, the white
+cliffs and sparkling sea, and no doubt it was the beauty before his
+eyes which persuaded him of his delusion in having taken Annette for
+a commonplace girl. He had come in a merely curious mood to discover
+whether she was one or not. Who but a commonplace girl would care to
+reside in Crikswich, he had asked himself; and now he was full sure that
+no commonplace girl would ever have had the idea. Exquisitely simple,
+she certainly was; but that may well be a distinction in a young lady
+whose eyes are expressive.
+
+The sound of sawing attracted him to Crickledon’s shop, and the
+industrious carpenter soon put him on the tide of affairs.
+
+Crickledon pointed to the house on the beach as the place where Mr. Van
+Diemen Smith and his daughter were staying.
+
+“Dear me! and how does he look?” said Fellingham.
+
+“Our town seems to agree with him, sir.”
+
+“Well, I must not say any more, I suppose.” Fellingham checked his
+tongue. “How have they settled that dispute about the chiwal-glass?”
+
+“Mr. Tinman had to give way.”
+
+“Really.”
+
+“But,” Crickledon stopped work, “Mr. Tinman sold him a meadow.”
+
+“I see.”
+
+“Mr. Smith has been buying a goodish bit of ground here. They tell me
+he’s about purchasing Elba. He has bought the Crouch. He and Mr. Tinman
+are always out together. They’re over at Helmstone now. They’ve been to
+London.”
+
+“Are they likely to be back to-day?”
+
+“Certain, I should think. Mr. Tinman has to be in London to-morrow.”
+
+Crickledon looked. He was not the man to look artful, but there was a
+lighted corner in his look that revived Fellingham’s recollections, and
+the latter burst out:
+
+“The Address? I ‘d half forgotten it. That’s not over yet? Has he been
+practicing much?”
+
+“No more glasses ha’ been broken.”
+
+“And how is your wife, Crickledon?”
+
+“She’s at home, sir, ready for a talk, if you’ve a mind to try her.”
+
+Mrs. Crickledon proved to be very ready. “That Tinman,” was her theme.
+He had taken away her lodgers, and she knew his objects. Mr. Smith
+repented of leaving her, she knew, though he dared not say it in plain
+words. She knew Miss Smith was tired to death of constant companionship
+with Mrs. Cavely, Tinman’s sister. She generally came once in the day
+just to escape from Mrs. Cavely, who would not, bless you! step into
+a cottager’s house where she was not allowed to patronize. Fortunately
+Miss Smith had induced her father to get his own wine from the
+merchants.
+
+“A happy resolution,” said Fellingham; “and a saving one.”
+
+He heard further that Mr. Smith would take possession of the Crouch next
+month, and that Mrs. Cavely hung over Miss Smith like a kite.
+
+“And that old Tinman, old enough to be her father!” said Mrs.
+Crickledon.
+
+She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas. Fellingham, though a man,
+and an Englishman, was nervously wakeful enough to see the connection.
+
+“They’ll have to consult the young lady first, ma’am.”
+
+“If it’s her father’s nod she’ll bow to it; now mark me,” Mrs.
+Crickledon said, with emphasis. “She’s a young lady who thinks for
+herself, but she takes her start from her father where it’s feeling. And
+he’s gone stone-blind over that Tinman.”
+
+While they were speaking, Annette appeared.
+
+“I saw you,” she said to Fellingham; gladly and openly, in the most
+commonplace manner.
+
+“Are you going to give me a walk along the beach?” said he.
+
+She proposed the country behind the town, and that was quite as much to
+his taste. But it was not a happy walk. He had decided that he admired
+her, and the notion of having Tinman for a rival annoyed him. He
+overflowed with ridicule of Tinman, and this was distressing to Annette,
+because not only did she see that he would not control himself before
+her father, but he kindled her own satirical spirit in opposition to her
+father’s friendly sentiments toward his old schoolmate.
+
+“Mr. Tinman has been extremely hospitable to us,” she said, a little
+coldly.
+
+“May I ask you, has he consented to receive instruction in deportment
+and pronunciation?”
+
+Annette did not answer.
+
+“If practice makes perfect, he must be near the mark by this time.”
+
+She continued silent.
+
+“I dare say, in domestic life, he’s as amiable as he is hospitable, and
+it must be a daily gratification to see him in his Court suit.”
+
+“I have not seen him in his Court suit.”
+
+“That is his coyness.”
+
+“People talk of those things.”
+
+“The common people scandalize the great, about whom they know nothing,
+you mean! I am sure that is true, and living in Courts one must be
+keenly aware of it. But what a splendid sky and-sea!”
+
+“Is it not?”
+
+Annette echoed his false rapture with a candour that melted him.
+
+He was preparing to make up for lost time, when the wild waving of a
+parasol down a road to the right, coming from the town, caused Annette
+to stop and say, “I think that must be Mrs. Cavely. We ought to meet
+her.”
+
+Fellingham asked why.
+
+“She is so fond of walks,” Anisette replied, with a tooth on her lip
+
+Fellingham thought she seemed fond of runs.
+
+Mrs. Cavely joined them, breathless. “My dear! the pace you go at!” she
+shouted. “I saw you starting. I followed, I ran, I tore along. I feared
+I never should catch you. And to lose such a morning of English scenery!
+
+“Is it not heavenly?”
+
+“One can’t say more,” Fellingham observed, bowing.
+
+“I am sure I am very glad to see you again, sir. You enjoy Crikswich?”
+
+“Once visited, always desired, like Venice, ma’am. May I venture to
+inquire whether Mr. Tinman has presented his Address?”
+
+“The day after to-morrow. The appointment is made with him,” said Mrs.
+Cavely, more officially in manner, “for the day after to-morrow. He is
+excited, as you may well believe. But Mr. Smith is an immense relief
+to him--the very distraction he wanted. We have become one family, you
+know.”
+
+“Indeed, ma’am, I did not know it,” said Fellingham.
+
+The communication imparted such satiric venom to his further remarks,
+that Annette resolved to break her walk and dismiss him for the day.
+
+He called at the house on the beach after the dinner-hour, to see
+Mr. Van Diemen Smith, when there was literally a duel between him and
+Tinman; for Van Diemen’s contribution to the table was champagne, and
+that had been drunk, but Tinman’s sherry remained. Tinman would insist
+on Fellingham’s taking a glass. Fellingham parried him with a sedate
+gravity of irony that was painfully perceptible to Anisette. Van
+Diemen at last backed Tinman’s hospitable intent, and, to Fellingham’s
+astonishment, he found that he had been supposed by these two men to be
+bashfully retreating from a seductive offer all the time that his tricks
+of fence and transpiercings of one of them had been marvels of skill.
+
+Tinman pushed the glass into his hand.
+
+“You have spilt some,” said Fellingham.
+
+“It won’t hurt the carpet,” said Tinman.
+
+“Won’t it?” Fellingham gazed at the carpet, as if expecting a flame to
+arise.
+
+He then related the tale of the magnanimous Alexander drinking off the
+potion, in scorn of the slanderer, to show faith in his friend.
+
+“Alexander--Who was that?” said Tinman, foiled in his historical
+recollections by the absence of the surname.
+
+“General Alexander,” said Fellingham. “Alexander Philipson, or he
+declared it was Joveson; and very fond of wine. But his sherry did for
+him at last.”
+
+“Ah! he drank too much, then,” said Tinman.
+
+“Of his own!”
+
+Anisette admonished the vindictive young gentleman by saying, “How long
+do you stay in Crikswich, Mr. Fellingham?”
+
+He had grossly misconducted himself. But an adversary at once offensive
+and helpless provokes brutality. Anisette prudently avoided letting her
+father understand that satire was in the air; and neither he nor Tinman
+was conscious of it exactly: yet both shrank within themselves under the
+sensation of a devilish blast blowing. Fellingham accompanied them and
+certain jurats to London next day.
+
+Yes, if you like: when a mayor visits Majesty, it is an important
+circumstance, and you are at liberty to argue at length that it means
+more than a desire on his part to show his writing power and his reading
+power: it is full of comfort the people, as an exhibition of their
+majesty likewise; and it is an encouragement to men to strive to
+become mayors, bailiffs, or prime men of any sort; but a stress in the
+reporting of it--the making it appear too important a circumstance--will
+surely breathe the intimation to a politically-minded people that satire
+is in the air, and however dearly they cherish the privilege of knocking
+at the first door of the kingdom, and walking ceremoniously in to read
+their writings, they will, if they are not in one of their moods for
+prostration, laugh. They will laugh at the report.
+
+All the greater reason is it that we should not indulge them at such
+periods; and I say woe’s me for any brother of the pen, and one in some
+esteem, who dressed the report of that presentation of the Address of
+congratulation by Mr. Bailiff Tinman, of Crikswich! Herbert Fellingham
+wreaked his personal spite on Tinman. He should have bethought him that
+it involved another than Tinman that is to say, an office--which the
+fitful beast rejoices to paw and play with contemptuously now and then,
+one may think, as a solace to his pride, and an indemnification for
+those caprices of abject worship so strongly recalling the days we see
+through Mr. Darwin’s glasses.
+
+He should not have written the report. It sent a titter over England.
+He was so unwise as to despatch a copy of the newspaper containing it
+to Van Diemen Smith. Van Diemen perused it with satisfaction. So did
+Tinman. Both of these praised the able young writer. But they handed the
+paper to the Coastguard Lieutenant, who asked Tinman how he liked it;
+and visitors were beginning to drop in to Crikswich, who made a point of
+asking for a sight of the chief man; and then came a comic publication,
+all in the Republican tone of the time, with Man’s Dignity for the
+standpoint, and the wheezy laughter residing in old puns to back it, in
+eulogy of the satiric report of the famous Address of congratulation of
+the Bailiff of Crikswich.
+
+“Annette,” Van Diemen said to his daughter, “you’ll not encourage that
+newspaper fellow to come down here any more. He had his warning.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+One of the most difficult lessons for spirited young men to learn is,
+that good jokes are not always good policy. They have to be paid for,
+like good dinners, though dinner and joke shall seem to have been at
+somebody else’s expense. Young Fellingham was treated rudely by Van
+Diemen Smith, and with some cold reserve by Annette: in consequence of
+which he thought her more than ever commonplace. He wrote her a
+letter of playful remonstrance, followed by one that appealed to her
+sentiments.
+
+But she replied to neither of them. So his visits to Crikswich came to
+an end.
+
+Shall a girl who has no appreciation of fun affect us? Her expressive
+eyes, and her quaint simplicity, and her enthusiasm for England, haunted
+Mr. Fellingham; being conjured up by contrast with what he met about
+him. But shall a girl who would impose upon us the task of holding
+in our laughter at Tinman be much regretted? There could be no
+companionship between us, Fellingham thought.
+
+On an excursion to the English Lakes he saw the name of Van Diemen
+Smith in a visitors’ book, and changed his ideas on the subject of
+companionship. Among mountains, or on the sea, or reading history,
+Annette was one in a thousand. He happened to be at a public ball
+at Helmstone in the Winter season, and who but Annette herself came
+whirling before him on the arm of an officer! Fellingham did not miss
+his chance of talking to her. She greeted him gaily, and speaking with
+the excitement of the dance upon her, appeared a stranger to the serious
+emotions he was willing to cherish. She had been to the Lakes and to
+Scotland. Next summer she was going to Wales. All her experiences were
+delicious. She was insatiable, but satisfied.
+
+“I wish I had been with you,” said Fellingham.
+
+“I wish you had,” said she.
+
+Mrs. Cavely was her chaperon at the ball, and he was not permitted to
+enjoy a lengthened conversation sitting with Annette. What was he to
+think of a girl who could be submissive to Mrs. Cavely, and danced with
+any number of officers, and had no idea save of running incessantly
+over England in the pursuit of pleasure? Her tone of saying, “I wish
+you had,” was that of the most ordinary of wishes, distinctly, if not
+designedly different from his own melodious depth.
+
+She granted him one waltz, and he talked of her father and his whimsical
+vagrancies and feeling he had a positive liking for Van Diemen, and he
+sagaciously said so.
+
+Annette’s eyes brightened. “Then why do you never go to see him? He has
+bought Elba. We move into the Hall after Christmas. We are at the Crouch
+at present. Papa will be sure to make you welcome. Do you not know that
+he never forgets a friend or breaks a friendship?”
+
+“I do, and I love him for it,” said Fellingham.
+
+If he was not greatly mistaken a gentle pressure on the fingers of his
+left hand rewarded him.
+
+This determined him. It should here be observed that he was by birth the
+superior of Annette’s parentage, and such is the sentiment of a better
+blood that the flattery of her warm touch was needed for him to overlook
+the distinction.
+
+Two of his visits to Crikswich resulted simply in interviews and
+conversations with Mrs. Crickledon. Van Diemen and his daughter were in
+London with Tinman and Mrs. Cavely, purchasing furniture for Elba Hall.
+Mrs. Crickledon had no scruple in saying, that Mrs. Cavely meant her
+brother to inhabit the Hall, though Mr. Smith had outbid him in the
+purchase. According to her, Tinman and Mr. Smith had their differences;
+for Mr. Smith was a very outspoken gentleman, and had been known to call
+Tinman names that no man of spirit would bear if he was not scheming.
+
+Fellingham returned to London, where he roamed the streets famous for
+furniture warehouses, in the vain hope of encountering the new owner of
+Elba.
+
+Failing in this endeavour, he wrote a love-letter to Annette.
+
+It was her first. She had liked him. Her manner of thinking she might
+love him was through the reflection that no one stood in the way. The
+letter opened a world to her, broader than Great Britain.
+
+Fellingham begged her, if she thought favourably of him, to prepare her
+father for the purport of his visit. If otherwise, she was to interdict
+the visit with as little delay as possible and cut him adrift.
+
+A decided line of conduct was imperative. Yet you have seen that she was
+not in love. She was only not unwilling to be in love. And Fellingham
+was just a trifle warmed. Now mark what events will do to light the
+fires.
+
+Van Diemen and Tinman, old chums re-united, and both successful in
+life, had nevertheless, as Mrs. Crickledon said, their differences. They
+commenced with an opposition to Tinman’s views regarding the expenditure
+of town moneys. Tinman was ever for devoting them to the patriotic
+defence of “our shores;” whereas Van Diemen, pointing in detestation
+of the town sewerage reeking across the common under the beach, loudly
+called on him to preserve our lives, by way of commencement. Then Van
+Diemen precipitately purchased Elba at a high valuation, and Tinman had
+expected by waiting to buy it at his own valuation, and sell it out
+of friendly consideration to his friend afterwards, for a friendly
+consideration. Van Diemen had joined the hunt. Tinman could not mount
+a horse. They had not quarrelled, but they had snapped about these and
+other affairs. Van Diemen fancied Tinman was jealous of his wealth.
+Tinman shrewdly suspected Van Diemen to be contemptuous of his dignity.
+He suffered a loss in a loan of money; and instead of pitying him, Van
+Diemen had laughed him to scorn for expecting security for investments
+at ten per cent. The bitterness of the pinch to Tinman made him
+frightfully sensitive to strictures on his discretion. In his anguish he
+told his sister he was ruined, and she advised him to marry before the
+crash. She was aware that he exaggerated, but she repeated her advice.
+She went so far as to name the person. This is known, because she
+was overheard by her housemaid, a gossip of Mrs. Crickledon’s, the
+subsequently famous “Little Jane.”
+
+Now, Annette had shyly intimated to her father the nature of Herbert
+Fellingham’s letter, at the same time professing a perfect readiness to
+submit to his directions; and her father’s perplexity was very great,
+for Annette had rather fervently dramatized the young man’s words at the
+ball at Helmstone, which had pleasantly tickled him, and, besides,
+he liked the young man. On the other hand, he did not at all like the
+prospect of losing his daughter; and he would have desired her to be a
+lady of title. He hinted at her right to claim a high position. Annette
+shrank from the prospect, saying, “Never let me marry one who might be
+ashamed of my father!”
+
+“I shouldn’t stomach that,” said Van Diemen, more disposed in favour of
+the present suitor.
+
+Annette was now in a tremor. She had a lover; he was coming. And if he
+did not come, did it matter? Not so very much, except to her pride. And
+if he did, what was she to say to him? She felt like an actress who may
+in a few minutes be called on the stage, without knowing her part. This
+was painfully unlike love, and the poor girl feared it would be her
+conscientious duty to dismiss him--most gently, of course; and perhaps,
+should he be impetuous and picturesque, relent enough to let him hope,
+and so bring about a happy postponement of the question. Her father had
+been to a neighbouring town on business with Mr. Tinman. He knocked at
+her door at midnight; and she, in dread of she knew not what--chiefly
+that the Hour of the Scene had somehow struck--stepped out to him
+trembling. He was alone. She thought herself the most childish of
+mortals in supposing that she could have been summoned at midnight to
+declare her sentiments, and hardly noticed his gloomy depression. He
+asked her to give him five minutes; then asked her for a kiss, and told
+her to go to bed and sleep. But Annette had seen that a great present
+affliction was on him, and she would not be sent to sleep. She promised
+to listen patiently, to bear anything, to be brave. “Is it bad news from
+home?” she said, speaking of the old home where she had not left her
+heart, and where his money was invested.
+
+“It’s this, my dear Netty,” said Van Diemen, suffering her to lead him
+into her sitting-room; “we shall have to leave the shores of England.”
+
+“Then we are ruined.”
+
+“We’re not; the rascal can’t do that. We might be off to the Continent,
+or we might go to America; we’ve money. But we can’t stay here. I’ll not
+live at any man’s mercy.”
+
+“The Continent! America!” exclaimed the enthusiast for England. “Oh,
+papa, you love living in England so!”
+
+“Not so much as all that, my dear. You do, that I know. But I don’t see
+how it’s to be managed. Mart Tinman and I have been at tooth and claw
+to-day and half the night; and he has thrown off the mask, or he’s
+dashed something from my sight, I don’t know which. I knocked him down.”
+
+“Papa!”
+
+“I picked him up.”
+
+“Oh,” cried Annette, “has Mr. Tinman been hurt?”
+
+“He called me a Deserter!”
+
+Anisette shuddered.
+
+She did not know what this thing was, but the name of it opened a
+cabinet of horrors, and she touched her father timidly, to assure him of
+her constant love, and a little to reassure herself of his substantial
+identity.
+
+“And I am one,” Van Diemen made the confession at the pitch of his
+voice. “I am a Deserter; I’m liable to be branded on the back. And it’s
+in Mart Tinman’s power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in the
+sight of Crikswich, and all I can say for myself, as a man and a Briton,
+is, I did not desert before the enemy. That I swear I never would have
+done. Death, if death’s in front; but your poor mother was a handsome
+woman, my child, and there--I could not go on living in barracks and
+leaving her unprotected. I can’t tell a young woman the tale. A hundred
+pounds came on me for a legacy, as plump in my hands out of open
+heaven, and your poor mother and I saw our chance; we consulted, and we
+determined to risk it, and I got on board with her and you, and over the
+seas we went, first to shipwreck, ultimately to fortune.”
+
+Van Diemen laughed miserably. “They noticed in the hunting-field here I
+had a soldier-like seat. A soldier-like seat it’ll be, with a brand
+on it. I sha’n’t be asked to take a soldier-like seat at any of their
+tables again. I may at Mart Tinman’s, out of pity, after I’ve undergone
+my punishment. There’s a year still to run out of the twenty of my term
+of service due. He knows it; he’s been reckoning; he has me. But the
+worst cat-o’-nine-tails for me is the disgrace. To have myself pointed
+at, ‘There goes the Deserter’ He was a private in the Carbineers, and
+he deserted.’ No one’ll say, ‘Ay, but he clung to the idea of his old
+schoolmate when abroad, and came back loving him, and trusted him, and
+was deceived.”
+
+Van Diemen produced a spasmodic cough with a blow on his chest. Anisette
+was weeping.
+
+“There, now go to bed,” said he. “I wish you might have known no more
+than you did of our flight when I got you on board the ship with your
+poor mother; but you’re a young woman now, and you must help me to think
+of another cut and run, and what baggage we can scrape together in a
+jiffy, for I won’t live here at Mart Tinman’s mercy.”
+
+Drying her eyes to weep again, Annette said, when she could speak: “Will
+nothing quiet him? I was going to bother you with all sorts of silly
+questions, poor dear papa; but I see I can understand if I try. Will
+nothing--Is he so very angry? Can we not do something to pacify him? He
+is fond of money. He--oh, the thought of leaving England! Papa, it will
+kill you; you set your whole heart on England. We could--I could--could
+I not, do you not think?--step between you as a peacemaker. Mr. Tinman
+is always very courteous to me.”
+
+At these words of Annette’s, Van Diemen burst into a short snap of
+savage laughter. “But that’s far away in the background, Mr. Mart
+Tinman!” he said. “You stick to your game, I know that; but you’ll find
+me flown, though I leave a name to stink like your common behind
+me. And,” he added, as a chill reminder, “that name the name of my
+benefactor. Poor old Van Diemen! He thought it a safe bequest to make.”
+
+“It was; it is! We will stay; we will not be exiled,” said Annette. “I
+will do anything. What was the quarrel about, papa?”
+
+“The fact is, my dear, I just wanted to show him--and take down his
+pride--I’m by my Australian education a shrewder hand than his old
+country. I bought the house on the beach while he was chaffering, and
+then I sold it him at a rise when the town was looking up--only to make
+him see. Then he burst up about something I said of Australia. I will
+have the common clean. Let him live at the Crouch as my tenant if he
+finds the house on the beach in danger.”
+
+“Papa, I am sure,” Annette repeated--“sure I have influence with Mr.
+Tinman.”
+
+“There are those lips of yours shutting tight,” said her father. “Just
+listen, and they make a big O. The donkey! He owns you’ve got influence,
+and he offers he’ll be silent if you’ll pledge your word to marry him.
+I’m not sure he didn’t say, within the year. I told him to look sharp
+not to be knocked down again. Mart Tinman for my son-in-law! That’s
+an upside down of my expectations, as good as being at the antipodes
+without a second voyage back! I let him know you were engaged.”
+
+Annette gazed at her father open-mouthed, as he had predicted; now with
+a little chilly dimple at one corner of the mouth, now at another--as a
+breeze curves the leaden winter lake here and there. She could not
+get his meaning into her sight, and she sought, by looking hard, to
+understand it better; much as when some solitary maiden lady, passing
+into her bedchamber in the hours of darkness, beholds--tradition telling
+us she has absolutely beheld foot of burglar under bed; and lo! she
+stares, and, cunningly to moderate her horror, doubts, yet cannot but
+believe that there is a leg, and a trunk, and a head, and two terrible
+arms, bearing pistols, to follow. Sick, she palpitates; she compresses
+her trepidation; she coughs, perchance she sings a bar or two of an
+aria. Glancing down again, thrice horrible to her is it to discover that
+there is no foot! For had it remained, it might have been imagined a
+harmless, empty boot. But the withdrawal has a deadly significance of
+animal life....
+
+In like manner our stricken Annette perceived the object; so did she
+gradually apprehend the fact of her being asked for Tinman’s bride, and
+she could not think it credible. She half scented, she devised her
+plan of escape from another single mention of it. But on her father’s
+remarking, with a shuffle, frightened by her countenance, “Don’t listen
+to what I said, Netty. I won’t paint him blacker than he is”--then
+Annette was sure she had been proposed for by Mr. Tinman, and she
+fancied her father might have revolved it in his mind that there
+was this means of keeping Tinman silent, silent for ever, in his own
+interests.
+
+“It was not true, when you told Mr. Tinman I was engaged, papa,” she
+said.
+
+“No, I know that. Mart Tinman only half-kind of hinted. Come, I say!
+Where’s the unmarried man wouldn’t like to have a girl like you, Netty!
+They say he’s been rejected all round a circuit of fifteen miles; and
+he’s not bad-looking, neither--he looks fresh and fair. But I thought
+it as well to let him know he might get me at a disadvantage, but he
+couldn’t you. Now, don’t think about it, my love.”
+
+“Not if it is not necessary, papa,” said Annette; and employed her
+familiar sweetness in persuading him to go to bed, as though he were the
+afflicted one requiring to be petted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Round under the cliffs by the sea, facing South, are warm seats in
+winter. The sun that shines there on a day of frost wraps you as in
+a mantle. Here it was that Mr. Herbert Fellingham found Annette, a
+chalk-block for her chair, and a mound of chalk-rubble defending her
+from the keen-tipped breath of the east, now and then shadowing the
+smooth blue water, faintly, like reflections of a flight of gulls.
+
+Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies? Those
+who write of their perplexities in descriptions comical in their length
+are unkind to them, by making them appear the simplest of the creatures
+of fiction; and most of us, I am sure, would incline to believe in
+them if they were only some bit more lightly touched. Those troubled
+sentiments of our young lady of the comfortable classes are quite worthy
+of mention. Her poor little eye poring as little fishlike as possible
+upon the intricate, which she takes for the infinite, has its place in
+our history, nor should we any of us miss the pathos of it were it not
+that so large a space is claimed for the exposure. As it is, one has
+almost to fight a battle to persuade the world that she has downright
+thoughts and feelings, and really a superhuman delicacy is required
+in presenting her that she may be credible. Even then--so much being
+accomplished the thousands accustomed to chapters of her when she is in
+the situation of Annette will be disappointed by short sentences, just
+as of old the Continental eater of oysters would have been offended at
+the offer of an exchange of two live for two dozen dead ones. Annette
+was in the grand crucial position of English imaginative prose. I
+recognize it, and that to this the streamlets flow, thence pours the
+flood. But what was the plain truth? She had brought herself to think
+she ought to sacrifice herself to Tinman, and her evasions with Herbert,
+manifested in tricks of coldness alternating with tones of regret,
+ended, as they had commenced, in a mysterious half-sullenness. She had
+hardly a word to say. Let me step in again to observe that she had at
+the moment no pointed intention of marrying Tinman. To her mind the
+circumstances compelled her to embark on the idea of doing so, and
+she saw the extremity in an extreme distance, as those who are taking
+voyages may see death by drowning. Still she had embarked.
+
+“At all events, I have your word for it that you don’t dislike me?” said
+Herbert.
+
+“Oh! no,” she sighed. She liked him as emigrants the land they are
+leaving.
+
+“And you have not promised your hand?”
+
+“No,” she said, but sighed in thinking that if she could be induced to
+promise it, there would not be a word of leaving England.
+
+“Then, as you are not engaged, and don’t hate me, I have a chance?” he
+said, in the semi-wailful interrogative of an organ making a mere windy
+conclusion.
+
+Ocean sent up a tiny wave at their feet.
+
+“A day like this in winter is rarer than a summer day,” Herbert resumed
+encouragingly.
+
+Annette was replying, “People abuse our climate--”
+
+But the thought of having to go out away from this climate in the
+darkness of exile, with her father to suffer under it worse than
+herself, overwhelmed her, and fetched the reality of her sorrow in
+the form of Tinman swimming before her soul with the velocity of a
+telegraph-pole to the window of the flying train. It was past as soon as
+seen, but it gave her a desperate sensation of speed.
+
+She began to feel that this was life in earnest.
+
+And Herbert should have been more resolute, fierier. She needed a strong
+will.
+
+But he was not on the rapids of the masterful passion. For though going
+at a certain pace, it was by his own impulsion; and I am afraid I must,
+with many apologies, compare him to the skater--to the skater on easy,
+slippery ice, be it understood; but he could perform gyrations as he
+went, and he rather sailed along than dashed; he was careful of his
+figuring. Some lovers, right honest lovers, never get beyond this
+quaint skating-stage; and some ladies, a right goodly number in a foggy
+climate, deceived by their occasional runs ahead, take them for vessels
+on the very torrent of love. Let them take them, and let the race
+continue. Only we perceive that they are skating; they are careering
+over a smooth icy floor, and they can stop at a signal, with just
+half-a-yard of grating on the heel at the outside. Ice, and not fire nor
+falling water, has been their medium of progression.
+
+Whether a man should unveil his own sex is quite another question. If
+we are detected, not solely are we done for, but our love-tales too.
+However, there is not much ground for anxiety on that head. Each member
+of the other party is blind on her own account.
+
+To Annette the figuring of Herbert was graceful, but it did not catch
+her up and carry her; it hardly touched her: He spoke well enough to
+make her sorry for him, and not warmly enough to make her forget her
+sorrow for herself.
+
+Herbert could obtain no explanation of the singularity of her conduct
+from Annette, and he went straight to her father, who was nearly as
+inexplicable for a time. At last he said:
+
+“If you are ready to quit the country with us, you may have my consent.”
+
+“Why quit the country?” Herbert asked, in natural amazement.
+
+Van Diemen declined to tell him.
+
+But seeing the young man look stupefied and wretched he took a turn
+about the room, and said: “I have n’t robbed,” and after more turns,
+“I have n’t murdered.” He growled in his menagerie trot within the four
+walls. “But I’m, in a man’s power. Will that satisfy you? You’ll tell
+me, because I’m rich, to snap my fingers. I can’t. I’ve got feelings.
+I’m in his power to hurt me and disgrace me. It’s the disgrace--to my
+disgrace I say it--I dread most. You’d be up to my reason if you had
+ever served in a regiment. I mean, discipline--if ever you’d known
+discipline--in the police if you like--anything--anywhere where there’s
+what we used to call spiny de cor. I mean, at school. And I’m,” said
+Van Diemen, “a rank idiot double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and
+transparent as a pane of glass. You see through me. Anybody could. I
+can’t talk of my botheration without betraying myself. What good am I
+among you sharp fellows in England?”
+
+Language of this kind, by virtue of its unintelligibility, set Mr.
+Herbert Fellingham’s acute speculations at work. He was obliged to lean
+on Van Diemen’s assertion, that he had not robbed and had not murdered,
+to be comforted by the belief that he was not once a notorious
+bushranger, or a defaulting manager of mines, or any other thing that is
+naughtily Australian and kangarooly.
+
+He sat at the dinner-table at Elba, eating like the rest of mankind, and
+looking like a starved beggarman all the while.
+
+Annette, in pity of his bewilderment, would have had her father take him
+into their confidence. She suggested it covertly, and next she spoke of
+it to him as a prudent measure, seeing that Mr. Fellingham might find
+out his exact degree of liability. Van Diemen shouted; he betrayed
+himself in his weakness as she could not have imagined him. He was ready
+to go, he said--go on the spot, give up Elba, fly from Old England: what
+he could not do was to let his countrymen know what he was, and live
+among them afterwards. He declared that the fact had eternally been
+present to his mind, devouring him; and Annette remembered his kindness
+to the artillerymen posted along the shore westward of Crikswich, though
+she could recall no sign of remorse. Van Diemen said: “We have to do
+with Martin Tinman; that’s one who has a hold on me, and one’s enough.
+Leak out my secret to a second fellow, you double my risks.” He would
+not be taught to see how the second might counteract the first. The
+singularity of the action of his character on her position was, that
+though she knew not a soul to whom she could unburden her wretchedness,
+and stood far more isolated than in her Australian home, fever and chill
+struck her blood in contemplation of the necessity of quitting England.
+
+Deep, then, was her gratitude to dear good Mrs. Cavely for stepping
+in to mediate between her father and Mr. Tinman. And well might she be
+amazed to hear the origin of their recent dispute.
+
+“It was,” Mrs. Cavely said, “that Gippsland.”
+
+Annette cried: “What?”
+
+“That Gippsland of yours, my dear. Your father will praise Gippsland
+whenever my Martin asks him to admire the beauties of our neighbourhood.
+Many a time has Martin come home to me complaining of it. We have no
+doubt on earth that Gippsland is a very fine place; but my brother has
+his idea’s of dignity, you must know, and I only wish he had been more
+used to contradiction, you may believe me. He is a lamb by nature. And,
+as he says, ‘Why underrate one’s own country?’ He cannot bear to hear
+boasting. Well! I put it to you, dear Annette, is he so unimportant a
+person? He asks to be respected, and especially by his dearest friend.
+From that to blows! It’s the way with men. They begin about trifles,
+they drink, they quarrel, and one does what he is sorry for, and one
+says more than he means. All my Martin desires is to shake your dear
+father’s hand, forgive and forget. To win your esteem, darling Annette,
+he would humble himself in the dust. Will you not help me to bring these
+two dear old friends together once more? It is unreasonable of your dear
+papa to go on boasting of Gippsland if he is so fond of England, now is
+it not? My brother is the offended party in the eye of the law. That is
+quite certain. Do you suppose he dreams of taking advantage of it? He
+is waiting at home to be told he may call on your father. Rank, dignity,
+wounded feelings, is nothing to him in comparison with friendship.”
+
+Annette thought of the blow which had felled him, and spoke the truth of
+her heart in saying, “He is very generous.”
+
+“You understand him.” Mrs. Cavely pressed her hand. “We will both go to
+your dear father. He may,” she added, not without a gleam of feminine
+archness, “praise Gippsland above the Himalayas to me. What my Martin
+so much objected to was, the speaking of Gippsland at all when there was
+mention of our Lake scenery. As for me, I know how men love to boast of
+things nobody else has seen.”
+
+The two ladies went in company to Van Diemen, who allowed himself to
+be melted. He was reserved nevertheless. His reception of Mr. Tinman
+displeased his daughter. Annette attached the blackest importance to
+a blow of the fist. In her mind it blazed fiendlike, and the man who
+forgave it rose a step or two on the sublime. Especially did he do
+so considering that he had it in his power to dismiss her father and
+herself from bright beaming England before she had looked on all the
+cathedrals and churches, the sea-shores and spots named in printed
+poetry, to say nothing of the nobility.
+
+“Papa, you were not so kind to Mr. Tinman as I could have hoped,” said
+Annette.
+
+“Mart Tinman has me at his mercy, and he’ll make me know it,” her father
+returned gloomily. “He may let me off with the Commander-in-chief. He’ll
+blast my reputation some day, though. I shall be hanging my head in
+society, through him.”
+
+Van Diemen imitated the disconsolate appearance of a gallows body, in
+one of those rapid flashes of spontaneous veri-similitude which spring
+of an inborn horror painting itself on the outside.
+
+“A Deserter!” he moaned.
+
+He succeeded in impressing the terrible nature of the stigma upon
+Annette’s imagination.
+
+The guest at Elba was busy in adding up the sum of his own impressions,
+and dividing it by this and that new circumstance; for he was totally
+in the dark. He was attracted by the mysterious interview of Mrs.
+Cavely and Annette. Tinman’s calling and departing set him upon
+new calculations. Annette grew cold and visibly distressed by her
+consciousness of it.
+
+She endeavoured to account for this variation of mood. “We have been
+invited to dine at the house on the beach to-morrow. I would not have
+accepted, but papa... we seemed to think it a duty. Of course the
+invitation extends to you. We fancy you do not greatly enjoy dining
+there. The table will be laid for you here, if you prefer.”
+
+Herbert preferred to try the skill of Mrs. Crickledon.
+
+Now, for positive penetration the head prepossessed by a suspicion is
+unmatched; for where there is no daylight; this one at least goes about
+with a lantern. Herbert begged Mrs. Crickledon to cook a dinner for him,
+and then to give the right colour to his absence from the table of Mr.
+Tinman, he started for a winter day’s walk over the downs as sharpening
+a business as any young fellow, blunt or keen, may undertake;
+excellent for men of the pen, whether they be creative, and produce, or
+slaughtering, and review; good, then, for the silly sheep of letters and
+the butchers. He sat down to Mrs. Crickledon’s table at half-past six.
+She was, as she had previously informed him, a forty-pound-a-year cook
+at the period of her courting by Crickledon. That zealous and devoted
+husband had made his first excursion inland to drop over the downs to
+the great house, and fetch her away as his bride, on the death of her
+master, Sir Alfred Pooney, who never would have parted with her in life;
+and every day of that man’s life he dirtied thirteen plates at dinner,
+nor more, nor less, but exactly that number, as if he believed there
+was luck in it. And as Crickledon said, it was odd. But it was always a
+pleasure to cook for him. Mrs. Crickledon could not abide cooking for
+a mean eater. And when Crickledon said he had never seen an acorn, he
+might have seen one had he looked about him in the great park, under the
+oaks, on the day when he came to be married.
+
+“Then it’s a standing compliment to you, Mrs. Crickledon, that he did
+not,” said Herbert.
+
+He remarked with the sententiousness of enforced philosophy, that no
+wine was better than bad wine.
+
+Mrs. Crickledon spoke of a bottle left by her summer lodgers, who
+had indeed left two, calling the wine invalid’s wine; and she and her
+husband had opened one on the anniversary of their marriage day in
+October. It had the taste of doctor’s shop, they both agreed; and as
+no friend of theirs could be tempted beyond a sip, they were advised,
+because it was called a tonic, to mix it with the pig-wash, so that it
+should not be entirely lost, but benefit the constitution of the pig.
+Herbert sipped at the remaining bottle, and finding himself in the
+superior society of an old Manzanilla, refilled his glass.
+
+“Nothing I knows of proves the difference between gentlefolks and poor
+persons as tastes in wine,” said Mrs. Crickledon, admiring him as she
+brought in a dish of cutlets,--with Sir Alfred Pooney’s favourite sauce
+Soubise, wherein rightly onion should be delicate as the idea of love in
+maidens’ thoughts, albeit constituting the element of flavour. Something
+of such a dictum Sir Alfred Pooney had imparted to his cook, and
+she repeated it with the fresh elegance of, such sweet sayings when
+transfused through the native mind:
+
+“He said, I like as it was what you would call a young gal’s blush at a
+kiss round a corner.”
+
+The epicurean baronet had the habit of talking in that way.
+
+Herbert drank to his memory. He was well-filled; he had no work to do,
+and he was exuberant in spirits, as Mrs. Crickledon knew her countrymen
+should and would be under those conditions. And suddenly he drew his
+hand across a forehead so wrinkled and dark, that Mrs. Crickledon
+exclaimed, “Heart or stomach?”
+
+“Oh, no,” said he. “I’m sound enough in both, I hope.”
+
+“That old Tinman’s up to one of his games,” she observed.
+
+“Do you think so?”
+
+“He’s circumventing Miss Annette Smith.”
+
+“Pooh! Crickledon. A man of his age can’t be seriously thinking of
+proposing for a young lady.”
+
+“He’s a well-kept man. He’s never racketed. He had n’t the rackets in
+him. And she may n’t care for him. But we hear things drop.”
+
+“What things have you heard drop, Crickledon? In a profound silence
+you may hear pins; in a hubbub you may hear cannon-balls. But I never
+believe in eavesdropping gossip.”
+
+“He was heard to say to Mr. Smith,” Crickledon pursued, and she lowered
+her voice, “he was heard to say, it was when they were quarreling over
+that chiwal, and they went at one another pretty hard before Mr. Smith
+beat him and he sold Mr. Smith that meadow; he was heard to say, there
+was worse than transportation for Mr. Smith if he but lifted his finger.
+They Tinmans have awful tempers. His old mother died malignant, though
+she was a saving woman, and never owed a penny to a Christian a hour
+longer than it took to pay the money. And old Tinman’s just such
+another.”
+
+“Transportation!” Herbert ejaculated, “that’s sheer nonsense,
+Crickledon. I’m sure your husband would tell you so.”
+
+“It was my husband brought me the words,” Mrs. Crickledon rejoined with
+some triumph. “He did tell me, I own, to keep it shut: but my speaking
+to you, a friend of Mr. Smith’s, won’t do no harm. He heard them under
+the battery, over that chiwal glass: ‘And you shall pay,’ says Mr.
+Smith, and ‘I sha’n’t,’ says old Tinman. Mr. Smith said he would have
+it if he had to squeeze a deathbed confession from a sinner. Then old
+Tinman fires out, ‘You!’ he says, ‘you’ and he stammered. ‘Mr. Smith,’
+my husband said and you never saw a man so shocked as my husband at
+being obliged to hear them at one another Mr. Smith used the word damn.
+‘You may laugh, sir.’”
+
+“You say it so capitally, Crickledon.”
+
+“And then old Tinman said, ‘And a D. to you; and if I lift my finger,
+it’s Big D. on your back.”
+
+“And what did Mr. Smith say, then?”
+
+“He said, like a man shot, my husband says he said, ‘My God!’”
+
+Herbert Fellingham jumped away from the table.
+
+“You tell me, Crickledon, your husband actually heard that--just those
+words?--the tones?”
+
+“My husband says he heard him say, ‘My God!’ just like a poor man shot
+or stabbed. You may speak to Crickledon, if you speaks to him alone,
+sir. I say you ought to know. For I’ve noticed Mr. Smith since that day
+has never looked to me the same easy-minded happy gentleman he was when
+we first knew him. He would have had me go to cook for him at Elba, but
+Crickledon thought I’d better be independent, and Mr. Smith said to me,
+‘Perhaps you’re right, Crickledon, for who knows how long I may be among
+you?’”
+
+Herbert took the solace of tobacco in Crickledon’s shop. Thence, with
+the story confirmed to him, he sauntered toward the house on the beach.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The moon was over sea. Coasting vessels that had run into the bay for
+shelter from the North wind lay with their shadows thrown shoreward on
+the cold smooth water, almost to the verge of the beach, where there was
+neither breath nor sound of wind, only the lisp at the pebbles.
+
+Mrs. Crickledon’s dinner and the state of his heart made young
+Fellingham indifferent to a wintry atmosphere. It sufficed him that the
+night was fair. He stretched himself on the shingle, thinking of the
+Manzanilla, and Annette, and the fine flavour given to tobacco by a dry
+still air in moonlight--thinking of his work, too, in the background, as
+far as mental lassitude would allow of it. The idea of taking Annette to
+see his first play at the theatre when it should be performed--was
+very soothing. The beach rather looked like a stage, and the sea like
+a ghostly audience, with, if you will, the broadside bulks of black
+sailing craft at anchor for representatives of the newspaper piers.
+Annette was a nice girl; if a little commonplace and low-born, yet
+sweet. What a subject he could make of her father! “The Deserter”
+ offered a new complication. Fellingham rapidly sketched it in fancy--Van
+Diemen, as a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain, led away from
+the House of Commons to be branded on the bank! What a magnificent fall!
+We have so few intensely dramatic positions in English real life that
+the meditative author grew enamoured of this one, and laughed out a
+royal “Ha!” like a monarch reviewing his well-appointed soldiery.
+
+“There you are,” said Van Diemen’s voice; “I smelt your pipe. You’re a
+rum fellow, to belying out on the beach on a cold night. Lord! I don’t
+like you the worse for it. Twas for the romance of the moon in my young
+days.”
+
+“Where is Annette?” said Fellingham, jumping to his feet.
+
+“My daughter? She ‘s taking leave of her intended.”
+
+“What’s that?” Fellingham gasped. “Good heavens, Mr. Smith, what do you
+mean?”
+
+“Pick up your pipe, my lad. Girls choose as they please, I suppose”
+
+“Her intended, did you say, sir? What can that mean?”
+
+“My dear good young fellow, don’t make a fuss. We’re all going to
+stay here, and very glad to see you from time to time. The fact is,
+I oughtn’t to have quarrelled with Mart Tinman as I’ve done; I’m too
+peppery by nature. The fact is, I struck him, and he forgave it. I
+could n’t have done that myself. And I believe I’m in for a headache
+to-morrow; upon my soul, I do. Mart Tinman would champagne us; but, poor
+old boy, I struck him, and I couldn’t make amends--didn’t see my way;
+and we joined hands over the glass--to the deuce with the glass!--and
+the end of it is, Netty--she did n’t propose it, but as I’m in his--I
+say, as I had struck him, she--it was rather solemn, if you had seen
+us--she burst into tears, and there was Mrs. Cavely, and old Mart, and
+me as big a fool--if I’m not a villain!”
+
+Fellingham perceived a more than common effect of Tin man’s wine. He
+touched Van Diemen on the shoulder. “May I beg to hear exactly what has
+happened?”
+
+“Upon my soul, we’re all going to live comfortably in Old England, and
+no more quarreling and decamping,” was the stupid rejoinder. “Except
+that I did n’t exactly--I think you said I exactly’?--I did n’t bargain
+for old Mart as my--but he’s a sound man; Mart’s my junior; he’s rich.
+He’s eco ... he’s eco... you know--my Lord! where’s my brains?--but he’s
+upright--‘nomical!”
+
+“An economical man,” said Fellingham, with sedate impatience.
+
+“My dear sir, I’m heartily obliged to you for your assistance,” returned
+Van Diemen. “Here she is.”
+
+Annette had come out of the gate in the flint wall. She started slightly
+on seeing Herbert, whom she had taken for a coastguard, she said. He
+bowed. He kept his head bent, peering at her intrusively.
+
+“It’s the air on champagne,” Van Diemen said, calling on his lungs to
+clear themselves and right him. “I was n’t a bit queer in the house.”
+
+“The air on Tinman’s champagne!” said Fellingham.
+
+“It must be like the contact of two hostile chemical elements.”
+
+Annette walked faster.
+
+They descended from the shingle to the scant-bladed grass-sweep running
+round the salted town-refuse on toward Elba. Van Diemen sniffed,
+ejaculating, “I’ll be best man with Mart Tinman about this business!
+You’ll stop with us, Mr.----what’s your Christian name? Stop with us as
+long as you like. Old friends for me! The joke of it is that Nelson
+was my man, and yet I went and enlisted in the cavalry. If you talk of
+chemical substances, old Mart Tinman was a sneak who never cared a dump
+for his country; and I’m not to speak a single sybbarel about that.....
+over there... Australia... Gippsland! So down he went, clean over. Very
+sorry for what we have done. Contrite. Penitent.”
+
+“Now we feel the wind a little,” said Annette.
+
+Fellingham murmured, “Allow me; your shawl is flying loose.”
+
+He laid his hands on her arms, and, pressing her in a tremble, said,
+“One sign! It’s not true? A word! Do you hate me?”
+
+“Thank you very much, but I am not cold,” she replied and linked herself
+to her father.
+
+Van Diemen immediately shouted, “For we are jolly boys! for we are jolly
+boys! It’s the air on the champagne. And hang me,” said he, as they
+entered the grounds of Elba, “if I don’t walk over my property.”
+
+Annette interposed; she stood like a reed in his way.
+
+“No! my Lord! I’ll see what I sold you for!” he cried. “I’m an owner of
+the soil of Old England, and care no more for the title of squire than
+Napoleon Bonaparty. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard: your mother
+was never so astonished at her dog as old Van Diemen would be to hear
+himself called squire in Old England. And a convict he was, for he
+did wrong once, but he worked his redemption. And the smell of my
+own property makes me feel my legs again. And I’ll tell you what, Mr.
+Hubbard, as Netty calls you when she speaks of you in private: Mart
+Tinman’s ideas of wine are pretty much like his ideas of healthy smells,
+and when I’m bailiff of Crikswich, mind, he’ll find two to one against
+him in our town council. I love my country, but hang me if I don’t
+purify it--”
+
+Saying this, with the excitement of a high resolve a upon him, Van
+Diemen bored through a shrubbery-brake, and Fellingham said to Annette:
+
+“Have I lost you?”
+
+“I belong to my father,” said she, contracting and disengaging her
+feminine garments to step after him in the cold silver-spotted dusk of
+the winter woods.
+
+Van Diemen came out on a fish-pond.
+
+“Here you are, young ones!” he said to the pair. “This way, Fellowman.
+I’m clearer now, and it’s my belief I’ve been talking nonsense.
+I’m puffed up with money, and have n’t the heart I once had. I say,
+Fellowman, Fellowbird, Hubbard--what’s your right name?--fancy an old
+carp fished out of that pond and flung into the sea. That’s exile! And
+if the girl don’t mind, what does it matter?”
+
+“Mr. Herbert Fellingham, I think, would like to go to bed, papa,” said
+Annette.
+
+“Miss Smith must be getting cold,” Fellingham hinted.
+
+“Bounce away indoors,” replied Van Diemen, and he led them like a bull.
+
+Annette was disinclined to leave them together in the smoking-room, and
+under the pretext of wishing to see her father to bed she remained with
+them, though there was a novel directness and heat of tone in Herbert
+that alarmed her, and with reason. He divined in hideous outlines what
+had happened. He was no longer figuring on easy ice, but desperate at
+the prospect of a loss to himself, and a fate for Annette, that tossed
+him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back.
+
+Van Diemen begged him to light his pipe.
+
+“I’m off to London to-morrow,” said Fellingham. “I don’t want to go,
+for very particular reasons; I may be of more use there. I have a cousin
+who’s a General officer in the army, and if I have your permission--you
+see, anything’s better, as it seems to me, than that you should depend
+for peace and comfort on one man’s tongue not wagging, especially
+when he is not the best of tempers if I have your permission--without
+mentioning names, of course--I’ll consult him.”
+
+There was a dead silence.
+
+“You know you may trust me, sir. I love your daughter with all my heart.
+Your honour and your interests are mine.”
+
+Van Diemen struggled for composure.
+
+“Netty, what have you been at?” he said.
+
+“It is untrue, papa!” she answered the unworded accusation.
+
+“Annette has told me nothing, sir. I have heard it. You must brace your
+mind to the fact that it is known. What is known to Mr. Tinman is pretty
+sure to be known generally at the next disagreement.”
+
+“That scoundrel Mart!” Van Diemen muttered.
+
+“I am positive Mr. Tinman did not speak of you, papa,” said Annette, and
+turned her eyes from the half-paralyzed figure of her father on Herbert
+to put him to proof.
+
+“No, but he made himself heard when it was being discussed. At any rate,
+it’s known; and the thing to do is to meet it.”
+
+“I’m off. I’ll not stop a day. I’d rather live on the Continent,”
+ said Van Diemen, shaking himself, as to prepare for the step into that
+desert.
+
+“Mr. Tinman has been most generous!” Annette protested tearfully.
+
+“I won’t say no: I think you are deceived and lend him your own
+generosity,” said Herbert. “Can you suppose it generous, that even in
+the extremest case, he should speak of the matter to your father, and
+talk of denouncing him? He did it.”
+
+“He was provoked.”
+
+“A gentleman is distinguished by his not allowing himself to be
+provoked.”
+
+“I am engaged to him, and I cannot hear it said that he is not a
+gentleman.”
+
+The first part of her sentence Annette uttered bravely; at the
+conclusion she broke down. She wished Herbert to be aware of the truth,
+that he might stay his attacks on Mr. Tinman; and she believed he had
+only been guessing the circumstances in which her father was placed; but
+the comparison between her two suitors forced itself on her now, when
+the younger one spoke in a manner so self-contained, brief, and full of
+feeling.
+
+She had to leave the room weeping.
+
+“Has your daughter engaged herself, sir?” said Herbert.
+
+“Talk to me to-morrow; don’t give us up if she has we were trapped, it’s
+my opinion,” said Van Diemen. “There’s the devil in that wine of--Mart
+Tinman’s. I feel it still, and in the morning it’ll be worse. What can
+she see in him? I must quit the country; carry her off. How he did it,
+I don’t know. It was that woman, the widow, the fellow’s sister. She
+talked till she piped her eye--talked about our lasting union. On my
+soul, I believe I egged Netty on! I was in a mollified way with that
+wine; all of a sudden the woman joins their hands! And I--a man of
+spirit will despise me!--what I thought of was, ‘now my secret’s safe!’
+You’ve sobered me, young sir. I see myself, if that’s being sober. I
+don’t ask your opinion of me; I am a deserter, false to my colours,
+a breaker of his oath. Only mark this: I was married, and a common
+trooper, married to a handsome young woman, true as steel; but she was
+handsome, and we were starvation poor, and she had to endure persecution
+from an officer day by day. Bear that situation in your mind....
+Providence dropped me a hundred pounds out of the sky. Properly
+speaking, it popped up out of the earth, for I reaped it, you may say,
+from a relative’s grave. Rich and poor ‘s all right, if I’m rich and
+you’re poor; and you may be happy though you’re poor; but where there
+are many poor young women, lots of rich men are a terrible temptation to
+them. That’s my dear good wife speaking, and had she been spared to me
+I never should have come back to Old England, and heart’s delight and
+heartache I should not have known. She was my backbone, she was my
+breast-comforter too. Why did she stick to me? Because I had faith
+in her when appearances were against her. But she never forgave this
+country the hurt to her woman’s pride. You’ll have noticed a squarish
+jaw in Netty. That’s her mother. And I shall have to encounter it,
+supposing I find Mart Tinman has been playing me false. I’m blown on
+somehow. I’ll think of what course I’ll take ‘twixt now and morning.
+Good night, young gentleman.”
+
+“Good night; sir,” said Herbert, adding, “I will get information from
+the Horse Guards; as for the people knowing it about here, you’re not
+living much in society--”
+
+“It’s not other people’s feelings, it’s my own,” Van Diemen silenced
+him. “I feel it, if it’s in the wind; ever since Mart Tinman spoke the
+thing out, I’ve felt on my skin cold and hot.”
+
+He flourished his lighted candle and went to bed, manifestly solaced by
+the idea that he was the victim of his own feelings.
+
+Herbert could not sleep. Annette’s monstrous choice of Tinman in
+preference to himself constantly assailed and shook his understanding.
+There was the “squarish jaw” mentioned by her father to think of. It
+filled him with a vague apprehension, but he was unable to imagine that
+a young girl, and an English girl, and an enthusiastic young English
+girl, could be devoid of sentiment; and presuming her to have it, as one
+must, there was no fear, that she would persist in her loathsome choice
+when she knew her father was against it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Annette did not shun him next morning. She did not shun the subject,
+either. But she had been exact in arranging that she should not be more
+than a few minutes downstairs before her father. Herbert found, that
+compared with her, girls of sentiment are commonplace indeed. She had
+conceived an insane idea of nobility in Tinman that blinded her to his
+face, figure, and character--his manners, likewise. He had forgiven a
+blow!
+
+Silly as the delusion might be, it clothed her in whimsical
+attractiveness.
+
+It was a beauty in her to dwell so firmly upon moral quality. Overthrown
+and stunned as he was, and reduced to helplessness by her brief and
+positive replies, Herbert was obliged to admire the singular young
+lady, who spoke, without much shyness, of her incongruous, destined mate
+though his admiration had an edge cutting like irony. While in the turn
+for candour, she ought to have told him, that previous to her decision
+she had weighed the case of the diverse claims of himself and Tinman,
+and resolved them according to her predilection for the peaceful
+residence of her father and herself in England. This she had done a
+little regretfully, because of the natural sympathy of the young
+girl for the younger man. But the younger man had seemed to her
+seriously-straightforward mind too light and airy in his wooing, like
+one of her waltzing officers--very well so long as she stepped the
+measure with him, and not forcible enough to take her off her feet. He
+had changed, and now that he had become persuasive, she feared he would
+disturb the serenity with which she desired and strove to contemplate
+her decision. Tinman’s magnanimity was present in her imagination to
+sustain her, though she was aware that Mrs. Cavely had surprised her
+will, and caused it to surrender unconsulted by her wiser intelligence.
+
+“I cannot listen to you,” she said to Herbert, after listening longer
+than was prudent. “If what you say of papa is true, I do not think he
+will remain in Crikswich, or even in England. But I am sure the old
+friend we used, to speak of so much in Australia has not wilfully
+betrayed him.”
+
+Herbert would have had to say, “Look on us two!” to proceed in his
+baffled wooing; and the very ludicrousness of the contrast led him to
+see the folly and shame of proposing it.
+
+Van Diemen came down to breakfast looking haggard and restless. “I
+have ‘nt had my morning’s walk--I can’t go out to be hooted,” he said,
+calling to his daughter for tea, and strong tea; and explaining to
+Herbert that he knew it to be bad for the nerves, but it was an antidote
+to bad champagne.
+
+Mr. Herbert Fellingham had previously received an invitation on behalf
+of a sister of his to Crikswich. A dull sense of genuine sagacity
+inspired him to remind Annette of it. She wrote prettily to Miss Mary
+Fellingham, and Herbert had some faint joy in carrying away the letter
+of her handwriting.
+
+“Fetch her soon, for we sha’n’t be here long,” Van Diemen said to him
+at parting. He expressed a certain dread of his next meeting with Mart
+Tinman.
+
+Herbert speedily brought Mary Fellingham to Elba, and left her there.
+The situation was apparently unaltered. Van Diemen looked worn, like a
+man who has been feeding mainly on his reflections, which was manifest
+in his few melancholy bits of speech. He said to Herbert: “How you feel
+a thing when you are found out!” and, “It doesn’t do for a man with a
+heart to do wrong!” He designated the two principal roads by which
+poor sinners come to a conscience. His own would have slumbered but for
+discovery; and, as he remarked, if it had not been for his heart leading
+him to Tinman, he would not have fallen into that man’s power.
+
+The arrival of a young lady of fashionable appearance at Elba was matter
+of cogitation to Mrs. Cavely. She was disposed to suspect that it meant
+something, and Van Diemen’s behaviour to her brother would of itself
+have fortified any suspicion. He did not call at the house on the beach,
+he did not invite Martin to dinner, he was rarely seen, and when he
+appeared at the Town Council he once or twice violently opposed his
+friend Martin, who came home ruffled, deeply offended in his interests
+and his dignity.
+
+“Have you noticed any difference in Annette’s treatment of you, dear?”
+ Mrs. Cavely inquired.
+
+“No,” said Tinman; “none. She shakes hands. She asks after my health.
+She offers me my cup of tea.”
+
+“I have seen all that. But does she avoid privacy with you?”
+
+“Dear me, no! Why should she? I hope, Martha, I am a man who may be
+confided in by any young lady in England.”
+
+“I am sure you may, dear Martin.”
+
+“She has an objection to name the... the day,” said Martin. “I have
+informed her that I have an objection to long engagements. I don’t like
+her new companion: She says she has been presented at Court. I greatly
+doubt it.”
+
+“It’s to give herself a style, you may depend. I don’t believe her!”
+ exclaimed Mrs. Cavely, with sharp personal asperity.
+
+Brother and sister examined together the Court Guide they had purchased
+on the occasion at once of their largest outlay and most thrilling
+gratification; in it they certainly found the name of General
+Fellingham. “But he can’t be related to a newspaper-writer,” said Mrs.
+Cavely.
+
+To which her brother rejoined, “Unless the young man turned scamp. I
+hate unproductive professions.”
+
+“I hate him, Martin.” Mrs. Cavely laughed in scorn, “I should say, I
+pity him. It’s as clear to me as the sun at noonday, he wanted Annette.
+That’s why I was in a hurry. How I dreaded he would come that evening
+to our dinner! When I saw him absent, I could have cried out it was
+Providence! And so be careful--we have had everything done for us from
+on High as yet--but be careful of your temper, dear Martin. I will
+hasten on the union; for it’s a shame of a girl to drag a man behind her
+till he ‘s old at the altar. Temper, dear, if you will only think of it,
+is the weak point.”
+
+“Now he has begun boasting to me of his Australian wines!” Tinman
+ejaculated.
+
+“Bear it. Bear it as you do Gippsland. My dear, you have the retort in
+your heart:--Yes! but have you a Court in Australia?”
+
+“Ha! and his Australian wines cost twice the amount I pay for mine!”
+
+“Quite true. We are not obliged to buy them, I should hope. I would,
+though--a dozen--if I thought it necessary, to keep him quiet.”
+
+Tinman continued muttering angrily over the Australian wines, with a
+word of irritation at Gippsland, while promising to be watchful of his
+temper.
+
+“What good is Australia to us,” he asked, “if it does n’t bring us
+money?”
+
+“It’s going to, my dear,” said Mrs. Cavely. “Think of that when he
+begins boasting his Australia. And though it’s convict’s money, as he
+confesses--”
+
+“With his convict’s money!” Tinman interjected tremblingly. “How long am
+I expected to wait?”
+
+“Rely on me to hurry on the day,” said Mrs. Cavely. “There is no other
+annoyance?”
+
+“Wherever I am going to buy, that man outbids me and then says it’s the
+old country’s want of pluck and dash, and doing things large-handed! A
+man who’d go on his knees to stop in England!” Tinman vociferated in a
+breath; and fairly reddened by the effort: “He may have to do it yet. I
+can’t stand insult.”
+
+“You are less able to stand insult after Honours,” his sister said,
+in obedience to what she had observed of him since his famous visit to
+London. “It must be so, in nature. But temper is everything just now.
+Remember, it was by command of temper, and letting her father put
+himself in the wrong, you got hold of Annette. And I would abstain even
+from wine. For sometimes after it, you have owned it disagreed. And
+I have noticed these eruptions between you and Mr. Smith--as he calls
+himself--generally after wine.”
+
+“Always the poor! the poor! money for the poor!” Tinman harped on
+further grievances against Van Diemen. “I say doctors have said the
+drain on the common is healthy; it’s a healthy smell, nourishing. We’ve
+always had it and been a healthy town. But the sea encroaches, and I say
+my house and my property is in danger. He buys my house over my head,
+and offers me the Crouch to live in at an advanced rent. And then he
+sells me my house at an advanced price, and I buy, and then he votes
+against a penny for the protection of the shore! And we’re in Winter
+again! As if he was not in my power!”
+
+“My dear Martin, to Elba we go, and soon, if you will govern your
+temper,” said Mrs. Cavely. “You’re an angel to let me speak of it
+so, and it’s only that man that irritates you. I call him sinfully
+ostentatious.”
+
+“I could blow him from a gun if I spoke out, and he knows it! He’s
+wanting in common gratitude, let alone respect,” Tinman snorted.
+
+“But he has a daughter, my dear.”
+
+Tinman slowly and crackingly subsided.
+
+His main grievance against Van Diemen was the non-recognition of
+his importance by that uncultured Australian, who did not seem to be
+conscious of the dignities and distinctions we come to in our country.
+The moneyed daughter, the prospective marriage, for an economical man
+rejected by every lady surrounding him, advised him to lock up his
+temper in submission to Martha.
+
+“Bring Annette to dine with us,” he said, on Martha’s proposing a visit
+to the dear young creature.
+
+Martha drank a glass of her brother’s wine at lunch, and departed on the
+mission.
+
+Annette declined to be brought. Her excuse was her guest, Miss
+Fellingham.
+
+“Bring her too, by all means--if you’ll condescend, I am sure,” Mrs.
+Cavely said to Mary.
+
+“I am much obliged to you; I do not dine out at present,” said the
+London lady.
+
+“Dear me! are you ill?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Nothing in the family, I hope?”
+
+“My family?”
+
+“I am sure, I beg pardon,” said Mrs. Cavely, bridling with a spite
+pardonable by the severest moralist.
+
+“Can I speak to you alone?” she addressed Annette.
+
+Miss Fellingham rose.
+
+Mrs. Cavely confronted her. “I can’t allow it; I can’t think of it.
+I’m only taking a little liberty with one I may call my future
+sister-in-law.”
+
+“Shall I come out with you?” said Annette, in sheer lassitude assisting
+Mary Fellingham in her scheme to show the distastefulness of this lady
+and her brother.
+
+“Not if you don’t wish to.”
+
+“I have no objection.”
+
+“Another time will do.”
+
+“Will you write?”
+
+“By post indeed!”
+
+Mrs. Cavely delivered a laugh supposed to, be peculiar to the English
+stage.
+
+“It would be a penny thrown away,” said Annette. “I thought you could
+send a messenger.”
+
+Intercommunication with Miss Fellingham had done mischief to her high
+moral conception of the pair inhabiting the house on the beach. Mrs.
+Cavely saw it, and could not conceal that she smarted.
+
+Her counsel to her brother, after recounting the offensive scene to him
+in animated dialogue, was, to give Van Diemen a fright.
+
+“I wish I had not drunk that glass of sherry before starting,” she
+exclaimed, both savagely and sagely. “It’s best after business. And
+these gentlemen’s habits of yours of taking to dining late upset me. I’m
+afraid I showed temper; but you, Martin, would not have borne one-tenth
+of what I did.”
+
+“How dare you say so!” her brother rebuked her indignantly; and the
+house on the beach enclosed with difficulty a storm between brother and
+sister, happily not heard outside, because of loud winds raging.
+
+Nevertheless Tinman pondered on Martha’s idea of the wisdom of giving
+Van Diemen a fright.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The English have been called a bad-tempered people, but this is to judge
+of them by their manifestations; whereas an examination into causes
+might prove them to be no worse tempered than that man is a bad sleeper
+who lies in a biting bed. If a sagacious instinct directs them to
+discountenance realistic tales, the realistic tale should justify its
+appearance by the discovery of an apology for the tormented souls. Once
+they sang madrigals, once they danced on the green, they revelled in
+their lusty humours, without having recourse to the pun for fun, an
+exhibition of hundreds of bare legs for jollity, a sentimental wailing
+all in the throat for music. Evidence is procurable that they have
+been an artificially-reared people, feeding on the genius of inventors,
+transposers, adulterators, instead of the products of nature, for the
+last half century; and it is unfair to affirm of them that they are
+positively this or that. They are experiments. They are the sons and
+victims of a desperate Energy, alluring by cheapness, satiating with
+quantity, that it may mount in the social scale, at the expense of their
+tissues. The land is in a state of fermentation to mount, and the shop,
+which has shot half their stars to their social zenith, is what verily
+they would scald themselves to wash themselves free of. Nor is it in any
+degree a reprehensible sign that they should fly as from hue and cry the
+title of tradesman. It is on the contrary the spot of sanity, which bids
+us right cordially hope. Energy, transferred to the moral sense, may
+clear them yet.
+
+Meanwhile this beer, this wine, both are of a character to have killed
+more than the tempers of a less gifted people. Martin Tinman invited Van
+Diemen Smith to try the flavour of a wine that, as he said, he thought
+of “laying down.”
+
+It has been hinted before of a strange effect upon the minds of men who
+knew what they were going to, when they received an invitation to dine
+with Tinman. For the sake of a little social meeting at any cost,
+they accepted it; accepted it with a sigh, midway as by engineering
+measurement between prospective and retrospective; as nearly mechanical
+as things human may be, like the Mussulman’s accustomed cry of Kismet.
+Has it not been related of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother’s
+breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after the Captivity,
+would start convulsively, relinquishing its feast, and indulging in
+the purest. Hebrew lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the
+passing sound of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice? In some such manner
+did men, unable to refuse, deep in what remained to them of nature,
+listen to Tinman; and so did Van Diemen, sighing heavily under the
+operation of simple animal instinct.
+
+“You seem miserable,” said Tinman, not oblivious of his design to give
+his friend a fright.
+
+“Do I? No, I’m all right,” Van Diemen replied. “I’m thinking of
+alterations at the Hall before Summer, to accommodate guests--if I stay
+here.”
+
+“I suppose you would not like to be separated from Annette.”
+
+“Separated? No, I should think I shouldn’t. Who’d do it?”
+
+“Because I should not like to leave my good sister Martha all to herself
+in a house so near the sea--”
+
+“Why not go to the Crouch, man?”
+
+“Thank you.”
+
+“No thanks needed if you don’t take advantage of the offer.”
+
+They were at the entrance to Elba, whither Mr. Tinman was betaking
+himself to see his intended. He asked if Annette was at home, and to his
+great stupefaction heard that she had gone to London for a week.
+
+Dissembling the spite aroused within him, he postponed his very strongly
+fortified design, and said, “You must be lonely.”
+
+Van Diemen informed him that it would be for a night only, as young
+Fellingham was coming down to keep him company.
+
+“At six o’clock this evening, then,” said Tinman. “We’re not fashionable
+in Winter.”
+
+“Hang me, if I know when ever we were!” Van Diemen rejoined.
+
+“Come, though, you’d like to be. You’ve got your ambition, Philip, like
+other men.”
+
+“Respectable and respected--that ‘s my ambition, Mr. Mart.”
+
+Tinman simpered: “With your wealth!”
+
+“Ay, I ‘m rich--for a contented mind.”
+
+“I ‘m pretty sure you ‘ll approve my new vintage,” said Tinman. “It’s
+direct from Oporto, my wine-merchant tells me, on his word.”
+
+“What’s the price?”
+
+“No, no, no. Try it first. It’s rather a stiff price.”
+
+Van Diemen was partially reassured by the announcement. “What do you
+call a stiff price?”
+
+“Well!--over thirty.”
+
+“Double that, and you may have a chance.”
+
+“Now,” cried Tinman, exasperated, “how can a man from Australia know
+anything about prices for port? You can’t divest your ideas of diggers’
+prices. You’re like an intoxicating drink yourself on the tradesmen
+of our town. You think it fine--ha! ha! I daresay, Philip, I should be
+doing the same if I were up to your mark at my banker’s. We can’t all of
+us be lords, nor baronets.”
+
+Catching up his temper thus cleverly, he curbed that habitual runaway,
+and retired from his old friend’s presence to explode in the society of
+the solitary Martha.
+
+Annette’s behaviour was as bitterly criticized by the sister as by the
+brother.
+
+“She has gone to those Fellingham people; and she may be thinking of
+jilting us,” Mrs. Cavely said.
+
+“In that case, I have no mercy,” cried her brother. “I have borne”--he
+bowed with a professional spiritual humility--“as I should, but it may
+get past endurance. I say I have borne enough; and if the worst comes to
+the worst, and I hand him over to the authorities--I say I mean him no
+harm, but he has struck me. He beat me as a boy and he has struck me
+as a man, and I say I have no thought of revenge, but I cannot have
+him here; and I say if I drive him out of the country back to his
+Gippsland!”
+
+Martin Tinman quivered for speech, probably for that which feedeth
+speech, as is the way with angry men.
+
+“And what?--what then?” said Martha, with the tender mellifluousness of
+sisterly reproach. “What good can you expect of letting temper get the
+better of you, dear?”
+
+Tinman did not enjoy her recent turn for usurping the lead in their
+consultations, and he said, tartly, “This good, Martha. We shall get the
+Hall at my price, and be Head People here. Which,” he raised his note,
+“which he, a Deserter, has no right to pretend to give himself out to
+be. What your feelings may be as an old inhabitant, I don’t know, but I
+have always looked up to the people at Elba Hall, and I say I don’t
+like to have a Deserter squandering convict’s money there--with his
+forty-pound-a-year cook, and his champagne at seventy a dozen. It’s the
+luxury of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
+
+“That does not prevent its being very nice to dine there,” said Mrs.
+Cavely; “and it shall be our table for good if I have any management.”
+
+“You mean me, ma’am,” bellowed Tinman.
+
+“Not at all,” she breathed, in dulcet contrast. “You are good-looking,
+Martin, but you have not half such pretty eyes as the person I mean. I
+never ventured to dream of managing you, Martin. I am thinking of the
+people at Elba.”
+
+“But why this extraordinary treatment of me, Martha?”
+
+“She’s a child, having her head turned by those Fellinghams. But she’s
+honourable; she has sworn to me she would be honourable.”
+
+“You do think I may as well give him a fright?” Tinman inquired
+hungrily.
+
+“A sort of hint; but very gentle, Martin. Do be gentle--casual like--as
+if you did n’t want to say it. Get him on his Gippsland. Then if he
+brings you to words, you can always laugh back, and say you will go to
+Kew and see the Fernery, and fancy all that, so high, on Helvellyn
+or the Downs. Why”--Mrs. Cavely, at the end of her astute advices and
+cautionings, as usual, gave loose to her natural character--“Why that
+man came back to England at all, with his boastings of Gippsland, I
+can’t for the life of me find out. It ‘s a perfect mystery.”
+
+“It is,” Tinman sounded his voice at a great depth, reflectively. Glad
+of taking the part she was perpetually assuming of late, he put out his
+hand and said: “But it may have been ordained for our good, Martha.”
+
+“True, dear,” said she, with an earnest sentiment of thankfulness to the
+Power which had led him round to her way of thinking and feeling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+Annette had gone to the big metropolis, which burns in colonial
+imaginations as the sun of cities, and was about to see something of
+London, under the excellent auspices of her new friend, Mary Fellingham,
+and a dense fog. She was alarmed by the darkness, a little in fear, too,
+of Herbert; and these feelings caused her to chide herself for leaving
+her father.
+
+Hearing her speak of her father sadly, Herbert kindly proposed to go
+down to Crikswich on the very day of her coming. She thanked him, and
+gave him a taste of bitterness by smiling favourably on his offer; but
+as he wished her to discern and take to heart the difference between one
+man and another, in the light of a suitor, he let her perceive that it
+cost him heavy pangs to depart immediately, and left her to brood on his
+example. Mary Fellingham liked Annette. She thought her a sensible
+girl of uncultivated sensibilities, the reverse of thousands; not
+commonplace, therefore; and that the sensibilities were expanding was
+to be seen in her gradual unreadiness to talk of her engagement to Mr.
+Tinman, though her intimacy with Mary warmed daily. She considered
+she was bound to marry the man at some distant date, and did not feel
+unhappiness yet. She had only felt uneasy when she had to greet and
+converse with her intended; especially when the London young lady had
+been present. Herbert’s departure relieved her of the pressing sense
+of contrast. She praised him to Mary for his extreme kindness to her
+father, and down in her unsounded heart desired that her father might
+appreciate it even more than she did.
+
+Herbert drove into Crikswich at night, and stopped at Crickledon’s,
+where he heard that Van Diemen was dining with Tinman.
+
+Crickledon the carpenter permitted certain dry curves to play round his
+lips like miniature shavings at the name of Tinman; but Herbert asked,
+“What is it now?” in vain, and he went to Crickledon the cook.
+
+This union of the two Crickledons, male and female; was an ideal one,
+such as poor women dream of; and men would do the same, if they knew how
+poor they are. Each had a profession, each was independent of the other,
+each supported the fabric. Consequently there was mutual respect, as
+between two pillars of a house. Each saw the other’s faults with a sly
+wink to the world, and an occasional interchange of sarcasm that was
+tonic, very strengthening to the wits without endangering the habit of
+affection. Crickledon the cook stood for her own opinions, and directed
+the public conduct of Crickledon the carpenter; and if he went astray
+from the line she marked out, she put it down to human nature, to which
+she was tolerant. He, when she had not followed his advice, ascribed it
+to the nature of women. She never said she was the equal of her husband;
+but the carpenter proudly acknowledged that she was as good as a man,
+and he bore with foibles derogatory to such high stature, by teaching
+himself to observe a neatness of domestic and general management that
+told him he certainly was not as good as a woman. Herbert delighted in
+them. The cook regaled the carpenter with skilful, tasty, and economic
+dishes; and the carpenter, obedient to her supplications, had promised,
+in the event of his outliving her, that no hands but his should have
+the making of her coffin. “It is so nice,” she said, “to think one’s own
+husband will put together the box you are to lie in, of his own make!”
+ Had they been even a doubtfully united pair, the cook’s anticipation of
+a comfortable coffin, the work of the best carpenter in England, would
+have kept them together; and that which fine cookery does for the
+cementing of couples needs not to be recounted to those who have read a
+chapter or two of the natural history of the male sex.
+
+“Crickledon, my dear soul, your husband is labouring with a bit of fun,”
+ Herbert said to her.
+
+“He would n’t laugh loud at Punch, for fear of an action,” she replied.
+“He never laughs out till he gets to bed, and has locked the door; and
+when he does he says ‘Hush!’ to me. Tinman is n’t bailiff again just
+yet, and where he has his bailiff’s best Court suit from, you may ask.
+He exercises in it off and on all the week, at night, and sometimes in
+the middle of the day.”
+
+Herbert rallied her for her gossip’s credulity.
+
+“It’s truth,” she declared. “I have it from the maid of the house,
+little Jane, whom he pays four pound a year for all the work of the
+house: a clever little thing with her hands and her head she is; and can
+read and write beautiful; and she’s a mind to leave ‘em if they don’t
+advance her. She knocked and went in while he was full blaze, and bowing
+his poll to his glass. And now he turns the key, and a child might know
+he was at it.”
+
+“He can’t be such a donkey!”
+
+“And he’s been seen at the window on the seaside. ‘Who’s your Admiral
+staying at the house on the beach?’ men have inquired as they come
+ashore. My husband has heard it. Tinman’s got it on his brain. He might
+be cured by marriage to a sound-headed woman, but he ‘ll soon be wanting
+to walk about in silk legs if he stops a bachelor. They tell me his old
+mother here had a dress value twenty pound; and pomp’s inherited. Save
+as he may, there’s his leak.”
+
+Herbert’s contempt for Tinman was intense; it was that of the young and
+ignorant who live in their imaginations like spendthrifts, unaware of
+the importance of them as the food of life, and of how necessary it is
+to seize upon the solider one among them for perpetual sustenance when
+the unsubstantial are vanishing. The great event of his bailiff’s term
+of office had become the sun of Tinman’s system. He basked in its
+rays. He meant to be again the proud official, royally distinguished;
+meantime, though he knew not that his days were dull, he groaned under
+the dulness; and, as cart or cab horses, uncomplaining as a rule, show
+their view of the nature of harness when they have release to frisk in
+a field, it is possible that existence was made tolerable to the jogging
+man by some minutes of excitement in his bailiff’s Court suit. Really
+to pasture on our recollections we ought to dramatize them. There is,
+however, only the testimony of a maid and a mariner to show that Tinman
+did it, and those are witnesses coming of particularly long-bow classes,
+given to magnify small items of fact.
+
+On reaching the hall Herbert found the fire alight in the smoking-room,
+and soon after settling himself there he heard Van Diemen’s voice at the
+hall-door saying good night to Tinman.
+
+“Thank the Lord! there you are,” said Van Diemen, entering the room. “I
+couldn’t have hoped so much. That rascal!” he turned round to the door.
+“He has been threatening me, and then smoothing me. Hang his oil! It’s
+combustible. And hang the port he’s for laying down, as he calls it.
+‘Leave it to posterity,’ says I. ‘Why?’ says he. ‘Because the young ones
+‘ll be better able to take care of themselves,’ says I, and he insists
+on an explanation. I gave it to him. Out he bursts like a wasp’s
+nest. He may have said what he did say in temper. He seemed sorry
+afterwards--poor old Mart! The scoundrel talked of Horse Guards and
+telegraph wires.”
+
+“Scoundrel, but more ninny,” said Herbert, full of his contempt. “Dare
+him to do his worst. The General tells me they ‘d be glad to overlook
+it at the Guards, even if they had all the facts. Branding ‘s out of the
+question.”
+
+“I swear it was done in my time,” cried Van Diemen, all on fire.
+
+“It’s out of the question. You might be advised to leave England for a
+few months. As for the society here--”
+
+“If I leave, I leave for good. My heart’s broken. I’m disappointed. I’m
+deceived in my friend. He and I in the old days! What’s come to him?
+What on earth is it changes men who stop in England so? It can’t be the
+climate. And did you mention my name to General Fellingham?”
+
+“Certainly not,” said Herbert. “But listen to me, sir, a moment. Why not
+get together half-a-dozen friends of the neighbourhood, and make a clean
+breast of it. Englishmen like that kind of manliness, and they are sure
+to ring sound to it.”
+
+“I couldn’t!” Van Diemen sighed. “It’s not a natural feeling I have
+about it--I ‘ve brooded on the word. If I have a nightmare, I see
+Deserter written in sulphur on the black wall.”
+
+“You can’t remain at his mercy, and be bullied as you are. He makes you
+ill, sir. He won’t do anything, but he’ll go on worrying you. I’d stop
+him at once. I’d take the train to-morrow and get an introduction to the
+Commander-in-Chief. He’s the very man to be kind to you in a situation
+like this. The General would get you the introduction.”
+
+“That’s more to my taste; but no, I couldn’t,” Van Diemen moaned in his
+weakness. “Money has unmanned me. I was n’t this kind of man formerly;
+nor more was Mart Tinman, the traitor! All the world seems changeing for
+the worse, and England is n’t what she used to be.”
+
+“You let that man spoil it for you, sir.” Herbert related Mrs.
+Crickledon’s tale of Mr. Tinman, adding, “He’s an utter donkey. I should
+defy him. What I should do would be to let him know to-morrow morning
+that you don’t intend to see him again. Blow for, blow, is the thing he
+requires. He’ll be cringing to you in a week.”
+
+“And you’d like to marry Annette,” said Van Diemen, relishing,
+nevertheless, the advice, whose origin and object he perceived so
+plainly.
+
+“Of course I should,” said Herbert, franker still in his colour than his
+speech.
+
+“I don’t see him my girl’s husband.” Van Diemen eyed the red hollow
+in the falling coals. “When I came first, and found him a healthy man,
+good-looking enough for a trifle over forty, I ‘d have given her gladly,
+she nodding Yes. Now all my fear is she’s in earnest. Upon my soul,
+I had the notion old Mart was a sort of a boy still; playing man, you
+know. But how can you understand? I fancied his airs and stiffness were
+put on; thought I saw him burning true behind it. Who can tell? He seems
+to be jealous of my buying property in his native town. Something frets
+him. I ought never to have struck him! There’s my error, and I repent
+it. Strike a friend! I wonder he didn’t go off to the Horse Guards at
+once. I might have done it in his place, if I found I couldn’t lick him.
+I should have tried kicking first.”
+
+“Yes, shinning before peaching,” said Herbert, astonished almost as
+much as he was disgusted by the inveterate sentimental attachment of Van
+Diemen to his old friend.
+
+Martin Tinman anticipated good things of the fright he had given the man
+after dinner. He had, undoubtedly, yielded to temper, forgetting pure
+policy, which it is so exceeding difficult to practice. But he had
+soothed the startled beast; they had shaken hands at parting, and Tinman
+hoped that the week of Annette’s absence would enable him to mould her
+father. Young Fellingham’s appointment to come to Elba had slipped Mr.
+Tinman’s memory. It was annoying to see this intruder. “At all events,
+he’s not with Annette,” said Mrs. Cavely. “How long has her father to
+run on?”
+
+“Five months,” Tinman replied. “He would have completed his term of
+service in five months.”
+
+“And to think of his being a rich man because he deserted,” Mrs. Cavely
+interjected. “Oh! I do call it immoral. He ought to be apprehended and
+punished, to be an example for the good of society. If you lose time,
+my dear Martin, your chance is gone. He’s wriggling now. And if I could
+believe he talked us over to that young impudent, who has n’t a penny
+that he does n’t get from his pen, I’d say, denounce him to-morrow. I
+long for Elba. I hate this house. It will be swallowed up some day; I
+know it; I have dreamt it. Elba at any cost. Depend upon it, Martin, you
+have been foiled in your suits on account of the mean house you inhabit.
+Enter Elba as that girl’s husband, or go there to own it, and girls will
+crawl to you.”
+
+“You are a ridiculous woman, Martha,” said Tinman, not dissenting.
+
+The mixture of an idea of public duty with a feeling of personal rancour
+is a strong incentive to the pursuit of a stern line of conduct; and
+the glimmer of self-interest superadded does not check the steps of
+the moralist. Nevertheless, Tinman held himself in. He loved peace. He
+preached it, he disseminated it. At a meeting in the town he strove to
+win Van Diemen’s voice in favour of a vote for further moneys to
+protect “our shores.” Van Diemen laughed at him, telling him he wanted a
+battery. “No,” said Tinman, “I’ve had enough to do with soldiers.”
+
+“How’s that?”
+
+“They might be more cautious. I say, they might learn to know their
+friends from their enemies.”
+
+“That’s it, that’s it,” said Van Diemen. “If you say much more, my
+hearty, you’ll find me bidding against you next week for Marine Parade
+and Belle Vue Terrace. I’ve a cute eye for property, and this town’s
+looking up.”
+
+“You look about you before you speculate in land and house property
+here,” retorted Tinman.
+
+Van Diemen bore so much from him that he asked himself whether he could
+be an Englishman. The title of Deserter was his raw wound. He attempted
+to form the habit of stigmatizing himself with it in the privacy of
+his chamber, and he succeeded in establishing the habit of talking to
+himself, so that he was heard by the household, and Annette, on her
+return, was obliged to warn him of his indiscretion. This development of
+a new weakness exasperated him. Rather to prove his courage by defiance
+than to baffle Tinman’s ambition to become the principal owner of houses
+in Crikswich, by outbidding him at the auction for the sale of Marine
+Parade and Belle Vue Terrace, Van Diemen ran the houses up at the
+auction, and ultimately had Belle Vue knocked down to him. So fierce was
+the quarrel that Annette, in conjunction with Mrs. Cavely; was called on
+to interpose with her sweetest grace. “My native place,” Tinman said
+to her; “it is my native place. I have a pride in it; I desire to own
+property in it, and your father opposes me. He opposes me. Then says I
+may have it back at auction price, after he has gone far to double the
+price! I have borne--I repeat I have borne too much.”
+
+“Are n’t your properties to be equal to one?” said Mrs. Cavely, smiling
+mother--like from Tinman to Annette.
+
+He sought to produce a fondling eye in a wry face, and said, “Yes, I
+will remember that.”
+
+“Annette will bless you with her dear hand in a month or two at the
+outside,” Mrs. Cavely murmured, cherishingly.
+
+“She will?” Tinman cracked his body to bend to her.
+
+“Oh, I cannot say; do not distress me. Be friendly with papa,” the girl
+resumed, moving to escape.
+
+“That is the essential,” said Mrs. Cavely; and continued, when Annette
+had gone, “The essential is to get over the next few months, miss, and
+then to snap your fingers at us. Martin, I would force that man to sell
+you Belle Vue under the price he paid for it, just to try your power.”
+
+Tinman was not quite so forcible. He obtained Belle Vue at auction
+price, and his passion for revenge was tipped with fire by having it
+accorded as a friend’s favour.
+
+The poisoned state of his mind was increased by a December high wind
+that rattled his casements, and warned him of his accession of property
+exposed to the elements. Both he and his sister attributed their
+nervousness to the sinister behaviour of Van Diemen. For the house on
+the beach had only, in most distant times, been threatened by the sea,
+and no house on earth was better protected from man,--Neptune, in the
+shape of a coastguard, being paid by Government to patrol about it
+during the hours of darkness. They had never had any fears before Van
+Diemen arrived, and caused them to give thrice their ordinary number of
+dinners to guests per annum. In fact, before Van Diemen came, the
+house on the beach looked on Crikswich without a rival to challenge its
+anticipated lordship over the place, and for some inexplicable reason
+it seemed to its inhabitants to have been a safer as well as a happier
+residence.
+
+They were consoled by Tinman’s performance of a clever stroke in
+privately purchasing the cottages west of the town, and including
+Crickledon’s shop, abutting on Marine Parade. Then from the house on the
+beach they looked at an entire frontage of their property.
+
+They entered the month of February. No further time was to be lost,
+“or we shall wake up to find that man has fooled us,” Mrs. Cavely said.
+Tinman appeared at Elba to demand a private interview with Annette. His
+hat was blown into the hall as the door opened to him, and he himself
+was glad to be sheltered by the door, so violent was the gale. Annette
+and her father were sitting together. They kept the betrothed gentleman
+waiting a very long time. At last Van Diemen went to him, and said,
+“Netty ‘ll see you, if you must. I suppose you have no business with
+me?”
+
+“Not to-day,” Tinman replied.
+
+Van Diemen strode round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets.
+“There’s a disparity of ages,” he said, abruptly, as if desirous to pour
+out his lesson while he remembered it. “A man upwards of forty marries
+a girl under twenty, he’s over sixty before she’s forty; he’s decaying
+when she’s only mellow. I ought never to have struck you, I know. And
+you’re such an infernal bad temper at times, and age does n’t improve
+that, they say; and she’s been educated tip-top. She’s sharp on grammar,
+and a man may n’t like that much when he’s a husband. See her, if you
+must. But she does n’t take to the idea; there’s the truth. Disparity
+of ages and unsuitableness of dispositions--what was it Fellingham
+said?--like two barrel-organs grinding different tunes all day in a
+house.”
+
+“I don’t want to hear Mr. Fellingham’s comparisons,” Tinman snapped.
+
+“Oh! he’s nothing to the girl,” said Van Diemen. “She doesn’t stomach
+leaving me.”
+
+“My dear Philip! why should she leave you? When we have interests in
+common as one household--”
+
+“She says you’re such a damned bad temper.”
+
+Tinman was pursuing amicably, “When we are united--” But the frightful
+charge brought against his temper drew him up. “Fiery I may be. Annette
+has seen I am forgiving. I am a Christian. You have provoked me; you
+have struck me.”
+
+“I ‘ll give you a couple of thousand pounds in hard money to be off the
+bargain, and not bother the girl,” said Van Diemen.
+
+“Now,” rejoined Tinman, “I am offended. I like money, like most men who
+have made it. You do, Philip. But I don’t come courting like a pauper.
+Not for ten thousand; not for twenty. Money cannot be a compensation to
+me for the loss of Annette. I say I love Annette.”
+
+“Because,” Van Diemen continued his speech, “you trapped us into that
+engagement, Mart. You dosed me with the stuff you buy for wine, while
+your sister sat sugaring and mollifying my girl; and she did the trick
+in a minute, taking Netty by surprise when I was all heart and no head;
+and since that you may have seen the girl turn her head from marriage
+like my woods from the wind.”
+
+“Mr. Van Diemen Smith!” Tinman panted; he mastered himself. “You shall
+not provoke me. My introductions of you in this neighbourhood, my
+patronage, prove my friendship.”
+
+“You’ll be a good old fellow, Mart, when you get over your hopes of
+being knighted.”
+
+“Mr. Fellingham may set you against my wine, Philip. Let me tell you--I
+know you--you would not object to have your daughter called Lady.”
+
+“With a spindle-shanked husband capering in a Court suit before he goes
+to bed every night, that he may n’t forget what a fine fellow he was one
+day bygone! You’re growing lean on it, Mart, like a recollection fifty
+years old.”
+
+“You have never forgiven me that day, Philip!”
+
+“Jealous, am I? Take the money, give up the girl, and see what friends
+we’ll be. I’ll back your buyings, I’ll advertise your sellings. I’ll pay
+a painter to paint you in your Court suit, and hang up a copy of you in
+my diningroom.”
+
+“Annette is here,” said Tinman, who had been showing Etna’s tokens of
+insurgency.
+
+He admired Annette. Not till latterly had Herbert Fellingham been so
+true an admirer of Annette as Tinman was. She looked sincere and she
+dressed inexpensively. For these reasons she was the best example
+of womankind that he knew, and her enthusiasm for England had the
+sympathetic effect on him of obscuring the rest of the world, and
+thrilling him with the reassuring belief that he was blest in his blood
+and his birthplace--points which her father, with his boastings
+of Gippsland, and other people talking of scenes on the Continent,
+sometimes disturbed in his mind.
+
+“Annette,” said he, “I come requesting to converse with you in private.”
+
+“If you wish it--I would rather not,” she answered.
+
+Tinman raised his head, as often at Helmstone when some offending
+shopwoman was to hear her doom.
+
+He bent to her. “I see. Before your father, then!”
+
+“It isn’t an agreeable bit of business, to me,” Van Diemen grumbled,
+frowning and shrugging.
+
+“I have come, Annette, to ask you, to beg you, entreat--before a third
+person--laughing, Philip?”
+
+“The wrong side of my mouth, my friend. And I’ll tell you what: we’re in
+for heavy seas, and I ‘m not sorry you’ve taken the house on the beach
+off my hands.”
+
+“Pray, Mr. Tinman, speak at once, if you please, and I will do my best.
+Papa vexes you.”
+
+“No, no,” replied Tinman.
+
+He renewed his commencement. Van Diemen interrupted him again.
+
+“Hang your power over me, as you call it. Eh, old Mart? I’m a Deserter.
+I’ll pay a thousand pounds to the British army, whether they punish me
+or not. March me off tomorrow!”
+
+“Papa, you are unjust, unkind.” Annette turned to him in tears.
+
+“No, no,” said Tinman, “I do not feel it. Your father has misunderstood
+me, Annette.”
+
+“I am sure he has,” she said fervently. “And, Mr. Tinman, I will
+faithfully promise that so long as you are good to my dear father, I
+will not be untrue to my engagement, only do not wish me to name any
+day. We shall be such very good dear friends if you consent to this.
+Will you?”
+
+Pausing for a space, the enamoured man unrolled his voice in
+lamentation: “Oh! Annette, how long will you keep me?”
+
+“There; you’ll set her crying!” said Van Diemen. “Now you can run
+upstairs, Netty. By jingo! Mart Tinman, you’ve got a bass voice for love
+affairs.”
+
+“Annette,” Tinman called to her, and made her turn round as she was
+retiring. “I must know the day before the end of winter. Please. In kind
+consideration. My arrangements demand it.”
+
+“Do let the girl go,” said Van Diemen. “Dine with me tonight and I’ll
+give you a wine to brisk your spirits, old boy.”
+
+“Thank you. When I have ordered dinner at home, I----and my wine agrees
+with ME,” Tinman replied.
+
+“I doubt it.”
+
+“You shall not provoke me, Philip.”
+
+They parted stiffly.
+
+Mrs. Cavely had unpleasant domestic news to communicate to her brother,
+in return for his tale of affliction and wrath. It concerned the
+ungrateful conduct of their little housemaid Jane, who, as Mrs. Cavely
+said, “egged on by that woman Crickledon,” had been hinting at an
+advance of wages.
+
+“She didn’t dare speak, but I saw what was in her when she broke a
+plate, and wouldn’t say she was sorry. I know she goes to Crickledon and
+talks us over. She’s a willing worker, but she has no heart.”
+
+Tinman had been accustomed in his shop at Helmstone--where heaven
+had blessed him with the patronage of the rich, as visibly as rays of
+supernal light are seen selecting from above the heads of prophets in
+the illustrations to cheap holy books--to deal with willing workers that
+have no hearts. Before the application for an advance of wages--and he
+knew the signs of it coming--his method was to calculate how much he
+might be asked for, and divide the estimated sum by the figure 4; which,
+as it seemed to come from a generous impulse, and had been unsolicited,
+was often humbly accepted, and the willing worker pursued her lean and
+hungry course in his service. The treatment did not always agree with
+his males. Women it suited; because they do not like to lift up their
+voices unless they are in a passion; and if you take from them the
+grounds of temper, you take their words away--you make chickens of them.
+And as Tinman said, “Gratitude I never expect!” Why not? For the reason
+that he knew human nature. He could record shocking instances of the
+ingratitude of human nature, as revealed to him in the term of his
+tenure of the shop at Helmstone. Blest from above, human nature’s
+wickedness had from below too frequently besulphured and suffumigated
+him for his memory to be dim; and though he was ever ready to own
+himself an example that heaven prevaileth, he could cite instances of
+scandal-mongering shop-women dismissed and working him mischief in the
+town, which pointed to him in person for a proof that the Powers of
+Good and Evil were still engaged in unhappy contention. Witness Strikes!
+witness Revolutions!
+
+“Tell her, when she lays the cloth, that I advance her, on account of
+general good conduct, five shillings per annum. Add,” said Tinman, “that
+I wish no thanks. It is for her merits--to reward her; you understand
+me, Martha?”
+
+“Quite; if you think it prudent, Martin.”
+
+“I do. She is not to breathe a syllable to cook.”
+
+“She will.”
+
+“Then keep your eye on cook.”
+
+Mrs. Cavely promised she would do so. She felt sure she was paying five
+shillings for ingratitude; and, therefore, it was with humility that she
+owned her error when, while her brother sipped his sugared acrid liquor
+after dinner (in devotion to the doctor’s decree, that he should take
+a couple of glasses, rigorously as body-lashing friar), she imparted to
+him the singular effect of the advance of wages upon little Jane--“Oh,
+ma’am! and me never asked you for it!” She informed her brother how
+little Jane had confided to her that they were called “close,” and how
+little Jane had vowed she would--the willing little thing!--go about
+letting everybody know their kindness.
+
+“Yes! Ah!” Tinman inhaled the praise. “No, no; I don’t want to be
+puffed,” he said. “Remember cook. I have,” he continued, meditatively,
+“rarely found my plan fail. But mind, I give the Crickledons notice
+to quit to-morrow. They are a pest. Besides, I shall probably think of
+erecting villas.”
+
+“How dreadful the wind is!” Mrs. Cavely exclaimed. “I would give that
+girl Annette one chance more. Try her by letter.”
+
+Tinman despatched a business letter to Annette, which brought back a
+vague, unbusiness-like reply. Two days afterward Mrs. Cavely reported to
+her brother the presence of Mr. Fellingham and Miss Mary Fellingham
+in Crikswich. At her dictation he wrote a second letter. This time the
+reply came from Van Diemen:
+
+   “My DEAR MARTIN,--Please do not go on bothering my girl. She does
+   not like the idea of leaving me, and my experience tells me I could
+   not live in the house with you. So there it is. Take it friendly.
+   I have always wanted to be, and am,
+
+                    “Your friend,
+
+                            “PHIL.”
+
+Tinman proceeded straight to Elba; that is, as nearly straight as the
+wind would allow his legs to walk. Van Diemen was announced to be
+out; Miss Annette begged to be excused, under the pretext that she was
+unwell; and Tinman heard of a dinner-party at Elba that night.
+
+He met Mr. Fellingham on the carriage drive. The young Londoner presumed
+to touch upon Tinman’s private affairs by pleading on behalf of the
+Crikledons, who were, he said, much dejected by the notice they had
+received to quit house and shop.
+
+“Another time,” bawled Tinman. “I can’t hear you in this wind.”
+
+“Come in,” said Fellingham.
+
+“The master of the house is absent,” was the smart retort roared at him;
+and Tinman staggered away, enjoying it as he did his wine.
+
+His house rocked. He was backed by his sister in the assurance that he
+had been duped.
+
+The process he supposed to be thinking, which was the castigation of
+his brains with every sting wherewith a native touchiness could ply
+immediate recollection, led him to conclude that he must bring Van
+Diemen to his senses, and Annette running to him for mercy.
+
+He sat down that night amid the howling of the storm, wind whistling,
+water crashing, casements rattling, beach desperately dragging, as by
+the wide-stretched star-fish fingers of the half-engulphed.
+
+He hardly knew what he wrote. The man was in a state of personal
+terror, burning with indignation at Van Diemen as the main cause of
+his jeopardy. For, in order to prosecute his pursuit of Annette, he had
+abstained from going to Helmstone to pay moneys into his bank there,
+and what was precious to life as well as life itself, was imperilled
+by those two--Annette and her father--who, had they been true, had
+they been honest, to say nothing of honourable, would by this time have
+opened Elba to him as a fast and safe abode.
+
+His letter was addressed, on a large envelope,
+
+   “To the Adjutant-General,
+
+   “HORSE GUARDS.”
+
+But if ever consigned to the Post, that post-office must be in London;
+and Tinman left the letter on his desk till the morning should bring
+counsel to him as to the London friend to whom he might despatch it
+under cover for posting, if he pushed it so far.
+
+Sleep was impossible. Black night favoured the tearing fiends of
+shipwreck, and looking through a back window over sea, Tinman saw with
+dismay huge towering ghostwhite wreaths, that travelled up swiftly on
+his level, and lit the dark as they flung themselves in ruin, with a
+gasp, across the mound of shingle at his feet.
+
+He undressed: His sister called to him to know if they were in
+danger. Clothed in his dressing-gown, he slipped along to her door, to
+vociferate to her hoarsely that she must not frighten the servants; and
+one fine quality in the training of the couple, which had helped them to
+prosper, a form of self-command, kept her quiet in her shivering fears.
+
+For a distraction Tinman pulled open the drawers of his wardrobe. His
+glittering suit lay in one. And he thought, “What wonderful changes
+there are in the world!” meaning, between a man exposed to the wrath of
+the elements, and the same individual reading from vellum, in that suit,
+in a palace, to the Head of all of us!
+
+The presumption is; that he must have often done it before. The fact is
+established, that he did it that night. The conclusion drawn from it is,
+that it must have given him a sense of stability and safety.
+
+At any rate that he put on the suit is quite certain.
+
+Probably it was a work of ingratiation and degrees; a feeling of the
+silk, a trying on to one leg, then a matching of the fellow with it. O
+you Revolutionists! who would have no state, no ceremonial, and but one
+order of galligaskins! This man must have been wooed away in spirit to
+forgetfulness of the tempest scourging his mighty neighbour to a bigger
+and a farther leap; he must have obtained from the contemplation of
+himself in his suit that which would be the saving of all men, in
+especial of his countrymen--imagination, namely.
+
+Certain it is, as I have said, that he attired himself in the suit. He
+covered it with his dressing-gown, and he lay down on his bed so garbed,
+to await the morrow’s light, being probably surprised by sleep acting
+upon fatigue and nerves appeased and soothed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Elba lay more sheltered from South-east winds under the slopes of down
+than any other house in Crikswich. The South-caster struck off the cliff
+to a martello tower and the house on the beach, leaving Elba to repose,
+so that the worst wind for that coast was one of the most comfortable
+for the owner of the hall, and he looked from his upper window on a sea
+of crumbling grey chalk, lashed unremittingly by the featureless piping
+gale, without fear that his elevated grounds and walls would be open
+at high tide to the ravage of water. Van Diemen had no idea of calamity
+being at work on land when he sat down to breakfast. He told Herbert
+that he had prayed for poor fellows at sea last night. Mary Fellingham
+and Annette were anxious to finish breakfast and mount the down to gaze
+on the sea, and receiving a caution from Van Diemen not to go too near
+the cliff, they were inclined to think he was needlessly timorous on
+their account.
+
+Before they were half way through the meal, word was brought in of great
+breaches in the shingle, and water covering the common. Van Diemen sent
+for his head gardener, whose report of the state of things outside took
+the comprehensive form of prophecy; he predicted the fall of the town.
+
+“Nonsense; what do you mean, John Scott?” said Van Diemen, eyeing his
+orderly breakfast table and the man in turns. “It does n’t seem like
+that, yet, does it?”
+
+“The house on the beach won’t stand an hour longer, sir.”
+
+“Who says so?”
+
+“It’s cut off from land now, and waves mast-high all about it.”
+
+“Mart Tinman?” cried Van Diemen.
+
+All started; all jumped up; and there was a scampering for hats and
+cloaks. Maids and men of the house ran in and out confirming the news of
+inundation. Some in terror for the fate of relatives, others pleasantly
+excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony, for at any rate
+it was a change of demons.
+
+The view from the outer bank of Elba was of water covering the space
+of the common up to the stones of Marine Parade and Belle Vue. But at a
+distance it had not the appearance of angry water; the ladies thought it
+picturesque, and the house on the beach was seen standing firm. A second
+look showed the house completely isolated; and as the party led by Van
+Diemen circled hurriedly toward the town, they discerned heavy cataracts
+of foam pouring down the wrecked mound of shingle on either side of the
+house.
+
+“Why, the outer wall’s washed away,” said Van Diemen. “Are they in real
+danger?” asked Annette, her teeth chattering, and the cold and other
+matters at her heart precluding for the moment such warmth of sympathy
+as she hoped soon to feel for them. She was glad to hear her father say:
+
+“Oh! they’re high and dry by this time. We shall find them in the
+town And we’ll take them in and comfort them. Ten to one they have n’t
+breakfasted. They sha’n’t go to an inn while I’m handy.”
+
+He dashed ahead, followed closely by Herbert. The ladies beheld them
+talking to townsfolk as they passed along the upper streets, and did not
+augur well of their increase of speed. At the head of the town water was
+visible, part of the way up the main street, and crossing it, the
+ladies went swiftly under the old church, on the tower of which were
+spectators, through the churchyard to a high meadow that dropped to a
+stone wall fixed between the meadow and a grass bank above the level of
+the road, where now salt water beat and cast some spray. Not less than
+a hundred people were in this field, among them Crickledon and his wife.
+All were in silent watch of the house on the beach, which was to east
+of the field, at a distance of perhaps three stonethrows. The scene was
+wild. Continuously the torrents poured through the shingleclefts, and
+momently a thunder sounded, and high leapt a billow that topped the
+house and folded it weltering.
+
+“They tell me Mart Tinman’s in the house,” Van Diemen roared to Herbert.
+He listened to further information, and bellowed: “There’s no boat!”
+
+Herbert answered: “It must be a mistake, I think; here’s Crickledon says
+he had a warning before dawn and managed to move most of his things, and
+the people over there must have been awakened by the row in time to get
+off.”
+
+“I can’t hear a word you say;” Van Diemen tried to pitch his voice
+higher than the wind. “Did you say a boat? But where?”
+
+Crickledon the carpenter made signal to Herbert. They stepped rapidly up
+the field.
+
+“Women feels their weakness in times like these, my dear,” Mrs.
+Crickledon said to Annette. “What with our clothes and our cowardice it
+do seem we’re not the equals of men when winds is high.”
+
+Annette expressed the hope to her that she had not lost much property.
+Mrs. Crickledon said she was glad to let her know she was insured in
+an Accident Company. “But,” said she, “I do grieve for that poor man
+Tinman, if alive he be, and comes ashore to find his property wrecked
+by water. Bless ye! he wouldn’t insure against anything less common than
+fire; and my house and Crickledon’s shop are floating timbers by this
+time; and Marine Parade and Belle Vue are safe to go. And it’ll be a
+pretty welcome for him, poor man, from his investments.”
+
+A cry at a tremendous blow of a wave on the doomed house rose from the
+field. Back and front door were broken down, and the force of water
+drove a round volume through the channel, shaking the walls.
+
+“I can’t stand this,” Van Diemen cried.
+
+Annette was too late to hold him back. He ran up the field. She was
+preparing to run after when Mrs. Crickledon touched her arm and implored
+her: “Interfere not with men, but let them follow their judgements when
+it’s seasons of mighty peril, my dear. If any one’s guilty it’s me, for
+minding my husband of a boat that was launched for a life-boat here,
+and wouldn’t answer, and is at the shed by the Crouch--left lying there,
+I’ve often said, as if it was a-sulking. My goodness!”
+
+A linen sheet bad been flung out from one of the windows of the house on
+the beach, and flew loose and flapping in sign of distress.
+
+“It looks as if they had gone mad in that house, to have waited so long
+for to declare theirselves, poor souls,” Mrs. Crickledon said, sighing.
+
+She was assured right and left that signals had been seen before, and
+some one stated that the cook of Mr. Tinman, and also Mrs. Cavely, were
+on shore.
+
+“It’s his furniture, poor man, he sticks to: and nothing gets round the
+heart so!” resumed Mrs. Crickledon. “There goes his bed-linen!”
+
+The sheet was whirled and snapped away by the wind; distended doubled,
+like a flock of winter geese changeing alphabetical letters on the
+clouds, darted this way and that, and finally outspread on the waters
+breaking against Marine Parade.
+
+“They cannot have thought there was positive danger in remaining,” said
+Annette.
+
+“Mr. Tinman was waiting for the cheapest Insurance office,” a man
+remarked to Mrs. Crickledon.
+
+“The least to pay is to the undertaker,” she replied, standing on
+tiptoe. “And it’s to be hoped he ‘ll pay more to-day. If only those
+walls don’t fall and stop the chance of the boat to save him for more
+outlay, poor man! What boats was on the beach last night, high up and
+over the ridge as they was, are planks by this time and only good for
+carpenters.”
+
+“Half our town’s done for,” one old man said; and another followed him
+in a pious tone: “From water we came and to water we go.”
+
+They talked of ancient inroads of the sea, none so serious as this
+threatened to be for them. The gallant solidity, of the house on
+the beach had withstood heavy gales: it was a brave house. Heaven be
+thanked, no fishing boats were out. Chiefly well-to-do people would
+be the sufferers--an exceptional case. For it is the mysterious and
+unexplained dispensation that: “Mostly heaven chastises we.”
+
+A knot of excited gazers drew the rest of the field to them. Mrs.
+Crickledon, on the edge of the crowd, reported what was doing to Annette
+and Miss Fellingham. A boat had been launched from the town. “Praise
+the Lord, there’s none but coastguard in it!” she exclaimed, and excused
+herself for having her heart on her husband.
+
+Annette was as deeply thankful that her father was not in the boat.
+
+They looked round and saw Herbert beside them. Van Diemen was in the
+rear, panting, and straining his neck to catch sight of the boat now
+pulling fast across a tumbled sea to where Tinman himself was perceived,
+beckoning them wildly, half out of one of the windows.
+
+“A pound apiece to those fellows, and two if they land Mart Tinman
+dry; I’ve promised it, and they’ll earn it. Look at that! Quick, you
+rascals!”
+
+To the east a portion of the house had fallen, melted away. Where it
+stood, just below the line of shingle, it was now like a structure
+wasting on a tormented submerged reef. The whole line was given over to
+the waves.
+
+“Where is his sister?” Annette shrieked to her father.
+
+“Safe ashore; and one of the women with her. But Mart Tinman would stop,
+the fool! to-poor old boy! save his papers and things; and has n’t a
+head to do it, Martha Cavely tells me. They’re at him now! They’ve got
+him in! There’s another? Oh! it’s a girl, who would n’t go and leave
+him. They’ll pull to the field here. Brave lads!--By jingo, why ain’t
+Englishmen always in danger!--eh? if you want to see them shine!”
+
+“It’s little Jane,” said Mrs. Crickledon, who had been joined by her
+husband, and now that she knew him to be no longer in peril, kept her
+hand on him to restrain him, just for comfort’s sake.
+
+The boat held under the lee of the house-wreck a minute; then, as
+if shooting a small rapid, came down on a wave crowned with foam, to
+hurrahs from the townsmen.
+
+“They’re all right,” said Van Diemen, puffing as at a mist before his
+eyes. “They’ll pull westward, with the wind, and land him among us. I
+remember when old Mart and I were bathing once, he was younger than me,
+and could n’t swim much, and I saw him going down. It’d have been hard
+to see him washed off before one’s eyes thirty years afterwards. Here
+they come. He’s all right. He’s in his dressing-gown!”
+
+The crowd made way for Mr. Van Diemen Smith to welcome his friend. Two
+of the coastguard jumped out, and handed him to the dry bank, while
+Herbert, Van Diemen, and Crickledon took him by hand and arm, and
+hoisted him on to the flint wall, preparatory to his descent into the
+field. In this exposed situation the wind, whose pranks are endless when
+it is once up, seized and blew Martin Tinman’s dressing-gown wide as two
+violently flapping wings on each side of him, and finally over his head.
+
+Van Diemen turned a pair of stupefied flat eyes on Herbert, who cast
+a sly look at the ladies. Tinman had sprung down. But not before the
+world, in one tempestuous glimpse, had caught sight of the Court suit.
+
+Perfect gravity greeted him from the crowd.
+
+“Safe, old Mart! and glad to be able to say it,” said Van Diemen.
+
+“We are so happy,” said Annette.
+
+“House, furniture, property, everything I possess!” ejaculated Tinman,
+shivering.
+
+“Fiddle, man; you want some hot breakfast in you. Your sister has gone
+on--to Elba. Come you too, old Man; and where’s that plucky little girl
+who stood by--”
+
+“Was there a girl?” said Tinman.
+
+“Yes, and there was a boy wanted to help.” Van Diemen pointed at
+Herbert.
+
+Tinman looked, and piteously asked, “Have you examined Marine Parade and
+Belle Vue? It depends on the tide!”
+
+“Here is little Jane, sir,” said Mrs. Crickledon.
+
+“Fall in,” Van Diemen said to little Jane.
+
+The girl was bobbing curtseys to Annette, on her introduction by Mrs.
+Crickledon.
+
+“Martin, you stay at my house; you stay at Elba till you get things
+comfortable about you, and then you shall have the Crouch for a year,
+rent free. Eh, Netty?”
+
+Annette chimed in: “Anything we can do, anything. Nothing can be too
+much.”
+
+Van Diemen was praising little Jane for her devotion to her master.
+
+“Master have been so kind to me,” said little Jane.
+
+“Now, march; it is cold,” Van Diemen gave the word, and Herbert stood
+by Mary rather dejectedly, foreseeing that his prospects at Elba were
+darkened.
+
+“Now then, Mart, left leg forward,” Van Diemen linked his arm in his
+friend’s.
+
+“I must have a look,” Tinman broke from him, and cast a forlorn look of
+farewell on the last of the house on the beach.
+
+“You’ve got me left to you, old Mart; don’t forget that,” said Van
+Diemen.
+
+Tinman’s chest fell. “Yes, yes,” he responded. He was touched.
+
+“And I told those fellows if they landed you dry they should have--I’d
+give them double pay; and I do believe they’ve earned their money.”
+
+“I don’t think I’m very wet, I’m cold,” said Tinman.
+
+“You can’t help being cold, so come along.”
+
+“But, Philip!” Tinman lifted his voice; “I’ve lost everything. I tried
+to save a little. I worked hard, I exposed my life, and all in vain.”
+
+The voice of little Jane was heard.
+
+“What’s the matter with the child?” said Van Diemen.
+
+Annette went up to her quietly.
+
+But little Jane was addressing her master.
+
+“Oh! if you please, I did manage to save something the last thing when
+the boat was at the window, and if you please, sir, all the bundles is
+lost, but I saved you a papercutter, and a letter Horse Guards, and here
+they are, sir.”
+
+The grateful little creature drew the square letter and paper-cutter
+from her bosom, and held them out to Mr. Tinman.
+
+It was a letter of the imposing size, with THE HORSE GUARDS very
+distinctly inscribed on it in Tinman’s best round hand, to strike his
+vindictive spirit as positively intended for transmission, and give him
+sight of his power to wound if it pleased him; as it might.
+
+“What!” cried he, not clearly comprehending how much her devotion had
+accomplished for him.
+
+“A letter to the Horse Guards!” cried Van Diemen.
+
+“Here, give it me,” said little Jane’s master, and grasped it nervously.
+
+“What’s in that letter?” Van Diemen asked. “Let me look at that letter.
+Don’t tell me it’s private correspondence.”
+
+“My dear Philip, dear friend, kind thanks; it’s not a letter,” said
+Tinman.
+
+“Not a letter! why, I read the address, ‘Horse Guards.’ I read it as it
+passed into your hands. Now, my man, one look at that letter, or take
+the consequences.”
+
+“Kind thanks for your assistance, dear Philip, indeed! Oh! this? Oh!
+it’s nothing.” He tore it in halves.
+
+His face was of the winter sea-colour, with the chalk wash on it.
+
+“Tear again, and I shall know what to think of the contents,” Van Diemen
+frowned. “Let me see what you’ve said. You’ve sworn you would do it, and
+there it is at last, by miracle; but let me see it and I’ll overlook it,
+and you shall be my house-mate still. If not!----”
+
+Tinman tore away.
+
+“You mistake, you mistake, you’re entirely wrong,” he said, as he
+pursued with desperation his task of rendering every word unreadable.
+
+Van Diemen stood fronting him; the accumulation of stores of petty
+injuries and meannesses which he had endured from this man, swelled
+under the whip of the conclusive exhibition of treachery. He looked so
+black that Annette called, “Papa!”
+
+“Philip,” said Tinman. “Philip! my best friend!”
+
+“Pooh, you’re a poor creature. Come along and breakfast at Elba, and you
+can sleep at the Crouch, and goodnight to you. Crickledon,” he called to
+the houseless couple, “you stop at Elba till I build you a shop.”
+
+With these words, Van Diemen led the way, walking alone. Herbert was
+compelled to walk with Tinman.
+
+Mary and Annette came behind, and Mary pinched Annette’s arm so sharply
+that she must have cried out aloud had it been possible for her to feel
+pain at that moment, instead of a personal exultation, flying wildly
+over the clash of astonishment and horror, like a sea-bird over the
+foam.
+
+In the first silent place they came to, Mary murmured the words: “Little
+Jane.”
+
+Annette looked round at Mrs. Crickledon, who wound up the procession,
+taking little Jane by the hand. Little Jane was walking demurely, with a
+placid face. Annette glanced at Tinman. Her excited feelings nearly rose
+to a scream of laughter. For hours after, Mary had only to say to her:
+“Little Jane,” to produce the same convulsion. It rolled her heart and
+senses in a headlong surge, shook her to burning tears, and seemed to
+her ideas the most wonderful running together of opposite things ever
+known on this earth. The young lady was ashamed of her laughter; but
+she was deeply indebted to it, for never was mind made so clear by that
+beneficent exercise.
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     Adversary at once offensive and helpless provokes brutality
+     Causes him to be popularly weighed
+     Distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked
+     Eccentric behaviour in trifles
+     Excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony
+     Generally he noticed nothing
+     Good jokes are not always good policy
+     I make a point of never recommending my own house
+     Indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked
+     Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies?
+     Lend him your own generosity
+     Men love to boast of things nobody else has seen
+     Naughtily Australian and kangarooly
+     Not in love--She was only not unwilling to be in love
+     Rich and poor ‘s all right, if I’m rich and you’re poor
+     She began to feel that this was life in earnest
+     She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas
+     She sought, by looking hard, to understand it better
+     Sunning itself in the glass of Envy
+     That which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
+     The intricate, which she takes for the infinite
+     Tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back
+     Two principal roads by which poor sinners come to a conscience
+
+
+
+
+THE GENTLEMAN OF FIFTY AND THE DAMSEL OF NINETEEN
+
+(An early uncompleted and hitherto unpublished fragment.)
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HE
+
+Passing over Ickleworth Bridge and rounding up the heavily-shadowed
+river of our narrow valley, I perceived a commotion as of bathers in a
+certain bright space immediately underneath the vicar’s terrace-garden
+steps. My astonishment was considerable when it became evident to me
+that the vicar himself was disporting in the water, which, reaching no
+higher than his waist, disclosed him in the ordinary habiliments of his
+cloth. I knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men,
+and my first effort to explain the phenomenon of his appearance
+there, suggested that he might have walked in, the victim of a fit of
+abstraction, and that he had not yet fully comprehended his plight; but
+this idea was dispersed when I beheld the very portly lady, his partner
+in joy and adversity, standing immersed, and perfectly attired, some
+short distance nearer to the bank. As I advanced along the bank opposed
+to them, I was further amazed to hear them discoursing quite equably
+together, so that it was impossible to say on the face of it whether a
+catastrophe had occurred, or the great heat of a cloudless summer day
+had tempted an eccentric couple to seek for coolness in the directest
+fashion, without absolute disregard to propriety. I made a point
+of listening for the accentuation of the ‘my dear’ which was being
+interchanged, but the key-note to the harmony existing between husband
+and wife was neither excessively unctuous, nor shrewd, and the connubial
+shuttlecock was so well kept up on both sides that I chose to await the
+issue rather than speculate on the origin of this strange exhibition. I
+therefore, as I could not be accused of an outrage to modesty, permitted
+myself to maintain what might be invidiously termed a satyr-like watch
+from behind a forward flinging willow, whose business in life was to
+look at its image in a brown depth, branches, trunk, and roots. The sole
+indication of discomfort displayed by the pair was that the lady’s hand
+worked somewhat fretfully to keep her dress from ballooning and puffing
+out of all proportion round about her person, while the vicar, who stood
+without his hat, employed a spongy handkerchief from time to time in
+tempering the ardours of a vertical sun. If you will consent to imagine
+a bald blackbird, his neck being shrunk in apprehensively, as you may
+see him in the first rolling of the thunder, you will gather an image of
+my friend’s appearance.
+
+He performed his capital ablutions with many loud ‘poofs,’ and a casting
+up of dazzled eyes, an action that gave point to his recital of the
+invocation of Chryses to Smintheus which brought upon the Greeks
+disaster and much woe. Between the lines he replied to his wife, whose
+remarks increased in quantity, and also, as I thought, in emphasis,
+under the river of verse which he poured forth unbaffled, broadening
+his chest to the sonorous Greek music in a singular rapture of
+obliviousness.
+
+A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it, but will
+keep the agitation of it down as long as he may. The simmering of humour
+sends a lively spirit into the mind, whereas the boiling over is but
+a prodigal expenditure and the disturbance of a clear current: for the
+comic element is visible to you in all things, if you do but keep
+your mind charged with the perception of it, as I have heard a great
+expounder deliver himself on another subject; and he spoke very truly.
+So, I continued to look on with the gravity of Nature herself, and I
+could not but fancy, and with less than our usual wilfulness when we
+fancy things about Nature’s moods, that the Mother of men beheld this
+scene with half a smile, differently from the simple observation of
+those cows whisking the flies from their flanks at the edge of the
+shorn meadow and its aspens, seen beneath the curved roof of a broad
+oak-branch. Save for this happy upward curve of the branch, we are
+encompassed by breathless foliage; even the gloom was hot; the little
+insects that are food for fish tried a flight and fell on the water’s
+surface, as if panting. Here and there, a sullen fish consented to take
+them, and a circle spread, telling of past excitement.
+
+I had listened to the vicar’s Homeric lowing for the space of a minute
+or so--what some one has called, the great beast-like, bellow-like, roar
+and roll of the Iliad hexameter: it stopped like a cut cord. One of
+the numerous daughters of his house appeared in the arch of white
+cluster-roses on the lower garden-terrace, and with an exclamation,
+stood petrified at the extraordinary spectacle, and then she laughed
+outright. I had hitherto resisted, but the young lady’s frank and
+boisterous laughter carried me along, and I too let loose a peal, and
+discovered myself. The vicar, seeing me, acknowledged a consciousness
+of his absurd position with a laugh as loud. As for the scapegrace
+girl, she went off into a run of high-pitched shriekings like twenty
+woodpeckers, crying: I Mama, mama, you look as if you were in Jordan!’
+
+The vicar cleared his throat admonishingly, for it was apparent that
+Miss Alice was giving offence to her mother, and I presume he thought it
+was enough for one of the family to have done so.
+
+‘Wilt thou come out of Jordan?’ I cried.
+
+‘I am sufficiently baptized with the water,’ said the helpless man...
+
+‘Indeed, Mr. Amble,’ observed his spouse, ‘you can lecture a woman for
+not making the best of circumstances; I hope you’ll bear in mind that
+it’s you who are irreverent. I can endure this no longer. You deserve
+Mr. Pollingray’s ridicule.’
+
+Upon this, I interposed: ‘Pray, ma’am, don’t imagine that you have
+anything but sympathy from me.’--but as I was protesting, having my
+mouth open, the terrible Miss Alice dragged the laughter remorselessly
+out of me.
+
+They have been trying Frank’s new boat, Mr. Pollingray, and they’ve
+upset it. Oh! oh’ and again there was the woodpeckers’ chorus.
+
+‘Alice, I desire you instantly to go and fetch John the gardener,’ said
+the angry mother.
+
+‘Mama, I can’t move; wait a minute, only a minute. John’s gone about the
+geraniums. Oh! don’t look so resigned, papa; you’ll kill me! Mama, come
+and take my hand. Oh! oh!’
+
+The young lady put her hands in against her waist and rolled her body
+like a possessed one.
+
+‘Why don’t you come in through the boat-house?’ she asked when she had
+mastered her fit.
+
+‘Ah!’ said the vicar. I beheld him struck by this new thought.
+
+‘How utterly absurd you are, Mr. Amble!’ exclaimed his wife, ‘when you
+know that the boat-house is locked, and that the boat was lying under
+the camshot when you persuaded me to step into it.’
+
+Hearing this explanation of the accident, Alice gave way to an
+ungovernable emotion.
+
+‘You see, my dear,’ the vicar addressed his wife, she can do nothing;
+it’s useless. If ever patience is counselled to us, it is when accidents
+befall us, for then, as we are not responsible, we know we are in other
+hands, and it is our duty to be comparatively passive. Perhaps I may say
+that in every difficulty, patience is a life-belt. I beg of you to be
+patient still.’
+
+‘Mr. Amble, I shall think you foolish,’ said the spouse, with a nod of
+more than emphasis.
+
+My dear, you have only to decide,’ was the meek reply.
+
+By this time, Miss Alice had so far conquered the fiend of laughter that
+she could venture to summon her mother close up to the bank and extend a
+rescuing hand. Mrs. Amble waded to within reach, her husband following.
+Arrangements were made for Alice to pull, and the vicar to push; both in
+accordance with Mrs. Amble’s stipulations, for even in her extremity
+of helplessness she affected rule and sovereignty. Unhappily, at the
+decisive moment, I chanced (and I admit it was more than an inadvertence
+on my part, it was a most ill-considered thing to do) I chanced, I say,
+to call out--and that I refrained from quoting Voltaire is something in
+my favour:
+
+‘How on earth did you manage to tumble in?’
+
+There can be no contest of opinion that I might have kept my curiosity
+waiting, and possibly it may be said with some justification that I
+was the direct cause of my friend’s unparalleled behaviour; but could a
+mortal man guess that in the very act of assisting his wife’s return to
+dry land, and while she was--if I may put it so--modestly in his hands,
+he would turn about with a quotation that compared him to old Palinurus,
+all the while allowing his worthy and admirable burden to sink lower and
+dispread in excess upon the surface of the water, until the vantage of
+her daughter’s help was lost to her; I beheld the consequences of my
+indiscretion, dismayed. I would have checked the preposterous Virgilian,
+but in contempt of my uplifted hand and averted head, and regardless of
+the fact that his wife was then literally dependent upon him, the vicar
+declaimed (and the drenching effect produced by Latin upon a lady at
+such a season, may be thought on):
+
+        Vix primos inopina quies laxaverat artus,
+        Et super incumbens, cum puppis parte revulsa
+        Cumque gubernaclo liquidas projecit in undas.’
+
+It is not easy when you are unacquainted with the language, to retort
+upon Latin, even when the attempt to do so is made in English. Very few
+even of the uneducated ears can tolerate such anti-climax vituperative
+as English after sounding Latin. Mrs. Amble kept down those sentiments
+which her vernacular might have expressed. I heard but one groan that
+came from her as she lay huddled indistinguishably in the arms of her
+husband.
+
+‘Not--praecipitem! I am happy to say,’ my senseless friend remarked
+further, and laughed cheerfully as he fortified his statement with a run
+of negatives. ‘No, no’; in a way peculiar to him. ‘No, no. If I plant my
+grey hairs anywhere, it will be on dry land: no. But, now, my dear; he
+returned to his duty; why, you’re down again. Come: one, two, and up.’
+
+He was raising a dead weight. The passion for sarcastic speech was
+manifestly at war with common prudence in the bosom of Mrs. Amble;
+prudence, however, overcame it. She cast on him a look of a kind that
+makes matrimony terrific in the dreams of bachelors, and then wedding
+her energy to the assistance given she made one of those senseless
+springs of the upper half of the body, which strike the philosophic eye
+with the futility of an effort that does not arise from a solid basis.
+Owing to the want of concert between them, the vicar’s impulsive
+strength was expended when his wife’s came into play. Alice clutched her
+mother bravely. The vicar had force enough to stay his wife’s descent;
+but Alice (she boasts of her muscle) had not the force in the other
+direction--and no wonder. There are few young ladies who could pull
+fourteen stone sheer up a camshot.
+
+Mrs. Amble remained in suspense between the two.
+
+Oh, Mr. Pollingray, if you were only on this side to help us,’ Miss
+Alice exclaimed very piteously, though I could see that she was half mad
+with the internal struggle of laughter at the parents and concern for
+them.
+
+‘Now, pull, Alice,’ shouted the vicar.
+
+‘No, not yet,’ screamed Mrs. Amble; I’m sinking.’
+
+‘Pull, Alice.’
+
+‘Now, Mama.’
+
+‘Oh!’
+
+‘Push, Papa.’
+
+‘I’m down.’
+
+‘Up, Ma’am; Jane; woman, up.’
+
+‘Gently, Papa: Abraham, I will not.’
+
+‘My dear, but you must.’
+
+‘And that man opposite.’
+
+‘What, Pollingray? He’s fifty.’
+
+I found myself walking indignantly down the path. Even now I protest my
+friend was guilty of bad manners, though I make every allowance for him;
+I excuse, I pass the order; but why--what justifies one man’s bawling
+out another man’s age? What purpose does it serve? I suppose the
+vicar wished to reassure his wife, on the principle (I have heard him
+enunciate it) that the sexes are merged at fifty--by which he means, I
+must presume, that something which may be good or bad, and is generally
+silly--of course, I admire and respect modesty and pudeur as much as any
+man--something has gone: a recognition of the bounds of division. There
+is, if that is a lamentable matter, a loss of certain of our young
+tricks at fifty. We have ceased to blush readily: and let me ask you to
+define a blush. Is it an involuntary truth or an ingenuous lie? I know
+that this will sound like the language of a man not a little jealous of
+his youthful compeers. I can but leave it to rightly judging persons to
+consider whether a healthy man in his prime, who has enough, and is not
+cursed by ambition, need be jealous of any living soul.
+
+A shriek from Miss Alice checked my retreating steps. The vicar was
+staggering to support the breathing half of his partner while she
+regained her footing in the bed of the river. Their effort to scale
+the camshot had failed. Happily at this moment I caught sight of Master
+Frank’s boat, which had floated, bottom upwards, against a projecting
+mud-bank of forget-me-nots. I contrived to reach it and right it, and
+having secured one of the sculls, I pulled up to the rescue; though
+not before I had plucked a flower, actuated by a motive that I cannot
+account for. The vicar held the boat firmly against the camshot, while
+I, at the imminent risk of joining them (I shall not forget the combined
+expression of Miss Alice’s retreating eyes and the malicious corners of
+her mouth) hoisted the lady in, and the river with her. From the seat
+of the boat she stood sufficiently high to project the step towards
+land without peril. When she had set her foot there, we all assumed an
+attitude of respectful attention, and the vicar, who could soar over
+calamity like a fairweather swallow, acknowledged the return of his wife
+to the element with a series of apologetic yesses and short coughings.
+
+‘That would furnish a good concert for the poets,’ he remarked. ‘A
+parting, a separation of lovers; “even as a body from the watertorn,”
+ or “from the water plucked”; eh? do you think--“so I weep round her,
+tearful in her track,” an excellent--’
+
+But the outraged woman, dripping in grievous discomfort above him, made
+a peremptory gesture.
+
+‘Mr. Amble, will you come on shore instantly, I have borne with your
+stupidity long enough. I insist upon your remembering, sir, that you
+have a family dependent upon you. Other men may commit these follies.’
+
+This was a blow at myself, a bachelor whom the lady had never persuaded
+to dream of relinquishing his freedom.
+
+‘My dear, I am coming,’ said the vicar.
+
+‘Then, come at once, or I shall think you idiotic,’ the wife retorted.
+
+‘I have been endeavouring,’ the vicar now addressed me, ‘to prove by a
+practical demonstration that women are capable of as much philosophy as
+men, under any sudden and afflicting revolution of circumstances.’
+
+‘And if you get a sunstroke, you will be rightly punished, and I shall
+not be sorry, Mr. Amble.’
+
+‘I am coming, my dear Jane. Pray run into the house and change your
+things.’
+
+‘Not till I see you out of the water, sir.’
+
+‘You are losing your temper, my love.’
+
+‘You would make a saint lose his temper, Mr. Amble.’
+
+‘There were female saints, my dear,’ the vicar mildly responded; and
+addressed me further: ‘Up to this point, I assure you, Pollingray, no
+conduct could have been more exemplary than Mrs. Amble’s. I had got her
+into the boat--a good boat, a capital boat--but getting in myself, we
+overturned. The first impulse of an ordinary woman would have been to
+reproach and scold; but Mrs. Amble succumbed only to the first impulse.
+Discovering that all effort unaided to climb the bank was fruitless,
+she agreed to wait patiently and make the best of circumstances; and she
+did; and she learnt to enjoy it. There is marrow in every bone. My dear.
+Jane, I have never admired you so much. I tried her, Pollingray, in
+metaphysics. I talked to her of the opera we last heard, I think fifty
+years ago. And as it is less endurable for a woman to be patient in
+tribulation--the honour is greater, when she overcomes the fleshy trial.
+Insomuch,’ the vicar put on a bland air of abnegation of honour, ‘that
+I am disposed to consider any male philosopher our superior; when you’ve
+found one, ha, ha--when you’ve found one. O sol pulcher! I am ready to
+sing that the day has been glorious, so far. Pulcher ille dies.’
+
+Mrs. Amble appealed to me. ‘Would anybody not swear that he is mad to
+see him standing waist-deep in the water and the sun on his bald head,
+I am reduced to entreat you not to--though you have no family of your
+own--not to encourage him. It is amusing to you. Pray, reflect that such
+folly is too often fatal. Compel him to come on shore.’
+
+The logic of the appeal was no doubt distinctly visible in the lady’s
+mind, though it was not accurately worded. I saw that I stood marked
+to be the scape goat of the day, and humbly continued to deserve well,
+notwithstanding. By dint of simple signs and nods of affirmative, and
+a constant propulsion of my friend’s arm, I drew him into the boat,
+and thence projected him up to the level with his wife, who had perhaps
+deigned to understand that it was best to avoid the arresting of his
+divergent mind by any remark during the passage, and remained silent. No
+sooner was he established on his feet, than she plucked him away.
+
+‘Your papa’s hat,’ she called, flashing to her daughter, and streamed
+up the lawn into the rose-trellised pathways leading on aloft to the
+vicarage house. Behind roses the weeping couple disappeared. The last
+I saw of my friend was a smiting of his hand upon his head in a vain
+effort to catch at one of the fleeting ideas sowed in him by the quick
+passage of objects before his vision, and shaken out of him by abnormal
+hurry. The Rev. Abraham Amble had been lord of his wife in the water,
+but his innings was over. He had evidently enjoyed it vastly, and I now
+understood why he had chosen to prolong it as much as possible. Your
+eccentric characters are not uncommonly amateurs of petty artifice.
+There are hours of vengeance even for henpecked men.
+
+I found myself sighing over the enslaved condition of every Benedict of
+my acquaintance, when the thought came like a surprise that I was alone
+with Alice. The fair and pleasant damsel made a clever descent into the
+boat, and having seated herself, she began to twirl the scull in the
+rowlock, and said: ‘Do you feel disposed to join me in looking after the
+other scull and papa’s hat, Mr. Pollingray?’ I suggested ‘Will you
+not get your feet wet? I couldn’t manage to empty all the water in the
+boat.’
+
+‘Oh’ cried she, with a toss of her head; I wet feet never hurt young
+people.’
+
+There was matter for an admonitory lecture in this. Let me confess I was
+about to give it, when she added: But Mr. Pollingray, I am really afraid
+that your feet are wet! You had to step into the water when you righted
+the boat:
+
+My reply was to jump down by her side with as much agility as I
+could combine with a proper discretion. The amateur craft rocked
+threateningly, and I found myself grasped by and grasping the pretty
+damsel, until by great good luck we were steadied and preserved from the
+same misfortune which had befallen her parents. She laughed and blushed,
+and we tottered asunder.
+
+‘Would you have talked metaphysics to me in the water, Mr. Pollingray?’
+
+Alice was here guilty of one of those naughty sort of innocent speeches
+smacking of Eve most strongly; though, of course, of Eve in her best
+days.
+
+I took the rudder lines to steer against the sculling of her single
+scull, and was Adam enough to respond to temptation: ‘I should perhaps
+have been grateful to your charitable construction of it as being
+metaphysics.’
+
+She laughed colloquially, to fill a pause. It had not been coquetry:
+merely the woman unconsciously at play. A man is bound to remember the
+seniority of his years when this occurs, for a veteran of ninety and a
+worn out young debauchee will equally be subject to it if they do
+not shun the society of the sex. My long robust health and perfect
+self-reliance apparently tend to give me unguarded moments, or lay me
+open to fitful impressions. Indeed there are times when I fear I
+have the heart of a boy, and certainly nothing more calamitous can be
+conceived, supposing that it should ever for one instant get complete
+mastery of my head. This is the peril of a man who has lived soberly.
+Do we never know when we are safe? I am, in reflecting thereupon,
+positively prepared to say that if there is no fool like what they
+call an old fool (and a man in his prime, who can be laughed at, is the
+world’s old fool) there is wisdom in the wild oats theory, and I shall
+come round to my nephew’s way of thinking: that is, as far as Master
+Charles by his acting represents his thinking. I shall at all events be
+more lenient in my judgement of him, and less stern in my allocutions,
+for I shall have no text to preach from.
+
+We picked up the hat and the scull in one of the little muddy bays of
+our brown river, forming an amphitheatre for water-rats and draped with
+great dockleaves, nettle-flowers, ragged robins, and other weeds for
+which the learned young lady gave the botanical names. It was pleasant
+to hear her speak with the full authority of absolute knowledge of her
+subject. She has intelligence. She is decidedly too good for Charles,
+unless he changes his method of living.
+
+‘Shall we row on?’ she asked, settling her arms to work the pair of
+sculls.
+
+‘You have me in your power,’ said I, and she struck out. Her shape is
+exceedingly graceful; I was charmed by the occasional tightening in of
+her lips as she exerted her muscle, while at intervals telling me of her
+race with one of her boastful younger brothers, whom she had beaten. I
+believe it is only when they are using physical exertion that the eyes
+of young girls have entire simplicity--the simplicity of nature as
+opposed to that other artificial simplicity which they learn from their
+governesses, their mothers, and the admiration of witlings. Attractive
+purity, or the nice glaze of no comprehension of anything which is
+considered to be improper in a wicked world, and is no doubt very
+useful, is not to my taste. French girls, as a rule, cannot compete
+with our English in the purer graces. They are only incomparable when as
+women they have resort to art.
+
+Alice could look at me as she rowed, without thinking it necessary to
+force a smile, or to speak, or to snigger and be foolish. I felt towards
+the girl like a comrade.
+
+We went no further than Hatchard’s mile, where the water plumps the poor
+sleepy river from a sidestream, and, as it turned the boat’s head quite
+round, I let the boat go. These studies of young women are very well
+as a pastime; but they soon cease to be a recreation. She forms an
+agreeable picture when she is rowing, and possesses a musical laugh. Now
+and then she gives way to the bad trick of laughing without caring or
+daring to explain the cause for it. She is moderately well-bred. I hope
+that she has principle. Certain things a man of my time of life learns
+by associating with very young people which are serviceable to him. What
+a different matter this earth must be to that girl from what it is to
+me! I knew it before. And--mark the difference--I feel it now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SHE
+
+Papa never will cease to meet with accidents and adventures. If he only
+walks out to sit for half an hour with one of his old dames, as he calls
+them, something is sure to happen to him, and it is almost as sure that
+Mr. Pollingray will be passing at the time and mixed up in it.
+
+Since Mr. Pollingray’s return from his last residence on the Continent,
+I have learnt to know him and like him. Charles is unjust to his
+uncle. He is not at all the grave kind of man I expected from Charles’s
+description. He is extremely entertaining, and then he understands the
+world, and I like to hear him talk, he is so unpretentious and uses just
+the right words. No one would imagine his age, from his appearance, and
+he has more fun than any young man I have listened to.
+
+But, I am convinced I have discovered his weakness. It is my fatal.
+peculiarity that I cannot be with people ten minutes without seeing some
+point about them where they are tenderest. Mr. Pollingray wants to be
+thought quite youthful. He can bear any amount of fatigue; he is always
+fresh and a delightful companion; but you cannot get him to show even
+a shadow of exhaustion or to admit that he ever knew what it was to lie
+down beaten. This is really to pretend that he is superhuman. I like
+him so much that I could wish him superior to such--it is nothing other
+than--vanity. Which is worse? A young man giving himself the air of
+a sage, or--but no one can call Mr. Pollingray an old man. He is a
+confirmed bachelor. That puts the case. Charles, when he says of him
+that he is a ‘gentleman in a good state of preservation,’ means to be
+ironical. I doubt whether Charles at fifty would object to have the same
+said of Mr. Charles Everett. Mr. Pollingray has always looked to his
+health. He has not been disappointed. I am sure he was always very good.
+But, whatever he was, he is now very pleasant, and he does not talk to
+women as if he thought them singular, and feel timid, I mean, confused,
+as some men show that they feel--the good ones. Perhaps he felt so once,
+and that is why he is still free. Charles’s dread that his uncle will
+marry is most unworthy. He never will, but why should he not? Mama
+declares that he is waiting for a woman of intellect, I can hear her:
+‘Depend upon it, a woman of intellect will marry Dayton Manor.’ Should
+that mighty event not come to pass, poor Charles will have to sink the
+name of Everett in that of Pollingray. Mr. Pollingray’s name is the
+worst thing about him. When I think of his name I see him ten times
+older than he is. My feelings are in harmony with his pedigree
+concerning the age of the name. One would have to be a woman of profound
+intellect to see the advantage of sharing it.
+
+‘Mrs. Pollingray!’ She must be a lady with a wig.
+
+It was when we were rowing up by Hatchard’s mill that I first perceived
+his weakness, he was looking at me so kindly, and speaking of his
+friendship for papa, and how glad he was to be fixed at last, near to us
+at Dayton. I wished to use some term of endearment in reply, and said, I
+remember, ‘Yes, and we are also glad, Godpapa.’ I was astonished that he
+should look so disconcerted, and went on: ‘Have you forgotten that you
+are my godpapa?’
+
+He answered: ‘Am I? Oh! yes--the name of Alice.’
+
+Still he looked uncertain, uncomfortable, and I said, ‘Do you want to
+cancel the past, and cast me off?’
+
+‘No, certainly not’; he, I suppose, thought he was assuring me.
+
+I saw his lips move at the words I cancel the past,’ though he did not
+speak them out. He positively blushed. I know the sort of young man
+he must have been. Exactly the sort of young man mama would like for
+a son-in-law, and her daughters would accept in pure obedience when
+reduced to be capable of the virtue by rigorous diet, or consumption.
+
+He let the boat go round instantly. This was enough for me. It struck
+me then that when papa had said to mama (as he did in that absurd
+situation) ‘He is fifty,’ Mr. Pollingray must have heard it across the
+river, for he walked away hurriedly. He came back, it is true, with the
+boat, but I have my own ideas. He is always ready to do a service, but
+on this occasion I think it was an afterthought. I shall not venture to
+call him ‘Godpapa’ again.
+
+Indeed, if I have a desire, it is that I may be blind to people’s
+weakness. My insight is inveterate. Papa says he has heard Mr.
+Pollingray boast of his age. If so, there has come a change over him.
+I cannot be deceived. I see it constantly. After my unfortunate speech,
+Mr. Pollingray shunned our house for two whole weeks, and scarcely bowed
+to us when coming out of church. Miss Pollingray idolises him--spoils
+him. She says that he is worth twenty of Charles. Nous savons ce que
+nous savons, nous autres. Charles is wild, but Charles would be above
+these littlenesses. How could Miss Pollingray comprehend the romance of
+Charles’s nature?
+
+My sister Evelina is now Mr. Pollingray’s favourite. She could not say
+Godpapa to him, if she would. Persons who are very much petted at home,
+are always establishing favourites abroad. For my part, let them praise
+me or not, I know that I can do any thing I set my mind upon. At present
+I choose to be frivolous. I know I am frivolous. What then? If there is
+fun in the world am I not to laugh at it? I shall astonish them by and
+by. But, I will laugh while I can. I am sure, there is so much misery in
+the world, it is a mercy to be able to laugh. Mr. Pollingray may think
+what he likes of me. When Charles tells me that I must do my utmost to
+propitiate his uncle, he cannot mean that I am to refrain from laughing,
+because that is being a hypocrite, which I may become when I have gone
+through all the potential moods and not before.
+
+It is preposterous to suppose that I am to be tied down to the views of
+life of elderly people.
+
+I dare say I did laugh a little too much the other night, but could
+I help it? We had a dinner party. Present were Mr. Pollingray, Mrs.
+Kershaw, the Wilbury people (three), Charles, my brother Duncan,
+Evelina, mama, papa, myself, and Mr. and Mrs. (put them last for
+emphasis) Romer Pattlecombe, Mrs. Pattlecombe (the same number of
+syllables as Pollingray, and a ‘P’ to begin with) is thirty-one years
+her husband’s junior, and she is twenty-six; full of fun, and always
+making fun of him, the mildest, kindest, goody old thing, who has never
+distressed himself for anything and never will. Mrs. Romer not only
+makes fun, but is fun. When you have done laughing with her, you can
+laugh at her. She is the salt of society in these parts. Some one, as we
+were sitting on the lawn after dinner, alluded to the mishap to papa and
+mama, and mama, who has never forgiven Mr. Pollingray for having seen
+her in her ridiculous plight, said that men were in her opinion greater
+gossips than women. ‘That is indisputable, ma’am,’ said Mr. Pollingray,
+he loves to bewilder her; ‘only, we never mention it.’
+
+‘There is an excuse for us,’ said Mrs. Romer; ‘our trials are so great,
+we require a diversion, and so we talk of others.’
+
+‘Now really,’ said Charles, ‘I don’t think your trials are equal to
+ours.’
+
+For which remark papa bantered him, and his uncle was sharp on him; and
+Charles, I know, spoke half seriously, though he was seeking to draw
+Mrs. Romer out: he has troubles.
+
+From this, we fell upon a comparison of sufferings, and Mrs. Romer took
+up the word. She is a fair, smallish, nervous woman, with delicate hands
+and outlines, exceedingly sympathetic; so much so that while you are
+telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation, and is
+ready to shriek with laughter or shake her head with uttermost grief;
+and sometimes, if you let her go too far in one direction, she does
+both. All her narrations are with ups and downs of her hands, her eyes,
+her chin, and her voice. Taking poor, good old Mr. Romer by the roll
+of his coat, she made as if posing him, and said: ‘There! Now, it’s
+all very well for you to say that there is anything equal to a woman’s
+sufferings in this world. I do declare you know nothing of what we
+unhappy women have to endure. It’s dreadful! No male creature can
+possibly know what tortures I have to undergo.’
+
+Mama neatly contrived, after interrupting her, to divert the subject.
+I think that all the ladies imagined they were in jeopardy, but I knew
+Mrs. Romer was perfectly to be trusted. She has wit which pleases,
+jusqu’aux ongles, and her sense of humour never overrides her discretion
+with more than a glance--never with preparation.
+
+‘Now,’ she pursued, ‘let me tell you what excruciating trials I have to
+go through. This man,’ she rocked the patient old gentleman to and fro,
+‘this man will be the death of me. He is utterly devoid of a sense of
+propriety. Again and again I say to him--cannot the tailor cut down
+these trowsers of yours? Yes, Mr. Amble, you preach patience to women,
+but this is too much for any woman’s endurance. Now, do attempt to
+picture to yourself what an agony it must be to me:--he will shave, and
+he will wear those enormously high trowsers that, when they are braced,
+reach up behind to the nape of his neck! Only yesterday morning, as I
+was lying in bed, I could see him in his dressing-room. I tell you: he
+will shave, and he will choose the time for shaving early after he has
+braced these immensely high trowsers that make such a placard of him.
+Oh, my goodness! My dear Romer, I have said to him fifty times if I have
+said it once, my goodness me! why can you not get decent trowsers such
+as other men wear? He has but one answer--he has been accustomed to wear
+those trowsers, and he would not feel at home in another pair. And what
+does he say if I continue to complain? and I cannot but continue to
+complain, for it is not only moral, it is physical torment to see
+the sight he makes of himself; he says: “My dear, you should not have
+married an old man.” What! I say to him, must an old man wear antiquated
+trowsers? No! nothing will turn him; those are his habits. But, you
+have not heard the worst. The sight of those hideous trowsers totally
+destroying all shape in the man, is horrible enough; but it is
+absolutely more than a woman can bear to see him--for he will
+shave--first cover his face with white soap with that ridiculous
+centre-piece to his trowsers reaching quite up to his poll, and then,
+you can fancy a woman’s rage and anguish! the figure lifts its nose by
+the extremist tip. Oh! it’s degradation! What respect can a woman have
+for her husband after that sight? Imagine it! And I have implored him
+to spare me. It’s useless. You sneer at our hbops and say that you
+are inconvenienced by them but you gentlemen are not degraded,--Oh!
+unutterably!--as I am every morning of my life by that cruel spectacle
+of a husband.’
+
+I have but faintly sketched Mrs. Romer’s style. Evelina, who is prudish
+and thinks her vulgar, refused to laugh, but it came upon me, as the
+picture of ‘your own old husband,’ with so irresistibly comic an effect
+that I was overcome by convulsions of laughter. I do not defend myself.
+It was as much a fit as any other attack. I did all I could to arrest
+it. At last, I ran indoors and upstairs to my bedroom and tried hard to
+become dispossessed. I am sure I was an example of the sufferings of my
+sex. It could hardly have been worse for Mrs. Romer than it was for me.
+I was drowned in internal laughter long after I had got a grave face.
+Early in the evening Mr. Pollingray left us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HE
+
+I am carried by the fascination of a musical laugh. Apparently I am
+doomed to hear it at my own expense. We are secure from nothing in this
+life.
+
+I have determined to stand for the county. An unoccupied man is a prey
+to every hook of folly. Be dilettante all your days, and you might as
+fairly hope to reap a moral harvest as if you had chased butterflies.
+The activities created by a profession or determined pursuit are
+necessary to the growth of the mind.
+
+Heavens! I find myself writing like an illegitimate son of La
+Rochefoucauld, or of Vauvenargues. But, it is true that I am fifty years
+old, and I am not mature. I am undeveloped somewhere.
+
+The question for me to consider is, whether this development is to be
+accomplished by my being guilty of an act of egregious folly.
+
+Dans la cinquantaine! The reflection should produce a gravity in men.
+Such a number of years will not ring like bridal bells in a man’s ears.
+I have my books about me, my horses, my dogs, a contented household. I
+move in the centre of a perfect machine, and I am dissatisfied. I rise
+early. I do not digest badly. What is wrong?
+
+The calamity of my case is that I am in danger of betraying what is
+wrong with me to others, without knowing it myself. Some woman will be
+suspecting and tattling, because she has nothing else to do. Girls
+have wonderfully shrewd eyes for a weakness in the sex which they are
+instructed to look upon as superior. But I am on my guard.
+
+The fact is manifest: I feel I have been living more or less uselessly.
+It is a fat time. There are a certain set of men in every prosperous
+country who, having wherewithal, and not being compelled to toil, become
+subjected to the moral ideal. Most of them in the end sit down with our
+sixth Henry or second Richard and philosophise on shepherds. To be no
+better than a simple hind! Am I better? Prime bacon and an occasional
+draft of shrewd beer content him, and they do not me. Yet I am sound,
+and can sit through the night and be ready, and on the morrow I shall
+stand for the county.
+
+I made the announcement that I had thoughts of entering Parliament,
+before I had half formed the determination, at my sister’s lawn party
+yesterday.
+
+‘Gilbert!’ she cried, and raised her hands. A woman is hurt if you do
+not confide to her your plans as soon as you can conceive them. She must
+be present to assist at the birth, or your plans are unblessed plans.
+
+I had been speaking aside in a casual manner to my friend Amble, whose
+idea is that the Church is not represented with sufficient strength
+in the Commons, and who at once, as I perceived, grasped the notion
+of getting me to promote sundry measures connected with schools and
+clerical stipends, for his eyes dilated; he said: ‘Well, if you do, I
+can put you up to several things,’ and imparting the usual chorus of
+yesses to his own mind, he continued absently: ‘Pollingray might be made
+strong on church rates. There is much to do. He has lived abroad and
+requires schooling in these things. We want a man. Yes, yes, yes. It’s a
+good idea; a notion.’
+
+My sister, however, was of another opinion. She did me the honour to
+take me aside.
+
+‘Gilbert, were you serious just now?’
+
+‘Quite serious. Is it not my characteristic?’
+
+‘Not on these occasions. I saw the idea come suddenly upon you. You were
+looking at Charles.’
+
+‘Continue: and at what was he looking?’
+
+‘He was looking at Alice Amble.’
+
+‘And the young lady?’
+
+‘She looked at you.’
+
+I was here attacked by a singularly pertinacious fly, and came out of
+the contest with a laugh.
+
+‘Did she have that condescension towards me? And from the glance,
+my resolution to enter Parliament was born? It is the French
+vaudevilliste’s doctrine of great events from little causes. The slipper
+of a soubrette trips the heart of a king and changes the destiny of a
+nation-the history of mankind. It may be true. If I were but shot into
+the House from a little girl’s eye!’
+
+With this I took her arm gaily, walked with her, and had nearly
+overreached myself with excess of cunning. I suppose we are reduced to
+see more plainly that which we systematically endeavour to veil from
+others. It is best to flutter a handkerchief, instead of nailing up a
+curtain. The principal advantage is that you may thereby go on deceiving
+yourself, for this reason: few sentiments are wholly matter of fact; but
+when they are half so, you make them concrete by deliberately seeking
+either to crush or conceal them, and you are doubly betrayed--betrayed
+to the besieging eye and to yourself. When a sentiment has grown to be a
+passion (mercifully may I be spared!) different tactics are required. By
+that time, you will have already betrayed yourself too deeply to dare to
+be flippant: the investigating eye is aware that it has been purposely
+diverted: knowing some things, it makes sure of the rest from which
+you turn it away. If you want to hide a very grave case, you must speak
+gravely about it.--At which season, be but sure of your voice, and
+simulate a certain depth of sentimental philosophy, and you may once
+more, and for a long period, bewilder the investigator of the secrets
+of your bosom. To sum up: in the preliminary stages of a weakness, be
+careful that you do not show your own alarm, or all will be suspected.
+Should the weakness turn to fever, let a little of it be seen, like a
+careless man, and nothing will really be thought.
+
+I can say this, I can do this; and is it still possible that a pin’s
+point has got through the joints of the armour of a man like me?
+
+Elizabeth quitted my side with the conviction that I am as considerate
+an uncle as I am an affectionate brother.
+
+I said to her, apropos, ‘I have been observing those two. It seems to me
+they are deciding things for themselves.’
+
+‘I have been going to speak to you about them Gilbert,’ said she.
+
+And I: ‘The girl must be studied. The family is good. While Charles is
+in Wales, you must have her at Dayton. She laughs rather vacantly, don’t
+you think? but the sound of it has the proper wholesome ring. I will
+give her what attention I can while she is here, but in the meantime I
+must have a bride of my own and commence courting.’
+
+‘Parliament, you mean,’ said Elizabeth with a frank and tender smile.
+The hostess was summoned to welcome a new guest, and she left me,
+pleased with her successful effort to reach my meaning, and absorbed by
+it.
+
+I would not have challenged Machiavelli; but I should not have
+encountered the Florentine ruefully. I feel the same keen delight in
+intellectual dexterity. On some points my sister is not a bad match for
+me. She can beat me seven games out of twelve at chess; but the five I
+win sequently, for then I am awake. There is natural art and artificial
+art, and the last beats the first. Fortunately for us, women are
+strangers to the last. They have had to throw off a mask before they
+have, got the schooling; so, when they are thus armed we know what we
+meet, and what are the weapons to be used.
+
+Alice, if she is a fine fencer at all, will expect to meet the ordinary
+English squire in me. I have seen her at the baptismal font! It is
+inconceivable. She will fancy that at least she is ten times more subtle
+than I. When I get the mastery--it is unlikely to make me the master.
+What may happen is, that the nature of the girl will declare itself,
+under the hard light of intimacy, vulgar. Charles I cause to be absent
+for six weeks; so there will be time enough for the probation. I do not
+see him till he returns. If by chance I had come earlier to see him and
+he to allude to her, he would have had my conscience on his side, and
+that is what a scrupulous man takes care to prevent.
+
+I wonder whether my friends imagine me to be the same man whom they knew
+as Gilbert Pollingray a month back? I see the change, I feel the change;
+but I have no retrospection, no remorse, no looking forward, no feeling:
+none for others, very little, for myself. I am told that I am losing
+fluency as a dinner-table talker. There is now more savour to me in a
+silvery laugh than in a spiced wit. And this is the man who knows
+women, and is far too modest to give a decided opinion upon any of their
+merits. Search myself through as I may, I cannot tell when the change
+began, or what the change consists of, or what is the matter with me,
+or what charm there is in the person who does the mischief. She is
+the counterpart of dozens of girls; lively, brown-eyed, brown-haired,
+underbred--it is not too harsh to say so--underbred slightly;
+half-educated, whether quickwitted I dare not opine. She is undoubtedly
+the last whom I or another person would have fixed upon as one to work
+me this unmitigated evil. I do not know her, and I believe I do not care
+to know her, and I am thirsting for the hour to come when I shall study
+her. Is not this to have the poison of a bite in one’s blood? The wrath
+of Venus is not a fable. I was a hard reader and I despised the sex
+in my youth, before the family estates fell to me; since when I have
+playfully admired the sex; I have dallied with a passion, and not read
+at all, save for diversion: her anger is not a fable. You may interpret
+many a mythic tale by the facts which lie in your own blood. My emotions
+have lain altogether dormant in sentimental attachment. I have, I
+suppose, boasted of, Python slain, and Cupid has touched me up with an
+arrow. I trust to my own skill rather than to his mercy for avoiding a
+second from his quiver. I will understand this girl if I have to submit
+to a close intimacy with her for six months. There is no doubt of the
+elegance of her movements. Charles might as well take his tour, and
+let us see him again next year. Yes, her movements are (or will be)
+gracious. In a year’s time she will have acquired the fuller tones and
+poetry of womanliness. Perhaps then, too, her smile will linger instead
+of flashing. I have known infinitely lovelier women than she. One I have
+known! but let her be. Louise and I have long since said adieu.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SHE
+
+Behold me installed in Dayton Manor House, and brought here for the
+express purpose (so Charles has written me word) of my being studied,
+that it may be seen whether I am worthy to be, on some august future
+occasion--possibly--a member (Oh, so much to mumble!) of this
+great family. Had I known it when I was leaving home, I should have
+countermanded the cording of my boxes. If you please, I do the packing,
+and not the cording. I must practise being polite, or I shall be
+horrifying these good people.
+
+I am mortally offended. I am very very angry. I shall show temper.
+Indeed, I have shown it. Mr. Pollingray must and does think me a goose.
+Dear sir, and I think you are justified. If any one pretends to guess
+how, I have names to suit that person. I am a ninny, an ape, and mind
+I call myself these bad things because I deserve worse. I am flighty,
+I believe I am heartless. Charles is away, and I suffer no pangs. The
+truth is, I fancied myself so exceedingly penetrating, and it was my
+vanity looking in a glass. I saw something that answered to my nods and
+howd’ye-do’s and--but I am ashamed, and so penitent I might begin making
+a collection of beetles. I cannot lift up my head.
+
+Mr. Pollingray is such a different man from the one I had imagined! What
+that one was, I have now quite forgotten. I remember too clearly what
+the wretched guesser was. I have been three weeks at Dayton, and if
+my sisters know me when I return to the vicarage, they are not foolish
+virgins. For my part, I know that I shall always hate Mrs. Romer
+Pattlecombe, and that I am unjust to the good woman, but I do hate her,
+and I think the stories shocking, and wonder intensely what it was that
+I could have found in them to laugh at. I shall never laugh again for
+many years. Perhaps, when I am an old woman, I may. I wish the time had
+come. All young people seem to me so helplessly silly. I am one of them
+for the present, and have no hope that I can appear to be anything else.
+The young are a crowd--a shoal of small fry. Their elders are the select
+of the world.
+
+On the morning of the day when I was to leave home for Dayton, a
+distance of eight miles, I looked out of my window while dressing--as
+early as halfpast seven--and I saw Mr. Pollingray’s groom on horseback,
+leading up and down the walk a darling little, round, plump, black cob
+that made my heart leap with an immense bound of longing to be on it and
+away across the downs. And then the maid came to my door with a letter:
+
+‘Mr. Pollingray, in return for her considerate good behaviour and
+saving of trouble to him officially, begs his goddaughter to accept
+the accompanying little animal: height 14 h., age 31 years; hunts, is
+sure-footed, and likely to be the best jumper in the county.’
+
+I flew downstairs. I rushed out of the house and up to my treasure, and
+kissed his nose and stroked his mane. I could not get my fingers away
+from him. Horses are so like the very best and beautifullest of women
+when you caress them. They show their pleasure so at being petted. They
+curve their necks, and paw, and look proud. They take your flattery
+like sunshine and are lovely in it. I kissed my beauty, peering at his
+black-mottled skin, which is like Allingborough Heath in the twilight.
+The smell of his new saddle and bridle-leather was sweeter than a garden
+to me. The man handed me a large riding-whip mounted with silver. I
+longed to jump up and ride till midnight.
+
+Then mama and papa came out and read the note and looked, at my darling
+little cob, and my sisters saw him and kissed me, for they are not
+envious girls. The most distressing thing was that we had not a
+riding-habit in the family. I was ready to wear any sort. I would have
+ridden as a guy rather than not ride at all. But mama gave me a promise
+that in two days a riding-habit should be sent on to Dayton, and I had
+to let my pet be led back from where he came. I had no life till I was
+following him. I could have believed him to be a fairy prince who had
+charmed me. I called him Prince Leboo, because he was black and good. I
+forgive anybody who talks about first love after what my experience has
+been with Prince Leboo.
+
+What papa thought of the present I do not know, but I know very well
+what mama thought: and for my part I thought everything, not distinctly
+including that, for I could not suppose such selfishness in one so
+generous as Mr. Pollingray. But I came to Dayton in a state of arrogant
+pride, that gave assurance if not ease to my manners. I thanked Mr.
+Pollingray warmly, but in a way to let him see it was the matter of a
+horse between us. ‘You give, I register thanks, and there’s an end.’
+
+‘He thinks me a fool! a fool!
+
+‘My habit,’ I said, ‘comes after me. I hope we shall have some rides
+together.’
+
+‘Many,’ replied Mr. Pollingray, and his bow inflated me with ideas of my
+condescension.
+
+And because Miss Pollingray (Queen Elizabeth he calls her) looked half
+sad, I read it--! I do not write what I read it to be.
+
+Behold the uttermost fool of all female creation led over the house by
+Mr. Pollingray. He showed me the family pictures.
+
+‘I am no judge of pictures, Mr. Pollingray.’
+
+‘You will learn to see the merits of these.’
+
+‘I’m afraid not, though I were to study them for years.’
+
+‘You may have that opportunity.’
+
+‘Oh! that is more than I can expect.’
+
+‘You will develop intelligence on such subjects by and by.’
+
+A dull sort of distant blow struck me in this remark; but I paid no heed
+to it.
+
+He led me over the gardens and the grounds. The Great John Methlyn
+Pollingray planted those trees, and designed the house, and the
+flower-garden still speaks of his task; but he is not my master, and
+consequently I could not share his three great-grandsons’ veneration
+for him. There are high fir-woods and beech woods, and a long ascending
+narrow meadow between them, through which a brook falls in continual
+cascades. It is the sort of scene I love, for it has a woodland grandeur
+and seclusion that leads, me to think, and makes a better girl of me.
+But what I said was: ‘Yes, it is the place of all others to come and
+settle in for the evening of one’s days.’
+
+‘You could not take to it now?’ said Mr. Pollingray.
+
+‘Now?’ my expression of face must have been a picture.
+
+‘You feel called upon to decline such a residence in the morning of your
+days?’
+
+He persisted in looking at me as he spoke, and I felt like something
+withering scarlet.
+
+I am convinced he saw through me, while his face was polished brass.
+My self-possession returned, for my pride was not to be dispersed
+immediately.
+
+‘Please, take me to the stables,’ I entreated; and there I was at home.
+There I saw my Prince Leboo, and gave him a thousand caresses.’
+
+‘He knows me already,’ I said.
+
+Then he is some degrees in advance of me,’ said Mr. Pollingray.
+
+Is not cold dissection of one’s character a cruel proceeding? And I
+think, too, that a form of hospitality like this by which I am invited
+to be analysed at leisure, is both mean and base. I have been kindly
+treated and I am grateful, but I do still say (even though I may have
+improved under it) it is unfair.
+
+To proceed: the dinner hour arrived. The atmosphere of his own house
+seems to favour Mr. Pollingray as certain soils and sites favour others.
+He walked into the dining-room between us with his hands behind him,
+talking to us both so easily and smoothly cheerfully--naturally and
+pleasantly--inimitable by any young man! You hardly feel the change
+of room. We were but three at table, but there was no lack of
+entertainment. Mr. Pollingray is an admirable host; he talks just enough
+himself and helps you to talk. What does comfort me is that it gives
+him real pleasure to see a hearty appetite. Young men, I know it for
+a certainty, never quite like us to be so human. Ah! which is right? I
+would not miss the faith in our nobler essence which Charles has.
+But, if it nobler? One who has lived longer in the world ought to know
+better, and Mr. Pollingray approves of naturalness in everything. I have
+now seen through Charles’s eyes for several months; so implicitly that
+I am timid when I dream of trusting to another’s judgement. It is,
+however, a fact that I am not quite natural with Charles.
+
+Every day Mr. Pollingray puts on evening dress out of deference to his
+sister. If young men had these good habits they would gain our respect,
+and lose their own self-esteem less early.
+
+After dinner I sang. Then Mr. Pollingray read an amusing essay to us,
+and retired to his library. Miss Pollingray sat and talked to me of
+her brother, and of her nephew--for whom it is that Mr. Pollingray
+is beginning to receive company, and is going into society. Charles’s
+subsequently received letter explained the ‘receive company.’ I could
+not comprehend it at the time.
+
+‘The house has been shut up for years, or rarely inhabited by us for
+more than a month in the year. Mr. Pollingray prefers France. All his
+associations, I may say his sympathies, are in France. Latterly he seems
+to have changed a little; but from Normandy to Touraine and Dauphiny--we
+had a triangular home over there. Indeed, we have it still. I am never
+certain of my brother.’
+
+While Miss Pollingray was speaking, my eyes were fixed on a Vidal crayon
+drawing, faintly coloured with chalks, of a foreign lady--I could have
+sworn to her being French--young, quite girlish, I doubt if her age was
+more than mine.
+
+She is pretty, is she not?’ said Miss Pollingray.
+
+She is almost beautiful,’ I exclaimed, and Miss Pollingray, seeing my
+curiosity, was kind enough not to keep me in suspense.
+
+‘That is the Marquise de Mazardouin--nee Louise de Riverolles. You will
+see other portraits of her in the house. This is the most youthful of
+them, if I except one representing a baby, and bearing her initials.’
+
+I remembered having noticed a similarity of feature in some of the
+portraits in the different rooms. My longing to look at them again was
+like a sudden jet of flame within me. There was no chance of seeing them
+till morning; so, promising myself to dream of the face before me, I
+dozed through a conversation with my hostess, until I had got the French
+lady’s eyes and hair and general outline stamped accurately, as I hoped,
+on my mind. I was no sooner on my way to bed than all had faded. The
+torment of trying to conjure up that face was inconceivable. I lay, and
+tossed, and turned to right and to left, and scattered my sleep; but by
+and by my thoughts reverted to Mr. Pollingray, and then like sympathetic
+ink held to the heat, I beheld her again; but vividly, as she must have
+been when she was sitting to the artist. The hair was naturally crisped,
+waving thrice over the forehead and brushed clean from the temples,
+showing the small ears, and tied in a knot loosely behind. Her eyebrows
+were thick and dark, but soft; flowing eyebrows; far lovelier, to my
+thinking, than any pencilled arch. Dark eyes, and full, not prominent.
+I find little expression of inward sentiment in very prominent eyes. On
+the contrary they seem to have a fish-like dependency of gaze on what is
+without, and show fishy depths, if any. For instance, my eyes are rather
+prominent, and I am just the little fool--but the French lady is my
+theme. Madame la Marquise, your eyes are sweeter to me than celestial.
+I never saw such candour and unaffected innocence in eyes before. Accept
+the compliment of the pauvre Anglaise. Did you do mischief with them?
+Did Vidal’s delicate sketch do justice to you? Your lips and chin and
+your throat all repose in such girlish grace, that if ever it is my good
+fortune to see you, you will not be aged to me!
+
+I slept and dreamed of her.
+
+In the morning, I felt certain that she had often said: ‘Mon cher
+Gilbert,’ to Mr. Pollingray. Had he ever said: ‘Ma chere Louise?’ He
+might have said: ‘Ma bien aimee!’ for it was a face to be loved.
+
+My change of feeling towards him dates from that morning. He had
+previously seemed to me a man so much older. I perceived in him now a
+youthfulness beyond mere vigour of frame. I could not detach him from my
+dreams of the night. He insists upon addressing me by the terms of
+our ‘official’ relationship, as if he made it a principle of our
+intercourse.
+
+‘Well, and is your godpapa to congratulate you on your having had a
+quiet rest?’ was his greeting.
+
+I answered stupidly: ‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ and would have given worlds
+for the courage to reply in French, but I distrusted my accent. At
+breakfast, the opportunity or rather the excuse for an attempt, was
+offered. His French valet, Francois, waits on him at breakfast. Mr.
+Pollingray and his sister asked for things in the French tongue, and,
+as if fearing some breach of civility, Mr. Pollingray asked me if I knew
+French.
+
+Yes, I know it; that is, I understand it,’ I stuttered. Allons, nous
+parlerons francais,’ said he. But I shook my head, and remained like a
+silly mute.
+
+I was induced towards the close of the meal to come out with a few
+French words. I was utterly shamefaced. Mr. Pollingray has got the
+French manner of protesting that one is all but perfect in one’s
+speaking. I know how absurd it must have sounded. But I felt his
+kindness, and in my heart I thanked him humbly. I believe now that a
+residence in France does not deteriorate an Englishman. Mr. Pollingray,
+when in his own house, has the best qualities of the two countries. He
+is gay, and, yes, while he makes a study of me, I am making a study of
+him. Which of us two will know the other first? He was papa’s college
+friend--papa’s junior, of course, and infinitely more papa’s junior now.
+I observe that weakness in him, I mean, his clinging to youthfulness,
+less and less; but I do see it, I cannot be quite in error. The truth
+is, I begin to feel that I cannot venture to mistrust my infallible
+judgement, or I shall have no confidence in myself at all.
+
+After breakfast, I was handed over to Miss Pollingray, with the
+intimation that I should not see him till dinner.
+
+‘Gilbert is anxious to cultivate the society of his English neighbours,
+now that he has, as he supposes, really settled among them,’ she
+remarked to me. ‘At his time of life, the desire to be useful is
+almost a malady. But, he cherishes the poor, and that is more than an
+occupation, it is a virtue.’
+
+Her speech has become occasionally French in the construction of the
+sentences.
+
+‘Mais oui,’ I said shyly, and being alone with her, I was not rebuffed
+by her smile, especially as she encouraged me on.
+
+I am, she told me, to see a monde of French people here in September.
+So, the story of me is to be completer, or continued in September. I
+could not get Miss Pollingray to tell me distinctly whether Madame la
+Marquise will be one of the guests. But I know that she is not a widow.
+In that case, she has a husband. In that case, what is the story of her
+relations towards Mr. Pollingray? There must be some story. He would not
+surely have so many portraits of her about the house (and they travel
+with him wherever he goes) if she were but a lovely face to him. I
+cannot understand it. They were frequent, constant visitors to one
+another’s estates in France; always together. Perhaps a man of Mr.
+Pollingray’s age, or perhaps M. le Marquis--and here I lose myself.
+French habits are so different from ours. One thing I am certain of: no
+charge can be brought against my Englishman. I read perfect rectitude
+in his face. I would cast anchor by him. He must have had a dreadful
+unhappiness.
+
+Mama kept her promise by sending my riding habit and hat punctually, but
+I had run far ahead of all the wishes I had formed when I left home,
+and I half feared my ride out with Mr. Pollingray. That was before I had
+received Charles’s letter, letting me know the object of my invitation
+here. I require at times a morbid pride to keep me up to the work.
+I suppose I rode befittingly, for Mr. Pollingray praised my seat on
+horseback. I know I can ride, or feel the ‘blast of a horse like my
+own’--as he calls it. Yet he never could have had a duller companion.
+My conversation was all yes and no, as if it went on a pair of crutches
+like a miserable cripple. I was humiliated and vexed. All the while I
+was trying to lead up to the French lady, and I could not commence with
+a single question. He appears to, have really cancelled the past in
+every respect save his calling me his goddaughter. His talk was of the
+English poor, and vegetation, and papa’s goodness to his old dames in
+Ickleworth parish, and defects in my education acknowledged by me, but
+not likely to restore me in my depressed state. The ride was beautiful.
+We went the length of a twelve-mile ridge between Ickleworth and
+Hillford, over high commons, with immense views on both sides, and
+through beech-woods, oakwoods, and furzy dells and downs spotted with
+juniper and yewtrees--old picnic haunts of mine, but Mr. Pollingray’s
+fresh delight in the landscape made them seem new and strange. Home
+through the valley.
+
+The next day Miss Pollingray joined us, wearing a feutre gris and green
+plume, which looked exceedingly odd until you became accustomed to it.
+Her hair has decided gray streaks, and that, and the Queen Elizabeth
+nose, and the feutre gris!--but she is so kind, I could not even smile
+in my heart. It is singular that Mr. Pollingray, who’s but three years
+her junior, should look at least twenty years younger--at the very
+least. His moustache and beard are of the colour of a corn sheaf, and
+his blue eyes shining over them remind me of summer. That describes him.
+He is summer, and has not fallen into his autumn yet. Miss Pollingray
+helped me to talk a little. She tried to check her brother’s enthusiasm
+for our scenery, and extolled the French paysage. He laughed at her, for
+when they were in France it was she who used to say, ‘There is nothing
+here like England!’ Miss Fool rode between them attentive to the
+jingling of the bells in her cap: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ at anybody’s command,
+in and out of season.
+
+Thank you, Charles, for your letter! I was beginning to think my
+invitation to Dayton inexplicable, when that letter arrived. I cannot
+but deem it an unworthy baseness to entrap a girl to study her without
+a warning to her. I went up to my room after I had read it, and wrote
+in reply till the breakfast-bell rang. I resumed my occupation an hour
+later, and wrote till one o’clock. In all, fifteen pages of writing,
+which I carefully folded and addressed to Charles; sealed the envelope,
+stamped it, and destroyed it. I went to bed. ‘No, I won’t ride out
+to-day, I have a headache!’ I repeated this about half-a-dozen times to
+nobody’s knocking on the door, and when at last somebody knocked I
+tried to repeat it once, but having the message that Mr. Pollingray
+particularly wished to have my company in a ride, I rose submissively
+and cried. This humiliation made my temper ferocious. Mr. Pollingray
+observed my face, and put it down in his notebook. ‘A savage
+disposition,’ or, no, ‘An untamed little rebel’; for he has hopes of me.
+He had the cruelty to say so.
+
+‘What I am, I shall remain,’ said I.
+
+He informed me that it was perfectly natural for me to think it; and
+on my replying that persons ought to know themselves best: ‘At my age,
+perhaps,’ he said, and added, ‘I cannot speak very confidently of my
+knowledge of myself.’
+
+‘Then you make us out to be nothing better than puppets, Mr.
+Pollingray.’
+
+‘If we have missed an early apprenticeship to the habit of self-command,
+ma filleule.’
+
+‘Merci, mon parrain.’
+
+He laughed. My French, I suppose.
+
+I determined that, if he wanted to study me, I would help him.
+
+‘I can command myself when I choose, but it is only when I choose.’
+
+This seemed to me quite a reasonable speech, until I found him looking
+for something to follow, in explanation, and on coming to sift my
+meaning, I saw that it was temper, and getting more angry, continued:
+
+‘The sort of young people who have such wonderful command of themselves
+are not the pleasantest.’
+
+‘No,’ he said; ‘they disappoint us. We expect folly from the young.’
+
+I shut my lips. Prince Leboo knew that he must go, and a good gallop
+reconciled me to circumstances. Then I was put to jumping little furzes
+and ditches, which one cannot pretend to do without a fair appearance
+of gaiety; for, while you are running the risk of a tumble, you are
+compelled to look cheerful and gay, at least, I am. To fall frowning
+will never do. I had no fall. My gallant Leboo made my heart leap with
+love of him, though mill-stones were tied to it. I may be vexed when I
+begin, but I soon ride out a bad temper. And he is mine! I am certainly
+inconstant to Charles, for I think of Leboo fifty times more. Besides,
+there is no engagement as yet between Charles and me. I have first to be
+approved worthy by Mr. and Miss Pollingray: two pairs of eyes and ears,
+over which I see a solemnly downy owl sitting, conning their reports of
+me. It is a very unkind ordeal to subject any inexperienced young woman
+to. It was harshly conceived and it is being remorselessly executed. I
+would complain more loudly--in shrieks--if I could say I was unhappy;
+but every night I look out of my window before going to bed and see the
+long falls of the infant river through the meadow, and the dark woods
+seeming to enclose the house from harm: I dream of the old inhabitant,
+his ancestors, and the numbers and numbers of springs when the
+wildflowers have flourished in those woods and the nightingales have
+sung there. And I feel there will never be a home to me like Dayton.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HE
+
+For twenty years of my life I have embraced the phantom of the fairest
+woman that ever drew breath. I have submitted to her whims, I have
+worshipped her feet, I have, I believe, strengthened her principle. I
+have done all in my devotion but adopt her religious faith. And I have,
+as I trusted some time since, awakened to perceive that those twenty
+years were a period of mere sentimental pastime, perfectly useless,
+fruitless, unless, as is possible, it has saved me from other follies.
+But it was a folly in itself. Can one’s nature be too stedfast? The
+question whether a spice of frivolousness may not be a safeguard has
+often risen before me. The truth, I must learn to think, is, that my
+mental power is not the match for my ideal or sentimental apprehension
+and native tenacity of attachment. I have fallen into one of the pits of
+a well-meaning but idle man. The world discredits the existence of pure
+platonism in love. I myself can barely look back on those twenty years
+of amatory servility with a full comprehension of the part I have been
+playing in them. And yet I would not willingly forfeit the exalted
+admiration of Louise for my constancy: as little willingly as I would
+have imperilled her purity. I cling to the past as to something in which
+I have deserved well, though I am scarcely satisfied with it. According
+to our English notions I know my name. English notions, however, are not
+to be accepted in all matters, any more than the flat declaration of a
+fact will develop it in alt its bearings. When our English society
+shall have advanced to a high civilization, it will be less expansive
+in denouncing the higher stupidities. Among us, much of the social
+judgement of Bodge upon the relations of men to women is the stereotyped
+opinion of the land. There is the dictum here for a man who adores a
+woman who is possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her, and
+known himself to be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has
+solved the problem of being her bosom’s lord, without basely seeking to
+degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in
+our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we
+are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest
+animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for
+without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses.
+I judge rather by the abstract evidence than by the examples our fair
+matrons give to astounded foreigners when abroad.
+
+Louise writes that her husband is paralysed. The Marquis de Mazardouin
+is at last tasting of his mortality. I bear in mind the day when he
+married her. She says that he has taken to priestly counsel, and, like
+a woman, she praises him for that. It is the one thing which I have
+not done to please her. She anticipates his decease. Should she be
+free--what then? My heart does not beat the faster for the thought.
+There are twenty years upon it, and they make a great load. But I have
+a desire that she should come over to us. The old folly might rescue me
+from the new one. Not that I am any further persecuted by the dread that
+I am in imminent danger here. I have established a proper mastery over
+my young lady. ‘Nous avons change de role’. Alice is subdued; she laughs
+feebly, is becoming conscious--a fact to be regretted, if I desired to
+check the creature’s growth. There is vast capacity in the girl. She
+has plainly not centred her affections upon Charles, so that a man’s
+conscience might be at ease if--if he chose to disregard what is due to
+decency. But, why, when I contest it, do I bow to the world’s opinion
+concerning disparity of years between husband and wife? I know
+innumerable cases of an old husband making a young wife happy. My
+friend, Dr. Galliot, married his ward, and he had the best wife of any
+man of my acquaintance. She has been publishing his learned manuscripts
+ever since his death. That is an extreme case, for he was forty-five
+years her senior, and stood bald at the altar. Old General Althorpe
+married Julia Dahoop, and, but for his preposterous jealousy of her,
+might be cited in proof that the ordinary reckonings are not to be a
+yoke on the neck of one who earnestly seeks to spouse a fitting mate,
+though late in life. But, what are fifty years? They mark the prime of a
+healthy man’s existence. He has by that time seen the world, can decide,
+and settle, and is virtually more eligible--to use the cant phrase of
+gossips--than a young man, even for a young girl. And may not some fair
+and fresh reward be justly claimed as the crown of a virtuous career?
+
+I say all this, yet my real feeling is as if I were bald as Dr. Galliot
+and jealous as General Althorpe. For, with my thorough knowledge of
+myself, I, were I like either one of them, should not have offered
+myself to the mercy of a young woman, or of the world. Nor, as I am and
+know myself to be, would I offer myself to the mercy of Alice Amble.
+When my filleule first drove into Dayton she had some singularly
+audacious ideas of her own. Those vivid young feminine perceptions and
+untamed imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing
+beyond their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are
+always seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little
+help from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they
+have once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
+supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in
+this state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have her
+with us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire that
+they should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but, if
+I stand in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity of
+dormant compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too,
+may save me from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on
+either side of him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SHE
+
+I am at home. There was never anybody who felt so strange in her home.
+It is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that
+I know them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thinking about such
+petty things. They complain that I tell them nothing. What have I to
+tell? My Prince! my own Leboo, if I might lie in the stall with you,
+then I should feel thoroughly happy! That is, if I could fall asleep.
+Evelina declares we are not eight miles from Dayton. It seems to me I
+am eight millions of miles distant, and shall be all my life travelling
+along a weary road to get there again just for one long sunny day.
+And it might rain when I got there after all! My trouble nobody knows.
+Nobody knows a thing!
+
+The night before my departure, Miss Pollingray did me the honour
+to accompany me up to my bedroom. She spoke to me searchingly about
+Charles; but she did not demand compromising answers. She is not in
+favour of early marriages, so she merely wishes to know the footing upon
+which we stand: that of friends. I assured her we were simply friends.
+‘It is the firmest basis of an attachment,’ she said; and I did not look
+hurried.
+
+But I gained my end. I led her to talk of the beautiful Marquise. This
+is the tale. Mr. Pollingray, when a very young man, and comparatively
+poor, went over to France with good introductions, and there saw and
+fell in love with Louise de Riverolles. She reciprocated his passion.
+If he would have consented to abjure his religion and worship with her,
+Madame de Riverolles, her mother, would have listened to her entreaties.
+But Gilbert was firm. Mr. Pollingray, I mean, refused to abandon his
+faith. Her mother, consequently, did not interfere, and Monsieur de
+Riverolles, her father, gave her to the Marquis de Marzardouin, a roue
+young nobleman, immensely rich, and shockingly dissipated. And she
+married him. No, I cannot understand French girls. Do as I will, it is
+quite incomprehensible to me how Louise, loving another, could suffer
+herself to be decked out in bridal finery and go to the altar and
+take the marriage oaths. Not if perdition had threatened would I have
+submitted. I have a feeling that Mr. Pollingray should have shown at
+least one year’s resentment at such conduct; and yet I admire him for
+his immediate generous forgiveness of her. It was fatherly. She was
+married at sixteen. His forgiveness was the fruit of his few years’
+seniority, said Miss Pollingray, whose opinion of the Marquise I cannot
+arrive at. At any rate, they have been true and warm friends ever since,
+constantly together interchangeing visits. That is why Mr. Pollingray
+has been more French than English for those long years.
+
+Miss Pollingray concluded by asking me what I thought of the story. I
+said: ‘It is very strange French habits are so different from ours. I
+dare say... I hope..., perhaps... indeed, Mr. Pollingray seems happy
+now.’ Her idea of my wits must be that they are of the schoolgirl
+order--a perfect receptacle for indefinite impressions.
+
+‘Ah!’ said she. ‘Gilbert has burnt his heart to ashes by this time.’
+
+I slept with that sentence in my brain. In the morning, I rose and
+dressed, dreaming. As I was turning the handle of my door to go down to
+breakfast, suddenly I swung round in a fit of tears. It was so piteous
+to think that he should have waited by her twenty years in a slow
+anguish, his heart burning out, without a reproach or a complaint. I saw
+him, I still see him, like a martyr.
+
+‘Some people,’ Miss Pollingray said, I permitted themselves to think
+evil of my brother’s assiduous devotion to a married woman. There is not
+a spot on his character, or on that of the person whom Gilbert loved.’
+
+I would believe it in the teeth of calumny. I would cling to my belief
+in him if I were drowning.
+
+I consider that those twenty years are just nothing, if he chooses to
+have them so. He has lived embalmed in a saintly affection. No wonder he
+considers himself still youthful. He is entitled to feel that his future
+is before him.
+
+No amount of sponging would get the stains away from my horrid red
+eyelids. I slunk into my seat at the breakfast-table, not knowing that
+one of the maids had dropped a letter from Charles into my hand, and
+that I had opened it and was holding it open. The letter, as I found
+afterwards, told me that Charles has received an order from his uncle
+to go over to Mr. Pollingray’s estate in Dauphiny on business. I am not
+sorry that they should have supposed I was silly enough to cry at the
+thought of Charles’s crossing the Channel. They did imagine it, I know;
+for by and by Miss Pollingray whispered: ‘Les absents n’auront pas tort,
+cette fois, n’est-ce-pas? ‘And Mr. Pollingray was cruelly gentle: an
+air of ‘I would not intrude on such emotions’; and I heightened their
+delusions as much as I could: there was no other way of accounting for
+my pantomime face. Why should he fancy I suffered so terribly? He talked
+with an excited cheerfulness meant to relieve me, of course, but there
+was no justification for his deeming me a love-sick kind of woe-begone
+ballad girl. It caused him likewise to adopt a manner--what to call it,
+I cannot think: tender respect, frigid regard, anything that accompanies
+and belongs to the pressure of your hand with the finger-tips. He said
+goodbye so tenderly that I would have kissed his sleeve. The effort to
+restrain myself made me like an icicle. Oh! adieu, mon parrain!
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it
+     A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans
+     Gentleman in a good state of preservation
+     Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind
+     In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt
+     Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men
+     Rapture of obliviousness
+     Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation
+     When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+
+AN UNFINISHED COMEDY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+                   DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+     HOMEWARE.
+     PROFESSOR SPIRAL.
+
+     ARDEN,............. In love with Astraea.
+
+     SWITHIN,........... Sympathetics. OSIER,
+
+     DAME DRESDEN,...... Sister to Homeware.
+
+     ASTRAEA,........... Niece to Dame Dresden and Homeware.
+
+     LYRA,.............. A Wife.
+     LADY OLDLACE.
+     VIRGINIA.
+     WINIFRED.
+
+              THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+
+              AN UNFINISHED COMEDY
+
+The scene is a Surrey garden in early summer. The paths are shaded by
+tall box-wood hedges. The--time is some sixty years ago.
+
+                 SCENE I
+
+       PROFESSOR SPIRAL, DAME DRESDEN, LADY OLDLACE,
+         VIRGINIA, WINIFRED, SWITHIN, and OSIER
+
+(As they slowly promenade the garden, the professor is delivering one of
+his exquisite orations on Woman.)
+
+SPIRAL: One husband! The woman consenting to marriage takes but one. For
+her there is no widowhood. That punctuation of the sentence called death
+is not the end of the chapter for her. It is the brilliant proof of her
+having a soul. So she exalts her sex. Above the wrangle and clamour of
+the passions she is a fixed star. After once recording her obedience
+to the laws of our common nature--that is to say, by descending once to
+wedlock--she passes on in sovereign disengagement--a dedicated widow.
+
+   (By this time they have disappeared from view. HOMEWARE appears;
+   he craftily avoids joining their party, like one who is unworthy of
+   such noble oratory. He desires privacy and a book, but is disturbed
+   by the arrival of ARDEN, who is painfully anxious to be polite to
+   ‘her uncle Homeware.’)
+
+                 SCENE II
+
+               HOMEWARE, ARDEN
+
+ARDEN: A glorious morning, sir.
+
+HOMEWARE: The sun is out, sir.
+
+ARDEN: I am happy in meeting you, Mr. Homeware.
+
+HOMEWARE: I can direct you to the ladies, Mr. Arden. You will find them
+up yonder avenue.
+
+ARDEN: They are listening, I believe, to an oration from the mouth of
+Professor Spiral.
+
+HOMEWARE: On an Alpine flower which has descended to flourish on English
+soil. Professor Spiral calls it Nature’s ‘dedicated widow.’
+
+ARDEN: ‘Dedicated widow’?
+
+HOMEWARE: The reference you will observe is to my niece Astraea.
+
+ARDEN: She is dedicated to whom?
+
+HOMEWARE: To her dead husband! You see the reverse of Astraea, says the
+professor, in those world-infamous widows who marry again.
+
+ARDEN: Bah!
+
+HOMEWARE: Astraea, it is decided, must remain solitary, virgin cold,
+like the little Alpine flower. Professor Spiral has his theme.
+
+ARDEN: He will make much of it. May I venture to say that I prefer my
+present company?
+
+HOMEWARE: It is a singular choice. I can supply you with no weapons for
+the sort of stride in which young men are usually engaged. You belong to
+the camp you are avoiding.
+
+ARDEN: Achilles was not the worse warrior, sir, for his probation in
+petticoats.
+
+HOMEWARE: His deeds proclaim it. But Alexander was the better chieftain
+until he drank with Lais.
+
+ARDEN: No, I do not plead guilty to Bacchus.
+
+HOMEWARE: You are confessing to the madder form of drunkenness.
+
+ARDEN: How, sir, I beg?
+
+HOMEWARE: How, when a young man sees the index to himself in everything
+spoken!
+
+ARDEN: That might have the look. I did rightly in coming to you, sir.
+
+HOMEWARE: ‘Her uncle Homeware’?
+
+ARDEN: You read through us all, sir.
+
+HOMEWARE: It may interest you to learn that you are the third of the
+gentlemen commissioned to consult the lady’s uncle Homeware.
+
+ARDEN: The third.
+
+HOMEWARE: Yes, she is pursued. It could hardly be otherwise. Her
+attractions are acknowledged, and the house is not a convent. Yet, Mr.
+Arden, I must remind you that all of you are upon an enterprise held to
+be profane by the laws of this region. Can you again forget that Astraea
+is a widow?
+
+ARDEN: She was a wife two months; she has been a widow two years.
+
+HOMEWARE: The widow of the great and venerable Professor Towers is not
+to measure her widowhood by years. His, from the altar to the tomb. As
+it might be read, a one day’s walk!
+
+ARDEN: Is she, in the pride of her youth, to be sacrificed to a
+whimsical feminine delicacy?
+
+HOMEWARE: You have argued it with her?
+
+ARDEN: I have presumed.
+
+HOMEWARE: And still she refused her hand!
+
+ARDEN: She commended me to you, sir. She has a sound judgement of
+persons.
+
+HOMEWARE: I should put it that she passes the Commissioners of Lunacy,
+on the ground of her being a humorous damsel. Your predecessors had also
+argued it with her; and they, too, discovered their enemy in a whimsical
+feminine delicacy. Where is the difference between you? Evidently
+she cannot perceive it, and I have to seek: You will have had many
+conversations with Astraea?
+
+ARDEN: I can say, that I am thrice the man I was before I had them.
+
+HOMEWARE: You have gained in manhood from conversations with a widow in
+her twenty-second year; and you want more of her.
+
+ARDEN: As much as I want more wisdom.
+
+HOMEWARE: You would call her your Muse?
+
+ARDEN: So prosaic a creature as I would not dare to call her that.
+
+HOMEWARE: You have the timely mantle of modesty, Mr. Arden. She has
+prepared you for some of the tests with her uncle Homeware.
+
+ARDEN: She warned me to be myself, without a spice of affectation.
+
+HOMEWARE: No harder task could be set a young man in modern days. Oh,
+the humorous damsel. You sketch me the dimple at her mouth.
+
+ARDEN: Frankly, sir, I wish you to know me better; and I think I can
+bear inspection. Astraea sent me to hear the reasons why she refuses me
+a hearing.
+
+HOMEWARE: Her reason, I repeat, is this; to her idea, a second wedlock
+is unholy. Further, it passes me to explain. The young lady lands
+us where we were at the beginning; such must have been her humorous
+intention.
+
+ARDEN: What can I do?
+
+HOMEWARE: Love and war have been compared. Both require strategy and
+tactics, according to my recollection of the campaign.
+
+ARDEN: I will take to heart what you say, sir.
+
+HOMEWARE: Take it to head. There must be occasional descent of lovers’
+heads from the clouds. And Professor Spiral,--But here we have a belated
+breeze of skirts.
+
+   (The reference is to the arrival of LYRA, breathless.)
+
+                SCENE III
+
+             HOMEWARE, ARDEN, LYRA
+
+LYRA: My own dear uncle Homeware!
+
+HOMEWARE: But where is Pluriel?
+
+LYRA: Where is a woman’s husband when she is away from him?
+
+HOMEWARE: In Purgatory, by the proper reckoning. But hurry up the
+avenue, or you will be late for Professor Spiral’s address.
+
+LYRA: I know it all without hearing. Their Spiral! Ah, Mr. Arden! You
+have not chosen badly. The greater my experience, the more do I value my
+uncle Homeware’s company.
+
+   (She is affectionate to excess but has a roguish eye withal, as of
+   one who knows that uncle Homeware suspects all young men and most
+   young women.)
+
+HOMEWARE: Agree with the lady promptly, my friend.
+
+ARDEN: I would gladly boast of so lengthened an experience, Lady
+Pluriel.
+
+LYRA: I must have a talk with Astraea, my dear uncle. Her letters breed
+suspicions. She writes feverishly. The last one hints at service on the
+West Coast of Africa.
+
+HOMEWARE: For the draining of a pestiferous land, or an enlightenment of
+the benighted black, we could not despatch a missionary more effective
+than the handsomest widow in Great Britain.
+
+LYRA: Have you not seen signs of disturbance?
+
+HOMEWARE: A great oration may be a sedative.
+
+LYRA: I have my suspicions.
+
+HOMEWARE: Mr. Arden, I could counsel you to throw yourself at Lady
+Pluriel’s feet, and institute her as your confessional priest.
+
+ARDEN: Madam, I am at your feet. I am devoted to the lady.
+
+LYRA: Devoted. There cannot be an objection. It signifies that a man
+asks for nothing in return!
+
+HOMEWARE: Have a thought upon your words with this lady, Mr. Arden!
+
+ARDEN: Devoted, I said. I am. I would give my life for her.
+
+LYRA: Expecting it to be taken to-morrow or next day? Accept my
+encomiums. A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle. Women had been
+looking for this model for ages, uncle.
+
+HOMEWARE: You are the model, Mr Arden!
+
+LYRA: Can you have intended to say that it is in view of marriage you
+are devoted to the widow of Professor Towers?
+
+ARDEN: My one view.
+
+LYRA: It is a star you are beseeching to descend.
+
+ARDEN: It is.
+
+LYRA: You disappoint me hugely. You are of the ordinary tribe after all;
+and your devotion craves an enormous exchange, infinitely surpassing the
+amount you bestow.
+
+ARDEN: It does. She is rich in gifts; I am poor. But I give all I have.
+
+LYRA: These lovers, uncle Homeware!
+
+HOMEWARE: A honey-bag is hung up and we have them about us. They would
+persuade us that the chief business of the world is a march to the
+altar.
+
+ARDEN: With the right partner, if the business of the world is to be
+better done.
+
+LYRA: Which right partner has been chosen on her part, by a veiled
+woman, who marches back from the altar to discover that she has chained
+herself to the skeleton of an idea, or is in charge of that devouring
+tyrant, an uxorious husband. Is Mr. Arden in favour with the Dame,
+uncle?
+
+HOMEWARE: My sister is an unsuspicious potentate, as you know.
+Pretenders to the hand of an inviolate widow bite like waves at a rock.
+
+LYRA: Professor Spiral advances rapidly.
+
+HOMEWARE: Not, it would appear, when he has his audience of ladies and
+their satellites.
+
+LYRA: I am sure I hear a spring-tide of enthusiasm coming.
+
+ARDEN: I will see.
+
+   (He goes up the path.)
+
+LYRA: Now! my own dear uncle, save me from Pluriel. I have given him the
+slip in sheer desperation; but the man is at his shrewdest when he is
+left to guess at my heels. Tell him I am anywhere but here. Tell him I
+ran away to get a sense of freshness in seeing him again. Let me have
+one day of liberty, or, upon my word, I shall do deeds; I shall console
+young Arden: I shall fly to Paris and set my cap at presidents and
+foreign princes. Anything rather than be eaten up every minute, as I am.
+May no woman of my acquaintance marry a man of twenty years her senior!
+She marries a gigantic limpet. At that period of his life a man becomes
+too voraciously constant.
+
+HOMEWARE: Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite.
+
+LYRA: I am in dead earnest, uncle, and I will have a respite, or else
+let decorum beware!
+
+   (Arden returns.)
+
+ARDEN: The ladies are on their way.
+
+LYRA: I must get Astraea to myself.
+
+HOMEWARE: My library is a virgin fortress, Mr. Arden. Its gates are open
+to you on other topics than the coupling of inebriates.
+
+   (He enters the house--LYRA disappears in the garden--Spiral’s
+   audience reappear without him.)
+
+                 SCENE IV
+
+       DAME DRESDEN, LADY OLDLACE, VIRGINIA, WINIFRED,
+             ARDEN, SWITHIN, OSIER
+
+LADY OLDLACE: Such perfect rhythm!
+
+WINIFRED: Such oratory!
+
+LADY OLDLACE: A master hand. I was in a trance from the first sentence
+to the impressive close.
+
+OSIER: Such oratory is a whole orchestral symphony.
+
+VIRGINIA: Such command of intonation and subject!
+
+SWITHIN: That resonant voice!
+
+LADY OLDLACE: Swithin, his flow of eloquence! He launched forth!
+
+SWITHIN: Like an eagle from a cliff.
+
+OSIER: The measure of the words was like a beat of wings.
+
+SWITHIN: He makes poets of us.
+
+DAME DRESDEN: Spiral achieved his pinnacle to-day!
+
+VIRGINIA: How treacherous is our memory when we have most the longing to
+recall great sayings!
+
+OSIER: True, I conceive that my notes will be precious.
+
+WINIFRED: You could take notes!
+
+LADY OLDLACE: It seems a device for missing the quintessential.
+
+SWITHIN: Scraps of the body to the loss of the soul of it. We can allow
+that our friend performed good menial service.
+
+WINIFRED: I could not have done the thing.
+
+SWITHIN: In truth; it does remind one of the mess of pottage.
+
+LADY OLDLACE: One hardly felt one breathed.
+
+VIRGINIA: I confess it moved me to tears.
+
+SWITHIN: There is a pathos for us in the display of perfection. Such
+subtle contrast with our individual poverty affects us.
+
+WINIFRED: Surely there were passages of a distinct and most exquisite
+pathos.
+
+LADY OLDLACE: As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos.
+
+VIRGINIA: In great oratory, great poetry, great fiction; you try it
+by the pathos. All our critics agree in stipulating for the pathos. My
+tears were no feminine weakness, I could not be a discordant instrument.
+
+SWITHIN: I must make confession. He played on me too.
+
+OSIER: We shall be sensible for long of that vibration from the touch of
+a master hand.
+
+ARDEN: An accomplished player can make a toy-shop fiddle sound you a
+Stradivarius.
+
+DAME DRESDEN: Have you a right to a remark, Mr. Arden? What could have
+detained you?
+
+ARDEN: Ah, Dame. It may have been a warning that I am a discordant
+instrument. I do not readily vibrate.
+
+DAME DRESDEN: A discordant instrument is out of place in any civil
+society. You have lost what cannot be recovered.
+
+ARDEN: There are the notes.
+
+OSIER: Yes, the notes.
+
+SWITHIN: You can be satisfied with the dog’s feast at the table, Mr.
+Arden!
+
+OSIER: Ha!
+
+VIRGINIA: Never have I seen Astraea look sublimer in her beauty than
+with her eyes uplifted to the impassioned speaker, reflecting every
+variation of his tones.
+
+ARDEN: Astraea!
+
+LADY OLDLACE: She was entranced when he spoke of woman descending from
+her ideal to the gross reality of man.
+
+OSIER: Yes, yes. I have the words [reads]: ‘Woman is to the front of
+man, holding the vestal flower of a purer civilization. I see,’ he says,
+‘the little taper in her hands transparent round the light, against
+rough winds.’
+
+DAME DRESDEN: And of Astraea herself, what were the words? ‘Nature’s
+dedicated widow.’
+
+SWITHIN: Vestal widow, was it not?
+
+VIRGINIA: Maiden widow, I think.
+
+DAME DRESDEN: We decide for ‘dedicated.’
+
+WINIFRED: Spiral paid his most happy tribute to the memory of her late
+husband, the renowned Professor Towers.
+
+VIRGINIA: But his look was at dear Astraea.
+
+ARDEN: At Astraea? Why?
+
+VIRGINIA: For her sanction doubtless.
+
+ARDEN: Ha!
+
+WINIFRED: He said his pride would ever be in his being received as the
+successor of Professor Towers.
+
+ARDEN: Successor!
+
+SWITHIN: Guardian was it not?
+
+OSIER: Tutor. I think he said.
+
+   (The three gentlemen consult Osier’s notes uneasily.)
+
+DAME DRESDEN: Our professor must by this time have received in full
+Astraea’s congratulations, and Lyra is hearing from her what it is to
+be too late. You will join us at the luncheon table, if you do not feel
+yourself a discordant instrument there, Mr. Arden?
+
+ARDEN (going to her): The allusion to knife and fork tunes my strings
+instantly, Dame.
+
+DAME DRESDEN: You must help me to-day, for the professor will be tired,
+though we dare not hint at it in his presence. No reference, ladies, to
+the great speech we have been privileged to hear; we have expressed our
+appreciation and he could hardly bear it.
+
+ARDEN: Nothing is more distasteful to the orator!
+
+VIRGINIA: As with every true genius, he is driven to feel humbly human
+by the exultation of him.
+
+SWITHIN: He breathes in a rarified air.
+
+OSIER: I was thrilled, I caught at passing beauties. I see that here and
+there I have jotted down incoherencies, lines have seduced me, so that
+I missed the sequence--the precious part. Ladies, permit me to rank him
+with Plato as to the equality of women and men.
+
+WINIFRED: It is nobly said.
+
+OSIER: And with the Stoics, in regard to celibacy.
+
+   (By this time all the ladies have gone into the house.)
+
+ARDEN: Successor! Was the word successor?
+
+   (ARDEN, SWITHIN, and OSIER are excitedly searching the notes
+   when SPIRAL passes and strolls into the house. His air of
+   self-satisfaction increases their uneasiness they follow him.
+   ASTRAEA and LYRA come down the path.)
+
+                 SCENE V
+
+               ASTRAEA, LYRA
+
+LYRA: Oh! Pluriel, ask me of him! I wish I were less sure he would not
+be at the next corner I turn.
+
+ASTRAEA: You speak of your husband strangely, Lyra.
+
+LYRA: My head is out of a sack. I managed my escape from him this
+morning by renouncing bath and breakfast; and what a relief, to be in
+the railway carriage alone! that is, when the engine snorted. And if
+I set eyes on him within a week, he will hear some truths. His idea of
+marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody. My hat is on, and on
+goes Pluriel’s. My foot on the stairs; I hear his boot behind me. In
+my boudoir I am alone one minute, and then the door opens to the
+inevitable. I pay a visit, he is passing the house as I leave it. He
+will not even affect surprise. I belong to him, I am cat’s mouse. And
+he will look doating on me in public. And when I speak to anybody, he is
+that fearful picture of all smirks. Fling off a kid glove after a round
+of calls; feel your hand--there you have me now that I am out of him for
+my half a day, if for as long.
+
+ASTRAEA: This is one of the world’s happy marriages!
+
+LYRA: This is one of the world’s choice dishes! And I have it planted
+under my nostrils eternally. Spare me the mention of Pluriel until he
+appears; that’s too certain this very day. Oh! good husband! good
+kind of man! whatever you please; only some peace, I do pray, for the
+husband-haunted wife. I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to
+breathe. Why, an English boy perpetually bowled by a Christmas pudding
+would come to loathe the mess.
+
+ASTRAEA: His is surely the excess of a merit.
+
+LYRA: Excess is a poison. Excess of a merit is a capital offence in
+morality. It disgusts, us with virtue. And you are the cunningest of
+fencers, tongue, or foils. You lead me to talk of myself, and I hate the
+subject. By the way, you have practised with Mr. Arden.
+
+ASTRAEA: A tiresome instructor, who lets you pass his guard to
+compliment you on a hit.
+
+LYRA: He rather wins me.
+
+ASTRAEA: He does at first.
+
+LYRA: Begins Plurielizing, without the law to back him, does he?
+
+ASTRAEA: The fencing lessons are at an end.
+
+LYRA: The duetts with Mr. Swithin’s violoncello continue?
+
+ASTRAEA: He broke through the melody.
+
+LYRA: There were readings in poetry with Mr. Osier, I recollect.
+
+ASTRAEA: His own compositions became obtrusive.
+
+LYRA: No fencing, no music, no poetry! no West Coast of Africa either, I
+suppose.
+
+ASTRAEA: Very well! I am on my defence. You at least shall not
+misunderstand me, Lyra. One intense regret I have; that I did not
+live in the time of the Amazons. They were free from this question of
+marriage; this babble of love. Why am I so persecuted? He will not
+take a refusal. There are sacred reasons. I am supported by every woman
+having the sense of her dignity. I am perverted, burlesqued by the fury
+of wrath I feel at their incessant pursuit. And I despise Mr. Osier and
+Mr. Swithin because they have an air of pious agreement with the Dame,
+and are conspirators behind their mask.
+
+LYRA: False, false men!
+
+ASTRAEA: They come to me. I am complimented on being the vulnerable
+spot.
+
+LYRA: The object desired is usually addressed by suitors, my poor
+Astraea!
+
+ASTRAEA: With the assumption, that as I am feminine I must necessarily
+be in the folds of the horrible constrictor they call Love, and that I
+leap to the thoughts of their debasing marriage.
+
+LYRA: One of them goes to Mr. Homeware.
+
+ASTRAEA: All are sent to him in turn. He can dispose of them.
+
+LYRA: Now that is really masterly fun, my dear; most creditable to you!
+Love, marriage, a troop of suitors, and uncle Homeware. No, it would
+not have occurred to me, and--I am considered to have some humour.
+Of course, he disposes of them. He seemed to have a fairly favourable
+opinion of Mr. Arden.
+
+ASTRAEA: I do not share it. He is the least respectful of the sentiments
+entertained by me. Pray, spare me the mention of him, as you say of your
+husband. He has that pitiful conceit in men, which sets them thinking
+that a woman must needs be susceptible to the declaration of the mere
+existence of their passion. He is past argument. Impossible for him
+to conceive a woman’s having a mind above the conditions of her sex. A
+woman, according to him, can have no ideal of life, except as a ball to
+toss in the air and catch in a cup. Put him aside.... We creatures are
+doomed to marriage, and if we shun it, we are a kind of cripple. He
+is grossly earthy in his view of us. We are unable to move a step
+in thought or act unless we submit to have a husband. That is his
+reasoning. Nature! Nature! I have to hear of Nature! We must be above
+Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below. He is ranked among
+our clever young men; and he can be amusing. So far he passes muster;
+and he has a pleasant voice. I dare say he is an uncle Homeware’s good
+sort of boy. Girls like him. Why does he not fix his attention upon one
+of them; Why upon me? We waste our time in talking of him.... The secret
+of it is, that he has no reverence. The marriage he vaunts is a mere
+convenient arrangement for two to live together under command of nature.
+Reverence for the state of marriage is unknown to him. How explain my
+feeling? I am driven into silence. Cease to speak of him.... He is the
+dupe of his eloquence--his passion, he calls it. I have only to trust
+myself to him, and--I shall be one of the world’s married women! Words
+are useless. How am I to make him see that it is I who respect the state
+of marriage by refusing; not he by perpetually soliciting. Once married,
+married for ever. Widow is but a term. When women hold their own against
+him, as I have done, they will be more esteemed. I have resisted and
+conquered. I am sorry I do not share in the opinion of your favourite.
+
+LYRA: Mine?
+
+ASTRAEA: You spoke warmly of him.
+
+LYRA: Warmly, was it?
+
+ASTRAEA: You are not blamed, my dear: he has a winning manner.
+
+LYRA: I take him to be a manly young fellow, smart enough; handsome too.
+
+ASTRAEA: Oh, he has good looks.
+
+LYRA: And a head, by repute.
+
+ASTRAEA: For the world’s work, yes.
+
+LYRA: Not romantic.
+
+ASTRAEA: Romantic ideas are for dreamy simperers.
+
+LYRA: Amazons repudiate them.
+
+ASTRAEA: Laugh at me. Half my time I am laughing at myself. I should
+regain my pride if I could be resolved on a step. I am strong to resist;
+I have not strength to move.
+
+LYRA: I see the sphinx of Egypt!
+
+ASTRAEA: And all the while I am a manufactory of gunpowder in this quiet
+old-world Sabbath circle of dear good souls, with their stereotyped
+interjections, and orchestra of enthusiasms; their tapering delicacies:
+the rejoicing they have in their common agreement on all created things.
+To them it is restful. It spurs me to fly from rooms and chairs and
+beds and houses. I sleep hardly a couple of hours. Then into the early
+morning air, out with the birds; I know no other pleasure.
+
+LYRA: Hospital work for a variation: civil or military. The former
+involves the house-surgeon: the latter the grateful lieutenant.
+
+ASTRAEA: Not if a woman can resist... I go to it proof-armoured.
+
+LYRA: What does the Dame say?
+
+ASTRAEA: Sighs over me! Just a little maddening to hear.
+
+LYRA: When we feel we have the strength of giants, and are bidden to
+sit and smile! You should rap out some of our old sweet-innocent garden
+oaths with her--‘Carnation! Dame!’ That used to make her dance on her
+seat.--‘But, dearest Dame, it is as natural an impulse for women to have
+that relief as for men; and natural will out, begonia! it will!’ We ran
+through the book of Botany for devilish objurgations. I do believe our
+misconduct caused us to be handed to the good man at the altar as the
+right corrective. And you were the worst offender.
+
+ASTRAEA: Was I? I could be now, though I am so changed a creature.
+
+LYRA: You enjoy the studies with your Spiral, come!
+
+ASTRAEA: Professor Spiral is the one honest gentleman here. He does
+homage to my principles. I have never been troubled by him: no silly
+hints or side-looks--you know, the dog at the forbidden bone.
+
+LYRA: A grand orator.
+
+ASTRAEA: He is. You fix on the smallest of his gifts. He is
+intellectually and morally superior.
+
+LYRA: Praise of that kind makes me rather incline to prefer his
+inferiors. He fed gobble-gobble on your puffs of incense. I coughed and
+scraped the gravel; quite in vain; he tapped for more and more.
+
+ASTRAEA: Professor Spiral is a thinker; he is a sage. He gives women
+their due.
+
+LYRA: And he is a bachelor too--or consequently.
+
+ASTRAEA: If you like you may be as playful with me as the Lyra of our
+maiden days used to be. My dear, my dear, how glad I am to have you
+here! You remind me that I once had a heart. It will beat again with you
+beside me, and I shall look to you for protection. A novel request
+from me. From annoyance, I mean. It has entirely altered my character.
+Sometimes I am afraid to think of what I was, lest I should suddenly
+romp, and perform pirouettes and cry ‘Carnation!’ There is the bell. We
+must not be late when the professor condescends to sit for meals.
+
+LYRA: That rings healthily in the professor.
+
+ASTRAEA: Arm in arm, my Lyra.
+
+LYRA: No Pluriel yet!
+
+   (They enter the house, and the time changes to evening of the same
+   day. The scene is still the garden.)
+
+                 SCENE VI
+
+               ASTRAEA, ARDEN
+
+ASTRAEA: Pardon me if I do not hear you well.
+
+ARDEN: I will not even think you barbarous.
+
+ASTRAEA: I am. I am the object of the chase.
+
+ARDEN: The huntsman draws the wood, then, and not you.
+
+ASTRAEA:        At any instant I am forced to run,
+        Or turn in my defence: how can I be
+        Other than barbarous? You are the cause.
+
+ARDEN: No: heaven that made you beautiful’s the cause.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Say, earth, that gave you instincts. Bring me down
+        To instincts! When by chance I speak awhile
+        With our professor, you appear in haste,
+        Full cry to sight again the missing hare.
+        Away ideas! All that’s divinest flies!
+        I have to bear in mind how young you are.
+
+ARDEN:        You have only to look up to me four years,
+        Instead of forty!
+
+ASTRAEA: Sir?
+
+ARDEN          There’s my misfortune!
+        And worse that, young, I love as a young man.
+        Could I but quench the fire, I might conceal
+        The youthfulness offending you so much.
+
+ASTRAEA: I wish you would. I wish it earnestly.
+
+ARDEN: Impossible. I burn.
+
+ASTRAEA: You should not burn.
+
+ARDEN        ‘Tis more than I. ‘Tis fire. It masters will.
+        You would not say I should not’ if you knew fire.
+        It seizes. It devours.
+
+ASTRAEA: Dry wood.
+
+ARDEN:        Cold wit!
+        How cold you can be! But be cold, for sweet
+        You must be. And your eyes are mine: with them
+        I see myself: unworthy to usurp
+        The place I hold a moment. While I look
+        I have my happiness.
+
+ASTRAEA: You should look higher.
+
+ARDEN:        Through you to the highest. Only through you!
+          Through you
+        The mark I may attain is visible,
+        And I have strength to dream of winning it.
+        You are the bow that speeds the arrow: you
+        The glass that brings the distance nigh. My world
+        Is luminous through you, pure heavenly,
+        But hangs upon the rose’s outer leaf,
+        Not next her heart. Astraea! my own beloved!
+
+ASTRAEA: We may be excellent friends. And I have faults.
+
+ARDEN: Name them: I am hungering for more to love.
+
+ASTRAEA:        I waver very constantly: I have
+        No fixity of feeling or of sight.
+        I have no courage: I can often dream
+        Of daring: when I wake I am in dread.
+        I am inconstant as a butterfly,
+        And shallow as a brook with little fish!
+        Strange little fish, that tempt the small boy’s net,
+        But at a touch straight dive! I am any one’s,
+        And no one’s! I am vain.
+        Praise of my beauty lodges in my ears.
+        The lark reels up with it; the nightingale
+        Sobs bleeding; the flowers nod; I could believe
+        A poet, though he praised me to my face.
+
+ARDEN:        Never had poet so divine a fount
+        To drink of!
+
+ASTRAEA:        Have I given you more to love
+
+ARDEN:        More! You have given me your inner mind,
+        Where conscience in the robes of Justice shoots
+        Light so serenely keen that in such light
+        Fair infants, I newly criminal of earth,’
+        As your friend Osier says, might show some blot.
+        Seraphs might! More to love? Oh! these dear faults
+        Lead you to me like troops of laughing girls
+        With garlands. All the fear is, that you trifle,
+        Feigning them.
+
+ASTRAEA:        For what purpose?
+
+ARDEN:             Can I guess?
+ASTRAEA:
+
+        I think ‘tis you who have the trifler’s note.
+        My hearing is acute, and when you speak,
+        Two voices ring, though you speak fervidly.
+        Your Osier quotation jars. Beware!
+        Why were you absent from our meeting-place
+        This morning?
+
+
+ARDEN:          I was on the way, and met
+        Your uncle Homeware
+
+ASTRAEA: Ah!
+
+ARDEN: He loves you.
+
+ASTRAEA:        He loves me: he has never understood.
+        He loves me as a creature of the flock;
+        A little whiter than some others.
+        Yes; He loves me, as men love; not to uplift;
+        Not to have faith in; not to spiritualize.
+        For him I am a woman and a widow
+        One of the flock, unmarked save by a brand.
+        He said it!--You confess it! You have learnt
+        To share his error, erring fatally.
+
+ARDEN: By whose advice went I to him?
+
+ASTRAEA:               By whose?
+        Pursuit that seemed incessant: persecution.
+        Besides, I have changed since then: I change; I change;
+        It is too true I change. I could esteem
+        You better did you change. And had you heard
+        The noble words this morning from the mouth
+        Of our professor, changed were you, or raised
+        Above love-thoughts, love-talk, and flame and flutter,
+        High as eternal snows. What said he else,
+        My uncle Homeware?
+
+ARDEN:             That you were not free:
+        And that he counselled us to use our wits.
+
+ASTRAEA:        But I am free I free to be ever free!
+        My freedom keeps me free! He counselled us?
+        I am not one in a conspiracy.
+        I scheme no discord with my present life.
+        Who does, I cannot look on as my friend.
+        Not free? You know me little. Were I chained,
+        For liberty I would sell liberty
+        To him who helped me to an hour’s release.
+        But having perfect freedom...
+
+ARDEN: No.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Good sir,
+        You check me?
+
+ARDEN: Perfect freedom?
+
+ASTRAEA: Perfect!
+
+ARDEN: No!
+
+ASTRAEA: Am I awake? What blinds me?
+
+ARDEN:                  Filaments
+        The slenderest ever woven about a brain
+        From the brain’s mists, by the little sprite called
+          Fancy.
+        A breath would scatter them; but that one breath
+        Must come of animation. When the heart
+        Is as, a frozen sea the brain spins webs.
+
+ASTRAEA:        ‘Tis very singular!
+        I understand.
+        You translate cleverly. I hear in verse
+        My uncle Homeware’s prose. He has these notions.
+        Old men presume to read us.
+
+ARDEN:        Young men may.
+        You gaze on an ideal reflecting you
+        Need I say beautiful? Yet it reflects
+        Less beauty than the lady whom I love
+        Breathes, radiates. Look on yourself in me.
+        What harm in gazing? You are this flower
+        You are that spirit. But the spirit fed
+        With substance of the flower takes all its bloom!
+        And where in spirits is the bloom of the flower?
+
+ASTRAEA:        ‘Tis very singular. You have a tone
+        Quite changed.
+
+ARDEN:        You wished a change. To show you, how
+        I read you...
+
+ASTRAEA:        Oh! no, no. It means dissection.
+        I never heard of reading character
+        That did not mean dissection. Spare me that.
+        I am wilful, violent, capricious, weak,
+        Wound in a web of my own spinning-wheel,
+        A star-gazer, a riband in the wind...
+
+ARDEN:        A banner in the wind! and me you lead,
+        And shall! At least, I follow till I win.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Forbear, I do beseech you.
+
+ARDEN:               I have had
+        Your hand in mine.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Once.
+
+ARDEN:               Once!
+        Once! ‘twas; once, was the heart alive,
+        Leaping to break the ice. Oh! once, was aye
+        That laughed at frosty May like spring’s return.
+        Say you are terrorized: you dare not melt.
+        You like me; you might love me; but to dare,
+        Tasks more than courage. Veneration, friends,
+        Self-worship, which is often self-distrust,
+        Bar the good way to you, and make a dream
+        A fortress and a prison.
+
+ASTRAEA:               Changed! you have changed
+        Indeed. When you so boldly seized my hand
+        It seemed a boyish freak, done boyishly.
+        I wondered at Professor Spiral’s choice
+        Of you for an example, and our hope.
+        Now you grow dangerous. You must have thought,
+        And some things true you speak-save ‘terrorized.’
+        It may be flattering to sweet self-love
+        To deem me terrorized.--‘Tis my own soul,
+        My heart, my mind, all that I hold most sacred,
+        Not fear of others, bids me walk aloof.
+        Who terrorizes me? Who could? Friends? Never!
+        The world? as little. Terrorized!
+
+ARDEN:               Forgive me.
+
+ASTRAEA:        I might reply, Respect me. If I loved,
+        If I could be so faithless as to love,
+        Think you I would not rather noise abroad
+        My shame for penitence than let friends dwell
+        Deluded by an image of one vowed
+        To superhuman, who the common mock
+        Of things too human has at heart become.
+
+ARDEN:        You would declare your love?
+
+ASTRAEA:               I said, my shame.
+        The woman that’s the widow is ensnared,
+        Caught in the toils! away with widows!--Oh!
+        I hear men shouting it.
+
+ARDEN:        But shame there’s none
+        For me in loving: therefore I may take
+        Your friends to witness? tell them that my pride
+        Is in the love of you?
+
+ASTRAEA:               ‘Twill soon bring
+        The silence that should be between us two,
+        And sooner give me peace.
+
+ARDEN:        And you consent?
+
+ASTRAEA:        For the sake of peace and silence I consent,
+        You should be warned that you will cruelly
+        Disturb them. But ‘tis best. You should be warned
+        Your pleading will be hopeless. But ‘tis best.
+        You have my full consent. Weigh well your acts,
+        You cannot rest where you have cast this bolt
+        Lay that to heart, and you are cherished, prized,
+        Among them: they are estimable ladies,
+        Warmest of friends; though you may think they soar
+        Too loftily for your measure of strict sense
+        (And as my uncle Homeware’s pupil, sir,
+        In worldliness, you do), just minds they have:
+        Once know them, and your banishment will fret.
+        I would not run such risks. You will offend,
+        Go near to outrage them; and perturbate
+        As they have not deserved of you. But I,
+        Considering I am nothing in the scales
+        You balance, quite and of necessity
+        Consent. When you have weighed it, let me hear.
+        My uncle Homeware steps this way in haste.
+        We have been talking long, and in full view!
+
+                SCENE VII
+
+             ASTRAEA, ARDEN, HOMEWARE
+
+HOMEWARE:        Astraea, child! You, Arden, stand aside.
+        Ay, if she were a maid you might speak first,
+        But being a widow she must find her tongue.
+        Astraea, they await you. State the fact
+        As soon as you are questioned, fearlessly.
+        Open the battle with artillery.
+
+ASTRAEA:        What is the matter, uncle Homeware?
+
+HOMEWARE (playing fox):                  What?
+        Why, we have watched your nice preliminaries
+        From the windows half the evening. Now run in.
+        Their patience has run out, and, as I said,
+        Unlimber and deliver fire at once.
+        Your aunts Virginia and Winifred,
+        With Lady Oldlace, are the senators,
+        The Dame for Dogs. They wear terrific brows,
+        But be not you affrighted, my sweet chick,
+        And tell them uncle Homeware backs your choice,
+        By lawyer and by priests! by altar, fount,
+        And testament!
+
+ASTRAEA:        My choice! what have I chosen?
+
+HOMEWARE:        She asks? You hear her, Arden?--what and whom!
+
+ARDEN:        Surely, sir!... heavens! have you...
+
+HOMEWARE:                  Surely the old fox,
+        In all I have read, is wiser than the young:
+        And if there is a game for fox to play,
+        Old fox plays cunningest.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Why fox? Oh! uncle,
+        You make my heart beat with your mystery;
+        I never did love riddles. Why sit they
+        Awaiting me, and looking terrible?
+
+HOMEWARE:        It is reported of an ancient folk
+        Which worshipped idols, that upon a day
+        Their idol pitched before them on the floor
+
+ASTRAEA:        Was ever so ridiculous a tale!
+
+HOMEWARE        To call the attendant fires to account
+        Their elders forthwith sat...
+
+ASTRAEA:                  Is there no prayer
+        Will move you, uncle Homeware?
+
+HOMEWARE:               God-daughter,
+        This gentleman for you I have proposed
+        As husband.
+
+ASTRAEA:        Arden! we are lost.
+
+ARDEN:                  Astraea!
+        Support him! Though I knew not his design,
+        It plants me in mid-heaven. Would it were
+        Not you, but I to bear the shock. My love!
+        We lost, you cry; you join me with you lost!
+        The truth leaps from your heart: and let it shine
+        To light us on our brilliant battle day
+        And victory
+
+ASTRAEA:        Who betrayed me!
+
+HOMEWARE:               Who betrayed?
+        Your voice, your eyes, your veil, your knife and fork;
+        Your tenfold worship of your widowhood;
+        As he who sees he must yield up the flag,
+        Hugs it oath-swearingly! straw-drowningly.
+        To be reasonable: you sent this gentleman
+        Referring him to me....
+
+ASTRAEA:                    And that is false.
+        All’s false. You have conspired. I am disgraced.
+        But you will learn you have judged erroneously.
+        I am not the frail creature you conceive.
+        Between your vision of life’s aim, and theirs
+        Who presently will question me, I cling
+        To theirs as light: and yours I deem a den
+        Where souls can have no growth.
+
+HOMEWARE:        But when we touched
+        The point of hand-pressings, ‘twas rightly time
+        To think of wedding ties?
+
+ASTRAEA:        Arden, adieu!
+
+          (She rushes into house.)
+
+                SCENE VIII
+
+               ARDEN, HOMEWARE
+
+ARDEN:        Adieu! she said. With her that word is final.
+
+HOMEWARE:        Strange! how young people blowing words like clouds
+        On winds, now fair, now foul, and as they please
+        Should still attach the Fates to them.
+
+ARDEN:               She’s wounded
+        Wounded to the quick!
+
+HOMEWARE:             The quicker our success: for short
+        Of that, these dames, who feel for everything,
+        Feel nothing.
+
+ARDEN:             Your intention has been kind,
+        Dear sir, but you have ruined me.
+
+HOMEWARE:             Good-night. (Going.)
+
+ARDEN:        Yet she said, we are lost, in her surprise.
+
+HOMEWARE:        Good morning. (Returning.)
+
+ARDEN:             I suppose that I am bound
+        (If I could see for what I should be glad!)
+        To thank you, sir.
+
+HOMEWARE:             Look hard but give no thanks.
+        I found my girl descending on the road
+        Of breakneck coquetry, and barred her way.
+        Either she leaps the bar, or she must back.
+        That means she marries you, or says good-bye.
+                    (Going again.)
+
+ARDEN:        Now she’s among them. (Looking at window.)
+
+HOMEWARE:        Now she sees her mind.
+
+ARDEN:        It is my destiny she now decides!
+
+HOMEWARE:        There’s now suspense on earth and round the spheres.
+
+ARDEN:        She’s mine now: mine! or I am doomed to go.
+
+HOMEWARE:        The marriage ring, or the portmanteau now!
+
+ARDEN:        Laugh as you like, air! I am not ashamed
+        To love and own it.
+
+HOMEWARE:        So the symptoms show.
+        Rightly, young man, and proving a good breed.
+        To further it’s a duty to mankind
+        And I have lent my push, But recollect:
+        Old Ilion was not conquered in a day.
+                  (He enters house.)
+
+ARDEN:        Ten years! If I may win her at the end!
+
+                 CURTAIN
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A great oration may be a sedative
+     A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle
+     Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below
+     As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos
+     Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
+     Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite
+     Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality
+     His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody
+     I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate
+     I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe
+     I who respect the state of marriage by refusing
+     Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy
+     Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife
+     Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant
+     Pitiful conceit in men
+     Rejoicing they have in their common agreement
+     Self-worship, which is often self-distrust
+     Suspects all young men and most young women
+     Their idol pitched before them on the floor
+     Were I chained,  For liberty I would sell liberty
+     Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man
+     Your devotion craves an enormous exchange
+
+
+
+
+MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY’S “THE FOUR GEORGES”
+      A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE.
+     CONCESSION TO THE CELT.
+     LESLIE STEPHEN.
+     CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE
+    ‘MORNING POST’ FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY’S “THE FOUR GEORGES”
+
+
+WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta, July 18, 1811, the
+only child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray. He received the main part of
+his education at the Charterhouse, as we know to our profit. Thence he
+passed to Cambridge, remaining there from February 1829 to sometime
+in 1830. To judge by quotations and allusions, his favourite of the
+classics was Horace, the chosen of the eighteenth century, and generally
+the voice of its philosophy in a prosperous country. His voyage from
+India gave him sight of Napoleon on the rocky island. In his young
+manhood he made his bow reverentially to Goethe of Weimar; which did not
+check his hand from setting its mark on the sickliness of Werther.
+
+He was built of an extremely impressionable nature and a commanding
+good sense. He was in addition a calm observer, having ‘the harvest of a
+quiet eye.’ Of this combination with the flood of subjects brought up
+to judgement in his mind, came the prevalent humour, the enforced
+disposition to satire, the singular critical drollery, notable in his
+works. His parodies, even those pushed to burlesque, are an expression
+of criticism and are more effective than the serious method, while they
+rarely overstep the line of justness. The Novels by Eminent Hands do not
+pervert the originals they exaggerate. ‘Sieyes an abbe, now a ferocious
+lifeguardsman,’ stretches the face of the rollicking Irish novelist
+without disfeaturing him; and the mysterious visitor to the palatial
+mansion in Holywell Street indicates possibilities in the Oriental
+imagination of the eminent statesman who stooped to conquer fact
+through fiction. Thackeray’s attitude in his great novels is that of the
+composedly urbane lecturer, on a level with a select audience, assured
+of interesting, above requirements to excite. The slow movement of the
+narrative has a grace of style to charm like the dance of the Minuet de
+la Cour: it is the limpidity of Addison flavoured with salt of a racy
+vernacular; and such is the veri-similitude and the dialogue that they
+might seem to be heard from the mouths of living speakers. When in this
+way the characters of Vanity Fair had come to growth, their author was
+rightly appreciated as one of the creators in our literature, he took at
+once the place he will retain. With this great book and with Esmond and
+The Newcomes, he gave a name eminent, singular, and beloved to English
+fiction.
+
+Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists, Thackeray had to
+bear with them. The social world he looked at did not show him heroes,
+only here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate in
+the unhysterical way of an English father patting a son on the head.
+He described his world as an accurate observer saw it, he could not be
+dishonest. Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer at
+humanity. He was driven to the satirical task by the scenes about him.
+There must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike. The
+stroke is weakened and art violated when he comes to the front. But he
+will always be pressing forward, and Thackeray restrained him as much as
+could be done, in the manner of a good-humoured constable. Thackeray may
+have appeared cynical to the devout by keeping him from a station in
+the pulpit among congregations of the many convicted sinners. That the
+moralist would have occupied it and thundered had he presented us with
+the Fourth of the Georges we see when we read of his rejecting the
+solicitations of so seductive a personage for the satiric rod.
+
+Himself one of the manliest, the kindliest of human creatures, it was
+the love of his art that exposed him to misinterpretation. He did stout
+service in his day. If the bad manners he scourged are now lessened to
+some degree we pay a debt in remembering that we owe much to him, and if
+what appears incurable remains with us, a continued reading of his works
+will at least help to combat it.
+
+
+
+
+A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE--1886
+
+Our ‘Eriniad,’ or ballad epic of the enfranchisement of the sister
+island is closing its first fytte for the singer, and with such result
+as those Englishmen who have some knowledge of their fellows foresaw.
+There are sufficient reasons why the Tories should always be able
+to keep together, but let them have the credit of cohesiveness and
+subordination to control. Though working for their own ends, they won
+the esteem of their allies, which will count for them in the struggles
+to follow. Their leaders appear to have seen what has not been
+distinctly perceptible to the opposite party--that the break up of the
+Liberals means the defection of the old Whigs in permanence, heralding
+the establishment of a powerful force against Radicalism, with a capital
+cry to the country. They have tactical astuteness. If they seem rather
+too proud of their victory, it is merely because, as becomes them, they
+do not look ahead. To rejoice in the gaining of a day, without having
+clear views of the morrow, is puerile enough. Any Tory victory, it may
+be said, is little more than a pause in the strife, unless when the
+Radical game is played ‘to dish the Whigs,’ and the Tories are now fast
+bound down by their incorporation of the latter to abstain from the
+violent springs and right-about-facings of the Derby-Disraeli period.
+They are so heavily weighted by the new combination that their
+Jack-in-the-box, Lord Randolph, will have to stand like an ordinary
+sentinel on duty, and take the measurement of his natural size. They
+must, on the supposition of their entry into office, even to satisfy
+their own constituents, produce a scheme. Their majority in the House
+will command it.
+
+To this extent, then, Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated. The question
+set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible
+matter has gone to ashes. But personally he meets a sharp rebuff. The
+Tories may well raise hurrahs over that. Radicals have to admit it,
+and point to the grounds of it. Between a man’s enemies and his friends
+there comes out a rough painting of his character, not without a
+resemblance to the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate
+historical touch to particular features. On the one side he is abused as
+‘the one-man power’; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition
+of the popular will. One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march
+dictatorially, and full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step
+a misreading of the will of the English people. He went forth on this
+campaign, with the finger of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against
+him a second time. Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too,
+the fatal tendency to the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of
+Jove big with Minerva. He perceived the necessity, and the issue of the
+necessity; clearly defined what must come, and, with a higher motive
+than the vanity with which his enemies charge him, though not with such
+high counsel as Wisdom at his ear, fell to work on it alone, produced
+the whole Bill alone, and then handed it to his Cabinet to digest, too
+much in love with the thing he had laid and incubated to permit of any
+serious dismemberment of its frame. Hence the disruption. He worked
+for the future, produced a Bill for the future, and is wrecked in the
+present. Probably he can work in no other way than from the impulse of
+his enthusiasm, solitarily. It is a way of making men overweeningly in
+love with their creations. The consequence is likely to be that Ireland
+will get her full measure of justice to appease her cravings earlier
+than she would have had as much from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at
+a cost both to her and to England. Meanwhile we are to have a House of
+Commons incapable of conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom
+the Times addressed pathetic condolences on the loss of their season
+will lose more than one; and we shall be made sensible that we have an
+enemy in our midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of
+their native generosity to put trust in the most generous race on earth.
+
+
+
+
+CONCESSION TO THE CELT--1886
+
+Things are quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust
+into it. Mr. Gladstone’s Bill for helping to the wiser government
+of Ireland has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in
+traversing counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that
+deals roughly with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything
+less violently impressive would have roused industrious England to take
+this question at last into the mind, as a matter for settlement.
+The Liberal leader has driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a
+pedestrian demagogue, some think; certainly to the discomposure of the
+comfortable and the myopely busy, who prefer to live on with a disease
+in the frame rather than at all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce
+a positive electoral negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd
+years of our domestic perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and
+odd members pledged for Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries
+regarding measures--short of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer
+from sniffing the vain incense of that word practical, is contempt of
+prevision! Many of the measures now being proposed responsively to the
+fretful cry for them, as a better alternative to correction by force
+of arms, are sound and just. Ten years back, or at a more recent period
+before Mr. Parnell’s triumph in the number of his followers, they
+would have formed a basis for the appeasement of the troubled land.
+The institution of county boards, the abolition of the detested Castle,
+something like the establishment of a Royal residence in Dublin, would
+have begun the work well. Materially and sentimentally, they were the
+right steps to take. They are now proposed too late. They are regarded
+as petty concessions, insufficient and vexatious. The lower and the
+higher elements in the population are fused by the enthusiasm of men who
+find themselves marching in full body on a road, under a flag, at the
+heels of a trusted leader; and they will no longer be fed with sops.
+Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied; they prick
+an appetite, they do not close breaches. If our object is, as we hear
+it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to give them the Parliament
+their leader demands. It might once have been much less; it may be
+worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate wrestling, for still more.
+Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of forethought. Mr. Parnell’s
+terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone’s Bill, to which he and his band
+have subscribed. The one point for him is the statutory Parliament, so
+that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and standing before the world
+as representative of his country, he addresses an applausive audience
+when he cites the total failure of England to do that business of
+government, as at least a logical reason for the claim. England has
+confessedly failed; the world says it, the country admits it. We
+have failed, and not because the so-called Saxon is incapable of
+understanding the Celt, but owing to our system, suitable enough to us,
+of rule by Party, which puts perpetually a shifting hand upon the reins,
+and invites the clamour it has to allay. The Irish--the English too in
+some degree--have been taught that roaring; in its various forms, is the
+trick to open the ears of Ministers. We have encouraged by irritating
+them to practise it, until it has become a habit, an hereditary
+profession with them. Ministers in turn have defensively adopted the
+arts of beguilement, varied by an exercise of the police. We grew
+accustomed to periods of Irish fever. The exhaustion ensuing we named
+tranquillity, and hoped that it would bear fruit. But we did not plant.
+The Party in office directed its attention to what was uppermost and
+urgent--to that which kicked them. Although we were living, by common
+consent; with a disease in the frame, eruptive at intervals, a national
+disfigurement always a danger, the Ministerial idea of arresting it
+for the purpose of healing was confined, before the passing of Mr.
+Gladstone’s well-meant Land Bill, to the occasional despatch of
+commissions; and, in fine, we behold through History the Irish malady
+treated as a form of British constitutional gout. Parliament touched
+on the Irish only when the Irish were active as a virus. Our later
+alternations of cajolery and repression bear painful resemblance to the
+nervous fit of rickety riders compounding with their destinations that
+they may keep their seats. The cajolery was foolish, if an end was in
+view; the repression inefficient. To repress efficiently we have to
+stifle a conscience accusing us of old injustice, and forget that we are
+sworn to freedom. The cries that we have been hearing for Cromwell or
+for Bismarck prove the existence of an impatient faction in our midst
+fitter to wear the collars of those masters whom they invoke than to
+drop a vote into the ballot-box. As for the prominent politicians
+who have displaced their rivals partly on the strength of an implied
+approbation of those cries, we shall see how they illumine the councils
+of a governing people. They are wiser than the barking dogs. Cromwell
+and Bismarck are great names; but the harrying of Ireland did not settle
+it, and to Germanize a Posen and call it peace will find echo only in
+the German tongue. Posen is the error of a master-mind too much given to
+hammer at obstacles. He has, however, the hammer. Can it be imagined
+in English hands? The braver exemplar for grappling with monstrous
+political tasks is Cavour, and he would not have hinted at the iron
+method or the bayonet for a pacification. Cavour challenged debate; he
+had faith in the active intellect, and that is the thing to be prayed
+for by statesmen who would register permanent successes. The Irish,
+it is true, do not conduct an argument coolly. Mr. Parnell and his
+eighty-five have not met the Conservative leader and his following in
+the Commons with the gravity of platonic disputants. But they have
+a logical position, equivalent to the best of arguments. They are
+representatives, they would say, of a country admittedly ill-governed by
+us; and they have accepted the Bill of the defeated Minister as final.
+Its provisions are their terms of peace. They offer in return for that
+boon to take the burden we have groaned under off our hands. If we
+answer that we think them insincere, we accuse these thrice accredited
+representatives of the Irish people of being hypocrites and crafty
+conspirators; and numbers in England, affected by the weapons they have
+used to get to their present strength, do think it; forgetful that
+our obtuseness to their constant appeals forced them into the extremer
+shifts of agitation. Yet it will hardly be denied that these men love
+Ireland; and they have not shown themselves by their acts to be insane.
+To suppose them conspiring for separation indicates a suspicion that
+they have neither hearts nor heads. For Ireland, separation is immediate
+ruin. It would prove a very short sail for these conspirators before the
+ship went down. The vital necessity of the Union for both, countries,
+obviously for the weaker of the two, is known to them; and unless we
+resume our exasperation of the wild fellow the Celt can be made by such
+a process, we have not rational grounds for treating him, or treating
+with him, as a Bedlamite. He has besides his passions shrewd sense; and
+his passions may be rightly directed by benevolent attraction. This is
+language derided by the victorious enemy; it speaks nevertheless what
+the world, and even troubled America, thinks of the Irish Celt. More of
+it now on our side of the Channel would be serviceable. The notion that
+he hates the English comes of his fevered chafing against the harness of
+England, and when subject to his fevers, he is unrestrained in his cries
+and deeds. That pertains to the nature of him. Of course, if we have no
+belief in the virtues of friendliness and confidence--none in regard to
+the Irishman--we show him his footing, and we challenge the issue.
+For the sole alternative is distinct antagonism, a form of war. Mr.
+Gladstone’s Bill has brought us to that definite line. Ireland having
+given her adhesion to it, swearing that she does so in good faith,
+and will not accept a smaller quantity, peace is only to be had by our
+placing trust in the Irish; we trust them or we crush them. Intermediate
+ways are but the prosecution of our ugly flounderings in Bogland; and
+dubious as we see the choice on either side, a decisive step to right or
+left will not show us to the world so bemired, to ourselves so miserably
+inefficient, as we appear in this session of a new Parliament. With his
+eighty-five, apart from external operations lawful or not, Mr. Parnell
+can act as a sort of lumbricus in the House. Let journalists watch and
+chronicle events: if Mr. Gladstone has humour, they will yet note a
+peculiar smile on his closed mouth from time to time when the alien body
+within the House, from which, for the sake of its dignity and ability to
+conduct its affairs, he would have relieved it till the day of a
+warmer intelligence between Irish and English, paralyzes our machinery
+business. An ably-handled coherent body in the midst of the liquid
+groups will make it felt that Ireland is a nation, naturally dependent
+though she must be. We have to do with forces in politics, and the great
+majority of the Irish Nationalists in Ireland has made them a force.
+
+No doubt Mr. Matthew Arnold is correct in his apprehensions of the
+dangers we may fear from a Dublin House of Commons. The declarations
+and novel or ultra theories might almost be written down beforehand.
+I should, for my part, anticipate a greater danger in the familiar
+attitude of the English metropolitan Press and public toward an
+experiment they dislike and incline to dread:--the cynical comments, the
+quotations between inverted commas, the commiserating shrug, cold irony,
+raw banter, growl of menace, sharp snap, rounds of laughter. Frenchmen
+of the Young Republic, not presently appreciated as offensive, have had
+some of these careless trifles translated for them, and have been stung.
+We favoured Germany with them now and then, before Germany became the
+first power in Europe. Before America had displayed herself as greatest
+among the giants that do not go to pieces, she had, as Americans
+forgivingly remember, without mentioning, a series of flicks of the
+whip. It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us.
+There are various ways for tripping the experiment. Nevertheless, when
+the experiment is tried, considering that our welfare is involved in its
+not failing, as we have failed, we should prepare to start it cordially,
+cordially assist it. Thoughtful political minds regard the measure as a
+backward step; yet conceiving but a prospect that a measure accepted by
+Home Rulers will possibly enable the Irish and English to step
+together, it seems better worth the venture than to pursue a course of
+prospectless discord! Whatever we do or abstain from doing has now its
+evident dangers, and this being imminent may appear the larger of
+them; but if a weighing of the conditions dictates it, and conscience
+approves, the wiser proceeding is to make trial of the untried. Our
+outlook was preternaturally black, with enormous increase of dangers
+when the originator of our species venturesomely arose from the posture
+of the ‘quatre pattes’. We consider that we have not lost by his
+temerity. In states of dubitation under impelling elements, the instinct
+pointing to courageous action is, besides the manlier, conjecturably the
+right one.
+
+
+
+
+LESLIE STEPHEN--1904
+
+When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians, the Sunday
+Tramps, were on the march, with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there was
+conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a
+benefaction to the country. A pause to it came at the examination of
+the leader’s watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void
+was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train
+offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over
+ditches and fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under
+suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight. The
+chief of the Tramps had a wonderful calculating eye in the observation
+of distances and the nature of the land, as he proved by his discovery
+of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy
+followers. I have often said of this life-long student and philosophical
+head that he had in him the making of a great military captain. He would
+not have been opposed to the profession of arms if he had been captured
+early for the service, notwithstanding his abomination of bloodshed.
+He had a high, calm courage, was unperturbed in a dubious position, and
+would confidently take the way out of it which he conceived to be the
+better. We have not to deplore that he was diverted from the ways of
+a soldier, though England, as the country has been learning of late,
+cannot boast of many in uniform who have capacity for leadership. His
+work in literature will be reviewed by his lieutenant of Tramps, one
+of the ablest of writers!--[Frederic W. Maitland.]--The memory of it
+remains with us, as being the profoundest and the most sober criticism
+we have had in our time. The only sting in it was an inoffensive
+humorous irony that now and then stole out for a roll over, like a furry
+cub, or the occasional ripple on a lake in grey weather. We have nothing
+left that is like it.
+
+One might easily fall into the pit of panegyric by an enumeration of his
+qualities, personal and literary. It would not be out of harmony with
+the temper and characteristics of a mind so equable. He, the equable,
+whether in condemnation or eulogy. Our loss of such a man is great, for
+work was in his brain, and the hand was active till close upon the time
+when his breathing ceased. The loss to his friends can be replaced only
+by an imagination that conjures him up beside them. That will be no task
+to those who have known him well enough to see his view of things
+as they are, and revive his expression of it. With them he will live
+despite the word farewell.
+
+
+
+
+CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY
+
+LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE MORNING POST FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY FROM
+OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT
+
+FERRARA, June 22, 1866.
+
+Before this letter reaches London the guns will have awakened both the
+echo of the old river Po and the classical Mincio. The whole of the
+troops, about 110,000 men, with which Cialdini intends to force the
+passage of the first-named river are already massed along the right
+bank of the Po, anxiously waiting that the last hour of to-morrow should
+strike, and that the order for action should be given. The telegraph
+will have already informed your readers that, according to the
+intimation sent by General Lamarmora on Tuesday evening to the Austrian
+headquarters, the three days fixed by the general’s message before
+beginning hostilities will expire at twelve p.m. of the 23rd of June.
+
+Cialdini’s headquarters have been established in this city since
+Wednesday morning, and the famous general, in whom the fourth corps
+he commands, and the whole of the nation, has so much confidence, has
+concentrated the whole of his forces within a comparatively narrow
+compass, and is ready for action. I believe therefore that by to-morrow
+the right bank of the Po will be connected with the mainland of the
+Polesine by several pontoon bridges, which will enable Cialdini’s corps
+d’armee to cross the river, and, as everybody here hopes, to cross it in
+spite of any defence the Austrians may make.
+
+On my way to this ancient city last evening I met General Cadogan and
+two superior Prussian officers, who by this time must have joined Victor
+Emmanuel’s headquarters at Cremona; if not, they have been by this
+time transferred elsewhere, more on the front, towards the line of the
+Mincio, on which, according to appearance, the first, second, and third
+Italian corps d’armee seem destined to operate. The English general
+and the two Prussian officers above mentioned are to follow the king’s
+staff, the first as English commissioner, the superior in rank of the
+two others in the same capacity.
+
+I have been told here that, before leaving Bologna, Cialdini held a
+general council of the commanders of the seven divisions of which his
+powerful corps d’armee is formed, and that he told them that, in spite
+of the forces the enemy has massed on the left bank of the Po, between
+the point which faces Stellata and Rovigo, the river must be crossed
+by his troops, whatever might be the sacrifice this important operation
+requires. Cialdini is a man who knows how to keep his word, and, for
+this reason, I have no doubt he will do what he has already made up his
+mind to accomplish. I am therefore confident that before two or three
+days have elapsed, these 110,000 Italian troops, or a great part of
+them, will have trod, for the Italians, the sacred land of Venetia.
+
+Once the river Po crossed by Cialdini’s corps d’armee, he will boldly
+enter the Polesine and make himself master of the road which leads
+by Rovigo towards Este and Padua. A glance at the map will show your
+readers how, at about twenty or thirty miles from the first-mentioned
+town, a chain of hills, called the Colli Euganei, stretches itself from
+the last spur of the Julian Alps, in the vicinity of Vicenza, gently
+sloping down towards the sea. As this line affords good positions for
+contesting the advance of an army crossing the Po at Lago Scuro, or at
+any other point not far from it, it is to be supposed that the Austrians
+will make a stand there, and I should not be surprised at all that
+Cialdini’s first battle, if accepted by the enemy, should take place
+within that comparatively narrow ground which is within Montagnana,
+Este, Terradura, Abano, and Padua. It is impossible to suppose that
+Cialdini’s corps d’armee, being so large, is destined to cross the Po
+only at one point of the river below its course: it is extremely likely
+that part of it should cross it at some point above, between Revere and
+Stellata, where the river is in two or three instances only 450 metres
+wide. Were the Italian general to be successful--protected as he will
+be by the tremendous fire of the powerful artillery he disposes of--in
+these twofold operations, the Austrians defending the line of the Colli
+Euganei could be easily outflanked by the Italian troops, who would
+have crossed the river below Lago Scuro. Of course these are mere
+suppositions, for nobody, as you may imagine, except the king, Cialdini
+himself, Lamarmora, Pettiti, and Menabrea, is acquainted with the
+plan of the forthcoming campaign. There was a rumour at Cialdini’s
+headquarters to-day that the Austrians had gathered in great numbers
+in the Polesine, and especially at Rovigo, a small town which they
+have strongly fortified of late, with an apparent design to oppose the
+crossing of the Po, were Cialdini to attempt it at or near Lago Scuro.
+There are about Rovigo large tracts of marshes and fields cut by ditches
+and brooks, which, though owing to the dryness of the season [they]
+cannot be, as it was generally believed two weeks ago, easily inundated,
+yet might well aid the operations the Austrians may undertake in order
+to check the advance of the Italian fourth corps d’armee. The resistance
+to the undertaking of Cialdini may be, on the part of the Austrians,
+very stout, but I am almost certain that it will be overcome by the
+ardour of Italian troops, and by the skill of their illustrious leader.
+
+As I told you above, the declaration of war was handed over to an
+Austrian major for transmission to Count Stancowick, the Austrian
+governor of Mantua, on the evening of the 19th, by Colonel Bariola,
+sous-chef of the general staff, who was accompanied by the Duke Luigi
+of Sant’ Arpino, the husband of the amiable widow of Lord Burghersh.
+The duke is the eldest son of Prince San Teodoro, one of the wealthiest
+noblemen of Naples. In spite of his high position and of his family
+ties, the Duke of Sant’ Arpino, who is well known in London fashionable
+society, entered as a volunteer in the Italian army, and was appointed
+orderly officer to General Lamarmora. The choice of such a gentleman
+for the mission I am speaking of was apparently made with intention,
+in order to show the Austrians, that the Neapolitan nobility is as much
+interested in the national movement as the middle and lower classes of
+the Kingdom, once so fearfully misruled by the Bourbons. The Duke of
+Sant’ Arpino is not the only Neapolitan nobleman who has enlisted in the
+Italian army since the war with Austria broke out. In order to show
+you the importance which must be given to this pronunciamiento of the
+Neapolitan noblemen, allow me to give you here a short list of the names
+of those of them who have enlisted as private soldiers in the cavalry
+regiments of the regular army: The Duke of Policastro; the Count of
+Savignano Guevara, the eldest son of the Duke of Bovino; the Duke d’Ozia
+d’Angri, who had emigrated in 1860, and returned to Naples six months
+ago; Marquis Rivadebro Serra; Marquis Pisicelli, whose family had left
+Naples in 1860 out of devotion to Francis II.; two Carraciolos, of the
+historical family from which sprung the unfortunate Neapolitan admiral
+of this name, whose head Lord Nelson would have done better not to
+have sacrificed to the cruelty of Queen Caroline; Prince Carini, the
+representative of an illustrious family of Sicily, a nephew of the
+Marquis del Vasto; and Pescara, a descendant of that great general
+of Charles V., to whom the proud Francis I. of France was obliged to
+surrender and give up his sword at the battle of Pavia. Besides these
+Neapolitan noblemen who have enlisted of late as privates, the Italian
+army now encamped on the banks of the Po and of the Mincio may boast of
+two Colonnas, a prince of Somma, two Barons Renzi, an Acquaviva, of the
+Duke of Atri, two Capece, two Princes Buttera, etc. To return to the
+mission of Colonel Bariola and the Duke of Sant’ Arpino, I will add some
+details which were told me this morning by a gentleman who left
+Cremona yesterday evening, and who had them from a reliable source. The
+messenger of General Lamarmora had been directed to proceed from Cremona
+to the small village of Le Grazie, which, on the line of the Mincio,
+marks the Austrian and Italian frontier.
+
+On the right bank of the Lake of Mantua, in the year 1340, stood a small
+chapel containing a miraculous painting of the Madonna, called by the
+people of the locality ‘Santa Maria delle Grazie.’ The boatmen and
+fishermen of the Mincio, who had been, as they said, often saved from
+certain death by the Madonna--as famous in those days as the modern
+Lady of Rimini, celebrated for the startling feat of winking her
+eyes--determined to erect for her a more worthy abode.
+
+Hence arose the Santuario delle Grazie. Here, as at Loretto and other
+holy localities of Italy, a fair is held, in which, amongst a great
+number of worldly things, rosaries, holy images, and other miraculous
+objects are sold, and astounding boons are said to be secured at the
+most trifling expense. The Santuario della Madonna delle Grazie enjoying
+a far-spread reputation, the dumb, deaf, blind, and halt-in short,
+people afflicted with all sorts of infirmities--flock thither during the
+fair, and are not wanting even on the other days of the year. The church
+of Le Grazie is one of the most curious of Italy. Not that there is
+anything remarkable in its architecture, for it is an Italian Gothic
+structure of the simplest style. But the ornamental part of the interior
+is most peculiar. The walls of the building are covered with a double
+row of wax statues, of life size, representing a host of warriors,
+cardinals, bishops, kings, and popes, who--as the story runs--pretended
+to have received some wonderful grace during their earthly existence.
+Amongst the grand array of illustrious personages, there are not a few
+humbler individuals whose history is faithfully told (if you choose to
+credit it) by the painted inscriptions below. There is even a convict,
+who, at the moment of being hanged, implored succour of the all-powerful
+Madonna, whereupon the beam of the gibbet instantly broke, and the
+worthy individual was restored to society--a very doubtful benefit after
+all. On Colonel Bariola and the Duke of Sant’ Arpino arriving at this
+place, which is only five miles distant from Mantua, their carriage was
+naturally stopped by the commissaire of the Austrian police, whose duty
+was to watch the frontier. Having told him that they had a despatch to
+deliver either to the military governor of Mantua or to some officer
+sent by him to receive it, the commissaire at once despatched a mounted
+gendarme to Mantua. Two hours had scarcely elapsed when a carriage drove
+into the village of Le Grazie, from which an Austrian major of infantry
+alighted and hastened to a wooden hut where the two Italian officers
+were waiting. Colonel Bariola, who was trained in the Austrian military
+school of Viller Nashstad, and regularly left the Austrian service in
+1848, acquainted the newly-arrived major with his mission, which was
+that of delivering the sealed despatch to the general in command
+of Mantua and receiving for it a regular receipt. The despatch was
+addressed to the Archduke Albert, commander-in-chief of the Austrian
+army of the South, care of the governor of Mantua. After the major had
+delivered the receipt, the three messengers entered into a courteous
+conversation, during which Colonel Bariola seized an opportunity
+of presenting the duke, purposely laying stress on the fact of his
+belonging to one of the most illustrious families of Naples. It happened
+that the Austrian major had also been trained in the same school where
+Colonel Bariola was brought up--a circumstance of which he was reminded
+by the Austrian officer himself. Three hours had scarcely elapsed from
+the arrival of the two Italian messengers of war at Le Grazie, on the
+Austrian frontier, when they were already on their way back to the
+headquarters of Cremona, where during the night the rumour was current
+that a telegram had been received by Lamarmora from Verona, in which
+Archduke Albert accepted the challenge. Victor Emmanuel, whom I saw at
+Bologna yesterday, arrived at Cremona in the morning at two o’clock, but
+by this time his Majesty’s headquarters must have removed more towards
+the front, in the direction of the Oglio. I should not be at all
+surprised were the Italian headquarters to be established by to-morrow
+either at Piubega or Gazzoldo, if not actually at Goito, a village, as
+you know, which marks the Italian-Austrian frontier on the Mincio. The
+whole of the first, second, and third Italian corps d’armee are by this
+time concentrated within that comparatively narrow space which lies
+between the position of Castiglione, Delle Stiviere, Lorrato, and
+Desenzano, on the Lake of Garda, and Solferino on one side; Piubega,
+Gazzoldo, Sacca, Goito, and Castellucchio on the other. Are these three
+corps d’armee to attack when they hear the roar of Cialdini’s artillery
+on the right bank of the Po? Are they destined to force the passage
+of the Mincio either at Goito or at Borghetto? or are they destined to
+invest Verona, storm Peschiera, and lay siege to Mantua? This is more
+than I can tell you, for, I repeat it, the intentions of the
+Italian leaders are enveloped in a veil which nobody--the Austrians
+included--has as yet been able to penetrate. One thing, however, is
+certain, and it is this, that as the clock of Victor Emmanuel marks
+the last minute of the seventy-second hour fixed by the declaration
+delivered at Le Grazie on Wednesday by Colonel Bariola to the Austrian
+major, the fair land where Virgil was born and Tasso was imprisoned will
+be enveloped by a thick cloud of the smoke of hundreds and hundreds of
+cannon. Let us hope that God will be in favour of right and justice,
+which, in this imminent and fierce struggle, is undoubtedly on the
+Italian side.
+
+CREMONA, June 30, 1866.
+
+The telegraph will have already informed you of the concentration of the
+Italian army, whose headquarters have since Tuesday been removed from
+Redondesco to Piadena, the king having chosen the adjacent villa of
+Cigognolo for his residence. The concentrating movements of the royal
+army began on the morning of the 27th, i.e., three days after the bloody
+fait d’armes of the 24th, which, narrated and commented on in different
+manners according to the interests and passions of the narrators, still
+remains for many people a mystery. At the end of this letter you will
+see that I quote a short phrase with which an Austrian major, now
+prisoner of war, portrayed the results of the fierce struggle fought
+beyond the Mincio. This officer is one of the few survivors of a
+regiment of Austrian volunteers, uhlans, two squadrons of which he
+himself commanded. The declaration made by this officer was thoroughly
+explicit, and conveys the exact idea of the valour displayed by the
+Italians in that terrible fight. Those who incline to overrate the
+advantages obtained by the Austrians on Sunday last must not forget that
+if Lamarmora had thought proper to persist in holding the positions of
+Valeggio, Volta, and Goito, the Austrians could not have prevented him.
+It seems the Austrian general-in-chief shared this opinion, for, after
+his army had carried with terrible sacrifices the positions of Monte
+Vento and Custozza, it did not appear, nor indeed did the Austrians
+then give any signs, that they intended to adopt a more active system of
+warfare. It is the business of a commander to see that after a victory
+the fruit of it should not be lost, and for this reason the enemy is
+pursued and molested, and time is not left him for reorganization.
+Nothing of this happened after the 24th--nothing has been done by the
+Austrians to secure such results. The frontier which separates the two
+dominions is now the same as it was on the eve of the declaration of
+war. At Goito, at Monzambano, and in the other villages of the extreme
+frontier, the Italian authorities are still discharging their duties.
+Nothing is changed in those places, were we to except that now and then
+an Austrian cavalry party suddenly makes its appearance, with the only
+object of watching the movements of the Italian army. One of these
+parties, formed by four squadrons of the Wurtemberg hussar regiment,
+having advanced at six o’clock this morning on the right bank of the
+Mincio, met the fourth squadron of the Italian lancers of Foggia and
+were beaten back, and compelled to retire in disorder towards Goito and
+Rivolta. In this unequal encounter the Italian lancers distinguished
+themselves very much, made some Austrian hussars prisoners, and killed a
+few more, amongst whom was an officer. The same state of thing, prevails
+at Rivottella, a small village on the shores of the Lake of Garda, about
+four miles distant from the most advanced fortifications of Peschiera.
+There, as elsewhere, some Austrian parties advanced with the object of
+watching the movements of the Garibaldians, who occupy the hilly ground,
+which from Castiglione, Eseuta, and Cartel Venzago stretches to Lonato,
+Salo, and Desenzano, and to the mountain passes of Caffaro. In the
+last-named place the Garibaldians came to blows with the Austrians on
+the morning of the 28th, and the former got the best of the fray. Had
+the fait d’armes of the 24th, or the battle of Custozza, as Archduke
+Albrecht calls it, been a great victory for the Austrians, why should
+the imperial army remain in such inaction? The only conclusion we must
+come to is simply this, that the Austrian losses have been such as
+to induce the commander-in-chief of the army to act prudently on the
+defensive. We are now informed that the charges of cavalry which
+the Austrian lancers and the Hungarian hussars had to sustain near
+Villafranca on the 24th with the Italian horsemen of the Aorta and
+Alessandria regiments have been so fatal to the former that a whole
+division of the Kaiser cavalry must be reorganised before it can be
+brought into the field main.
+
+The regiment of Haller hussars and two of volunteer uhlans were almost
+destroyed in that terrible charge. To give you an idea of this cavalry
+encounter, it is sufficient to say that Colonel Vandoni, at the head of
+the Aorta regiment he commands, charged fourteen times during the short
+period of four hours. The volunteer uhlans of the Kaiser regiment had
+already given up the idea of breaking through the square formed by the
+battalion, in the centre of which stood Prince Humbert of Savoy,
+when they were suddenly charged and literally cut to pieces by the
+Alessandria light cavalry, in spite of the long lances they carried.
+This weapon and the loose uniform they wear makes them resemble the
+Cossacks of the Don. There is one circumstance, which, if I am not
+mistaken, has not as yet been published by the newspapers, and it
+is this. There was a fight on the 25th on a place at the north of
+Roverbella, between the Italian regiment of Novara cavalry and a
+regiment of Hungarian hussars, whose name is not known. This regiment
+was so thoroughly routed by the Italians that it was pursued as far as
+Villafranca, and had two squadrons put hors de combat, whilst the Novara
+regiment only lost twenty-four mounted men. I think it right to mention
+this, for it proves that, the day after the bloody affair of the
+24th, the Italian army had still a regiment of cavalry operating at
+Villafranca, a village which lay at a distance of fifteen kilometres
+from the Italian frontier. A report, which is much accredited here,
+explains how the Italian army did not derive the advantages it might
+have derived from the action of the 24th. It appears that the orders
+issued from the Italian headquarters during the previous night, and
+especially the verbal instructions given by Lamarmora and Pettiti to
+the staff officers of the different army corps, were either forgotten or
+misunderstood by those officers. Those sent to Durando, the commander
+of the first corps, seem to have been as follows: That he should have
+marched in the direction of Castelnuovo, without, however, taking part
+in the action. Durando, it is generally stated, had strictly adhered to
+the orders sent from the headquarters, but it seems that General
+Cerale understood them too literally. Having been ordered to march on
+Castelnuovo, and finding the village strongly held by the Austrians, who
+received his division with a tremendous fire, he at once engaged in the
+action instead of falling back on the reserve of the first corps and
+waiting new instructions. If such was really the case, it is evident
+that Cerale thought that the order to march which he had received
+implied that he was to attack and get possession of Castelnuovo, had
+this village, as it really was, already been occupied by the enemy. In
+mentioning this fact I feel bound to observe that I write it under the
+most complete reserve, for I should be sorry indeed to charge General
+Cerale with having misunderstood such an important order.
+
+I see that one of your leading contemporaries believes that it would be
+impossible for the king or Lamarmora to say what result they expected
+from their ill-conceived and worse-executed attempt. The result they
+expected is, I think, clear enough; they wanted to break through the
+quadrilateral and make their junction with Cialdini, who was ready
+to cross the Po during the night of the 24th. That the attempt was
+ill-conceived and worse-executed, neither your contemporary nor the
+public at large has, for the present, the right to conclude, for no one
+knows as yet but imperfectly the details of the terrible fight. What is
+certain, however, is that General Durando, perceiving that the Cerale
+division was lost, did all that he could to help it. Failing in this he
+turned to his two aides-de-camp and coolly said to them:
+
+‘Now, gentlemen, it is time for you to retire, for I have a duty to
+perform which is a strictly personal one--the duty of dying.’ On saying
+these words he galloped to the front and placed himself at about twenty
+paces from a battalion of Austrian sharp-shooters which were ascending
+the hill. In less than five minutes his horse was killed under him,
+and he was wounded in the right hand. I scarcely need add that his
+aides-de-camp did not flinch from sharing Durando’s fate. They bravely
+followed their general, and one, the Marquis Corbetta, was wounded in
+the leg; the other, Count Esengrini, had his horse shot under him. I
+called on Durando, who is now at Milan, the day before yesterday. Though
+a stranger to him, he received me at once, and, speaking of the action
+of the 24th, he only said: ‘I have the satisfaction of having done my
+duty. I wait tranquilly the judgement of history.’
+
+Assuming, for argument’s sake, that General Cerale misunderstood the
+orders he had received, and that, by precipitating his movement, he
+dragged into the same mistake the whole of Durando’s corps--assuming, I
+say, this to be the right version, you can easily explain the fact that
+neither of the two contending parties are as yet in a position clearly
+to describe the action of the 24th. Why did neither the one nor the
+other display and bring into action the whole forces they could have had
+at their disposal? Why so many partial engagements at a great distance
+one from the other? In a word, why that want of unity, which, in
+my opinion, constituted the paramount characteristic of that bloody
+struggle? I may be greatly mistaken, but I am of opinion that neither
+the Italian general-in-chief nor the Austrian Archduke entertained
+on the night of the 23rd the idea of delivering a battle on the 24th.
+There, and only there, lies the whole mystery of the affair. The total
+want of unity of action on the part of the Italians assured to the
+Austrians, not the victory, but the chance of rendering impossible
+Lamarmora’s attempt to break through the quadrilateral. This no one can
+deny; but, on the other hand, if the Italian army failed in attaining
+its object, the failure-owing to the bravery displayed both by the
+soldiers and by the generals-was far from being a disastrous or
+irreparable one. The Italians fought from three o’clock in the morning
+until nine in the evening like lions, showing to their enemies and to
+Europe that they know how to defend their country, and that they are
+worthy of the noble enterprise they have undertaken.
+
+But let me now register one of the striking episodes of that memorable
+day. It was five o’clock p.m. when General Bixio, whose division held an
+elevated position not far from Villafranca, was attacked by three strong
+Austrian brigades, which had debouched at the same time from three
+different roads, supported with numerous artillery. An officer of the
+Austrian staff, waving a white handkerchief, was seen galloping towards
+the front of Bixio’s position, and, once in the presence of this
+general, bade him surrender. Those who are not personally acquainted
+with Bixio cannot form an idea of the impression this bold demand
+must have made on him. I have been told that, on hearing the word
+‘surrender,’ his face turned suddenly pale, then flushed like purple,
+and darting at the Austrian messenger, said, ‘Major, if you dare to
+pronounce once more the word surrender in my presence, I tell you--and
+Bixio always keeps his word--that I will have you shot at once.’ The
+Austrian officer had scarcely reached the general who had sent him, than
+Bixio, rapidly moving his division, fell with such impetuosity on the
+Austrian column, which were ascending the hill, that they were thrown
+pellmell in the valley, causing the greatest confusion amongst their
+reserve. Bixio himself led his men, and with his aides-de-camp,
+Cavaliere Filippo Fermi, Count Martini, and Colonel Malenchini, all
+Tuscans, actually charged the enemy. I have been told that, on hearing
+this episode, Garibaldi said, ‘I am not at all surprised, for Bixio is
+the best general I have made.’ Once the enemy was repulsed, Bixio was
+ordered to manoeuvre so as to cover the backward movement of the army,
+which was orderly and slowly retiring on the Mincio. Assisted by the
+co-operation of the heavy cavalry, commanded by General Count de Sonnaz,
+Bixio covered the retreat, and during the night occupied Goito, a
+position which he held till the evening of the 27th.
+
+In consequence of the concentrating movement of the Italian army which
+I have mentioned at the beginning of this letter, the fourth army corps
+(Cialdini’s) still holds the line of the Po. If I am rightly informed,
+the decree for the formation of the fourth army corps was signed by the
+king yesterday. This corps is that of Garibaldi, and is about 40,000
+strong. An officer who has just returned from Milan told me this morning
+that he had had an opportunity of speaking with the Austrian prisoners
+sent from Milan to the fortress of Finestrelle in Piedmont. Amongst
+them was an officer of a uhlan regiment, who had all the appearance of
+belonging to some aristocratic family of Austrian Poland. Having been
+asked if he thought Austria had really gained the battle on the 24th, he
+answered: ‘I do not know if the illusions of the Austrian army go so far
+as to induce it to believe it has obtained a victory--I do not believe
+it. He who loves Austria cannot, however, wish she should obtain such
+victories, for they are the victories of Pyrrhus!
+
+There is at Verona some element in the Austrian councils of war which
+we don’t understand, but which gives to their operations in this present
+phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character
+as it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still
+beyond the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of
+Garda steams up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless
+city and her railway station, whilst two battalions of Tyrolese
+sharp-shooters occupy the building. On Sunday they retire, but early
+yesterday they cross the Mincio, at Goito and Monzambano, and begin to
+throw two bridges over the same river, between the last-named place
+and the mills of Volta. At the same time they erect batteries at Goito,
+Torrione, and Valeggio, pushing their reconnoitring parties of hussars
+as far as Medole, Castiglione delle Stiviere, and Montechiara, this
+last-named place being only at a distance of twenty miles from Brescia.
+Before this news reached me here this morning I was rather inclined to
+believe that they were playing at hide-and-seek, in the hope that the
+leaders of the Italian army should be tempted by the game and repeat,
+for the second time, the too hasty attack on the quadrilateral. This
+news, which I have from a reliable source, has, however, changed my
+former opinion, and I begin to believe that the Austrian Archduke
+has really made up his mind to come out from the strongholds of
+the quadrilateral, and intends actually to begin war on the very
+battlefields where his imperial cousin was beaten on the 24th June 1859.
+It may be that the partial disasters sustained by Benedek in Germany
+have determined the Austrian Government to order a more active system
+of war against Italy, or, as is generally believed here, that the
+organisation of the commissariat was not perfect enough with the army
+Archduke Albert commands to afford a more active and offensive action.
+Be that as it may, the fact is that the news received here from several
+parts of Upper Lombardy seems to indicate, on the part of the Austrians,
+the intention of attacking their adversaries.
+
+Yesterday whilst the peaceable village of Gazzoldo--five Italian miles
+from Goito--was still buried in the silence of night it was occupied by
+400 hussars, to the great consternation of the people who were roused
+from their sleep by the galloping of their unexpected visitors. The
+sindaco, or mayor of the village, who is the chemist of the place,
+was, I hear, forcibly taken from his house and compelled to escort the
+Austrians on the road leading to Piubega and Redondesco. This worthy
+magistrate, who was not apparently endowed with sufficient courage to
+make at least half a hero, was so much frightened that he was taken
+ill, and still is in a very precarious condition. These inroads are
+not always accomplished with impunity, for last night, not far from
+Guidizzuolo, two squadrons of Italian light cavalry--Cavalleggieri di
+Lucca, if I am rightly informed--at a sudden turn of the road leading
+from the last-named village to Cerlongo, found themselves almost face
+to face with four squadrons of uhlans. The Italians, without numbering
+their foes, set spurs to their horses and fell like thunder on the
+Austrians, who, after a fight which lasted more than half an hour, were
+put to flight, leaving on the ground fifteen men hors de combat, besides
+twelve prisoners.
+
+Whilst skirmishing of this kind is going on in the flat ground of
+Lombardy which lies between the Mincio and the Chiese, a more decisive
+action has been adopted by the Austrian corps which is quartered in the
+Italian Tyrol and Valtellina. A few days ago it was generally believed
+that the mission of this corps was only to oppose Garibaldi should he
+try to force those Alpine passes. But now we suddenly hear that the
+Austrians are already masters of Caffaro, Bagolino, Riccomassino, and
+Turano, which points they are fortifying. This fact explains the last
+movements made by Garibaldi towards that direction. But whilst the
+Austrians are massing their troops on the Tyrolese Alps the revolution
+is spreading fast in the more southern mountains of the Friuli and
+Cadorre, thus threatening the flank and rear of their army in
+Venetia. This revolutionary movement may not have as yet assumed great
+proportions, but as it is the effect of a plan proposed beforehand it
+might become really imposing, more so as the ranks of those Italian
+patriots are daily swollen by numerous deserters and refractory men of
+the Venetian regiments of the Austrian army.
+
+Although the main body of the Austrians seems to be still concentrated
+between Peschiera and Verona, I should not wonder if they crossed the
+Mincio either to-day or to-morrow, with the object of occupying the
+heights of Volta, Cavriana, and Solferino, which, both by their position
+and by the nature of the ground, are in themselves so many fortresses.
+Supposing that the Italian army should decide for action--and there is
+every reason to believe that such will be the case--it is not unlikely
+that, as we had already a second battle at Custozza, we may have a
+second one at Solferino.
+
+That at the Italian headquarters something has been decided upon which
+may hasten the forward movement of the army, I infer from the fact that
+the foreign military commissioners at the Italian headquarters, who,
+after the 24th June had gone to pass the leisure of their camp life
+at Cremona, have suddenly made their appearance at Torre Malamberti,
+a villa belonging to the Marquis Araldi, where Lamarmora’s staff
+is quartered. A still more important event is the presence of Baron
+Ricasoli, whom I met yesterday evening on coming here. The President of
+the Council was coming from Florence, and, after stopping a few hours
+at the villa of Cicognolo, where Victor Emmanuel and the royal household
+are staying, he drove to Torre Malamberti to confer with General
+Lamarmora and Count Pettiti. The presence of the baron at headquarters
+is too important an incident to be overlooked by people whose business
+is that of watching the course of events in this country. And it should
+be borne in mind that on his way to headquarters Baron Ricasoli stopped
+a few hours at Bologna, where he had a long interview with Cialdini.
+Nor is this all; for the most important fact I have to report to-day is,
+that whilst I am writing (five o’clock a.m.) three corps of the Italian
+army are crossing the Oglio at different points--all three acting
+together and ready for any occurrence. This reconnaissance en force may,
+as you see, be turned into a regular battle should the Austrians have
+crossed the Mincio with the main body of their army during the course
+of last night. You see that the air around me smells enough of powder to
+justify the expectation of events which are likely to exercise a great
+influence over the cause of right and justice--the cause of Italy.
+
+MARCARIA, July 3, Evening.
+
+Murray’s guide will save me the trouble of telling you what this little
+and dirty hole of Marcaria is like. The river Oglio runs due south,
+not far from the village, and cuts the road which from Bozzolo leads to
+Mantua. It is about seven miles from Castellucchio, a town which, since
+the peace of Villafranca, marked the Italian frontier in Lower Lombardy.
+Towards this last-named place marched this morning the eleventh division
+of the Italians under the command of General Angioletti, only a month
+ago Minister of the Marine in Lamarmora’s Cabinet. Angioletti’s division
+of the second corps was, in the case of an attack, to be supported by
+the fourth and eighth, which had crossed the Oglio at Gazzuolo four
+hours before the eleventh had started from the place from which I am
+now writing. Two other divisions also moved in an oblique line from
+the upper course of the above-mentioned river, crossed it on a pontoon
+bridge, and were directed to maintain their communications with
+Angioletti’s on the left, whilst the eighth and fourth would have formed
+its right. These five divisions were the avant garde of the main body of
+the Italian army. I am not in a position to tell you the exact line the
+army thus advancing from the Oglio has followed, but I have been told
+that, in order to avoid the possibility of repeating the errors which
+occurred in the action of the 24th, the three corps d’armee have been
+directed to march in such a manner as to enable them to present a
+compact mass should they meet the enemy. Contrary to all expectations,
+Angioletti’s division was allowed to enter and occupy Castellucchio
+without firing a shot. As its vanguard reached the hamlet of Ospedaletto
+it was informed that the Austrians had left Castellucchio during the
+night, leaving a few hussars, who, in their turn, retired on Mantua as
+soon as they saw the cavalry Angioletti had sent to reconnoitre both the
+country and the borough of Castellucchio.
+
+News has just arrived here that General Angioletti has been able to push
+his outposts as far as Rivolta on his left, and still farther forward on
+his front towards Curtalone. Although the distance from Rivolta to Goito
+is only five miles, Angioletti, I have been told, could not ascertain
+whether the Austrians had crossed the Mincio in force.
+
+What part both Cialdini and Garibaldi will play in the great struggle
+nobody can tell. It is certain, however, that these two popular
+leaders will not be idle, and that a battle, if fought, will assume the
+proportions of an almost unheard of slaughter.
+
+GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE ITALIAN ARMY, TORRE MALIMBERTI, July 7,
+1866.
+
+Whilst the Austrian emperor throws himself at the feet of the ruler of
+France--I was almost going to write the arbiter of Europe--Italy and its
+brave army seem to reject disdainfully the idea of getting Venetia as a
+gift of a neutral power. There cannot be any doubt as to the feeling
+in existence since the announcement of the Austrian proposal by the
+Moniteur being one of astonishment, and even indignation so far as Italy
+herself is concerned. One hears nothing but expressions of this kind
+in whatever Italian town he may be, and the Italian army is naturally
+anxious that she should not be said to relinquish her task when
+Austrians speak of having beaten her, without proving that she can beat
+them too. There are high considerations of honour which no soldier or
+general would ever think of putting aside for humanitarian or political
+reasons, and with these considerations the Italian army is fully in
+accord since the 24th June. The way, too, in which the Kaiser chose
+to give up the long-contested point, by ignoring Italy and recognising
+France as a party to the Venetian question, created great indignation
+amongst the Italians, whose papers declare, one and all, that a fresh
+insult has been offered to the country. This is the state of public
+opinion here, and unless the greatest advantages are obtained by a
+premature armistice and a hurried treaty of peace, it is likely to
+continue the same, not to the entire security of public order in Italy.
+As a matter of course, all eyes are turned towards Villa Pallavicini,
+two miles from here, where the king is to decide upon either accepting
+or rejecting the French emperor’s advice, both of which decisions are
+fraught with considerable difficulties and no little danger. The king
+will have sought the advice of his ministers, besides which that of
+Prussia will have been asked and probably given. The matter may be
+decided one way or the other in a very short time, or may linger on for
+days to give time for public anxiety and fears to be allayed and to calm
+down. In the meantime, it looks as if the king and his generals had
+made up their mind not to accept the gift. An attack on the Borgoforte
+tete-de-pont on the right side of the Po, began on 5th at half-past
+three in the morning, under the immediate direction of General Cialdini.
+The attacking corps was the Duke of Mignano’s. All the day yesterday the
+gun was heard at Torre Malamberti, as it was also this morning between
+ten and eleven o’clock. Borgoforte is a fortress on the left side of
+the Po, throwing a bridge across this river, the right end of which is
+headed by a strong tete-de-pont, the object of the present attack.
+This work may be said to belong to the quadrilateral, as it is only an
+advanced part of the fortress of Mantua, which, resting upon its rear,
+is connected to Borgoforte by a military road supported on the Mantua
+side by the Pietolo fortress. The distance between Mantua and Borgoforte
+is only eleven kilometres. The fete-de-poet is thrown upon the Po; its
+structure is of recent date, and it consists of a central part and of
+two wings, called Rocchetta and Bocca di Ganda respectively. The lock
+here existing is enclosed in the Rocchetta work.
+
+Since I wrote you my last letter Garibaldi has been obliged to desist
+from the idea of getting possession of Bagolino, Sant’ Antonio, and
+Monte Suello, after a fight which lasted four hours, seeing that he
+had to deal with an entire Austrian brigade, supported by uhlans,
+sharp-shooters (almost a battalion) and twelve pieces of artillery.
+These positions were subsequently abandoned by the enemy, and occupied
+by Garibaldi’s volunteers. In this affair the general received a
+slight wound in his left leg, the nature of which, however, is so very
+trifling, that a few days will be enough to enable him to resume active
+duties. It seems that the arms of the Austrians proved to be much
+superior to those of the Garibaldians, whose guns did very bad service.
+The loss of the latter amounted to about 100 killed and 200 wounded,
+figures in which the officers appear in great proportion, owing to their
+having been always at the head of their men, fighting, charging, and
+encouraging their comrades throughout. Captain Adjutant-Major Battino,
+formerly of the regular army, died, struck by three bullets, while
+rushing on the Austrians with the first regiment. On abandoning the
+Caffaro line, which they had reoccupied after the Lodrone encounter--in
+consequence of which the Garibaldians had to fall back because of the
+concentration following the battle of Custozza--the Austrians have
+retired to the Lardara fortress, between the Stabolfes and Tenara
+mountains, covering the route to Tione and Trento, in the Italian
+Tyrol. The third regiment of volunteers suffered most, as two of their
+companies had to bear the brunt of the terrible Austrian fire kept up
+from formidable positions. Another fight was taking place almost at the
+same time in the Val Camonico, i.e., north of the Caffaro, and of Rocca
+d’Anfo, Garibaldi’s point d’appui. This encounter was sustained in the
+same proportions, the Italians losing one of their bravest and best
+officers in the person of Major Castellini, a Milanese, commander of
+the second battalion of Lombardian bersaglieri. Although these and Major
+Caldesi’s battalion had to fall back from Vezza, a strong position was
+taken near Edalo, while in the rear a regiment kept Breno safe.
+
+Although still at headquarters only two days ago, Baron Ricasoli has
+been suddenly summoned by telegram from Florence, and, as I hear,
+has just arrived. This is undoubtedly brought about by the new
+complications, especially as, at a council of ministers presided over by
+the baron, a vote, the nature of which is as yet unknown, was taken on
+the present state of affairs. As you know very well in England, Italy
+has great confidence in Ricasoli, whose conduct, always far from
+obsequious to the French emperor, has pleased the nation. He is thought
+to be at this moment the right man in the right place, and with the
+great acquaintance he possesses of Italy and the Italians, and with the
+co-operation of such an honest man as General Lamarmora, Italy may be
+pronounced safe, both against friends and enemies.
+
+From what I saw this morning, coming back from the front, I presume that
+something, and that something new perhaps, will be attempted to-morrow.
+So far, the proposed armistice has had no effect upon the dispositions
+at general headquarters, and did not stay the cannon’s voice. In the
+middle of rumours, of hopes and fears, Italy’s wish to push on with the
+war has as yet been adhered to by her trusted leaders.
+
+
+
+
+HEADQUARTERS OF THE FIRST ARMY CORPS,
+
+PIADENA, July 8, 1866.
+
+As I begin writing you, no doubt can be entertained that some movement
+is not only in contemplation at headquarters, but is actually provided
+to take place to-day, and that it will probably prove to be against the
+Austrian positions at Borgoforte, on the left bank of the Po. Up to
+this time the tete-de-pout on the right side of the river had only been
+attacked by General the Duke of Mignano’s guns. It would now, on the
+contrary, be a matter of cutting the communications between Borgoforte
+and Mantua, by occupying the lower part of the country around the latter
+fortress, advancing upon the Valli Veronesi, and getting round the
+quadrilateral into Venetia. While, then, waiting for further news to
+tell us whether this plan has been carried into execution, and whether
+it will be pursued, mindless of the existence of Mantua and Borgoforte
+on its flanks, one great fact is already ascertained, that the armistice
+proposed by the Emperor Napoleon has not been accepted, and that the
+war is to be continued. The Austrians may shut themselves up in their
+strongholds, or may even be so obliging as to leave the king the
+uncontested possession of them by retreating in the same line as their
+opponents advance; the pursuit, if not the struggle, the war, if not the
+battle, will be carried on by the Italians. At Torre Malamberti, where
+the general headquarters are, no end of general officers were to be seen
+yesterday hurrying in all directions. I met the king, Generals Brignone,
+Gavone, Valfre, and Menabrea within a few minutes of one another, and
+Prince Amadeus, who has entirely recovered from his wound, had
+been telegraphed for, and will arrive in Cremona to-day. No precise
+information is to be obtained respecting the intentions of the
+Austrians, but it is to be hoped for the Italian army, and for the
+credit of its generals, that more will be known about them now than was
+known on the eve of the famous 24th of June, and on its very morning.
+The heroism of the Italians on that memorable day surpasses any possible
+idea that can be formed, as it did also surpass all expectations of the
+country. Let me relate you a few out of many heroic facts which only
+come to light when an occasion is had of speaking with those who
+have been eyewitnesses of them, as they are no object of magnified
+regimental--orders or, as yet, of well-deserved honours. Italian
+soldiers seem to think that the army only did its duty, and that,
+wherever Italians may fight, they will always show equal valour and
+firmness. Captain Biraghi, of Milan, belonging to the general staff,
+having in the midst of the battle received an order from General
+Lamarmora for General Durando, was proceeding with all possible speed
+towards the first army corps, which was slowly retreating before the
+superior forces of the enemy and before the greatly superior number of
+his guns, when, while under a perfect shower of grape and canister, he
+was all of a sudden confronted by, an Austrian officer of cavalry who
+had been lying in wait for the Italian orderly. The Austrian fires his
+revolver at Biraghi; and wounds him in the arm. Nothing daunted,
+Biraghi assails him and makes him turn tail; then, following in pursuit,
+unsaddles him, but has his own horse shot down under him. Biraghi
+disentangles himself, kills his antagonist, and jumps upon the latter’s
+horse. This, however, is thrown down also in a moment by a cannon ball,
+so that the gallant captain has to go back on foot, bleeding, and
+almost unable to walk. Talking of heroism, of inimitable endurance, and
+strength of soul, what do you think of a man who has his arm entirely
+carried away by a grenade, and yet keeps on his horse, firm as a
+rock, and still directs his battery until hemorrhage--and hemorrhage
+alone--strikes him down at last, dead! Such was the case with a
+Neapolitan--Major Abate, of the artillery--and his name is worth the
+glory of a whole army, of a whole war; and may only find a fit companion
+in that of an officer of the eighteenth battalion of bersaglieri, who,
+dashing at an Austrian flag-bearer, wrenches the standard out of his
+hands with his left one, has it clean cut away by an Austrian officer
+standing near, and immediately grapples it with his right, until his own
+soldiers carry him away with his trophy! Does not this sound like Greek
+history repeated--does it not look as if the brave men of old had
+been born again, and the old facts renewed to tell of Italian heroism?
+Another bersagliere--a Tuscan, by name Orlandi Matteo, belonging to that
+heroic fifth battalion which fought against entire brigades, regiments,
+and battalions, losing 11 out of its 16 officers, and about 300 out of
+its 600 men--Orlandi, was wounded already, when, perceiving an Austrian
+flag, he makes a great effort, dashes at the officer, kills him, takes
+the flag, and, almost dying, gives it over to his lieutenant. He is
+now in a ward of the San Domenico Hospital in Brescia, and all who have
+learnt of his bravery will earnestly hope that he may survive to be
+pointed out as one of the many who covered themselves with fame on that
+day. If it is sad to read of death encountered in the field by so many a
+patriotic and brave soldiers, it is sadder still to learn that not a few
+of them were barbarously killed by the enemy, and killed, too, when they
+were harmless, for they lay wounded on the ground. The Sicilian colonel,
+Stalella, a son-in-law of Senator Castagnetto, and a courageous man
+amongst the most courageous of men; was struck in the leg by a bullet,
+and thrown down from his horse while exciting his men to repulse the
+Austrians, which in great masses were pressing on his thinned column.
+Although retreating, the regiment sent some of his men to take him away,
+but as soon as he had been put on a stretcher [he] had to be put down,
+as ten or twelve uhlans were galloping down, obliging the men to hide
+themselves in a bush. When the uhlans got near the colonel, and when
+they had seen him lying down in agony, they all planted their lances in
+his body.
+
+Is not this wanton cruelty--cruelty even unheard of cruelty that no
+savage possesses? Still these are facts, and no one will ever dare to
+deny them from Verona and Vienna, for they are known as much as it was
+known and seen that the uhlans and many of the Austrian soldiers were
+drunk when they began fighting, and that alighting from the trains they
+were provided with their rations and with rum, and that they fought
+without their haversacks. This is the truth, and nothing beyond it has
+to the honour of the Italians been asserted, whether to the disgrace
+or credit of their enemies; so that while denying that they ill-treat
+Austrian prisoners, they are ready to state that theirs are well treated
+in Verona, without thinking of slandering and calumniating as the Vienna
+papers have done.
+
+This morning Prince Amadeus arrived in Cremona, where a most spontaneous
+and hearty reception was given him by the population and the National
+Guard. He proceeded at once by the shortest way to the headquarters, so
+that his wish to be again at the front when something should be done has
+been accomplished. This brave young man, and his worthy brother, Prince
+Humbert, have won the applause of all Italy, which is justly proud of
+counting her king and her princes amongst the foremost in the field.
+
+I have just learned from a most reliable source that the Austrians have
+mined the bridge of Borghetto on the Mincio, so that, should it be blown
+up, the only two, those of Goito and Borghetto, would be destroyed, and
+the Italians obliged to make provisional ones instead. I also hear that
+the Venetian towns are without any garrison, and that most probably all
+the forces are massed on two lines, one from Peschiera to Custozza and
+the other behind the Adige.
+
+You will probably know by this time that the garrison of Vienna had on
+the 3rd been directed to Prague. The news we receive from Prussia is on
+the whole encouraging, inasmuch as the greatly feared armistice has been
+repulsed by King William. Some people here think that France will not
+be too hard upon Italy for keeping her word with her ally, and that the
+brunt of French anger or disapproval will have to be borne by Prussia.
+This is the least she can expect, as you know!
+
+It is probable that by to-morrow I shall be able to write you more about
+the Italo-Austrian war of 1866.
+
+GONZAGA, July 9, 1866.
+
+I write you from a villa, only a mile distant from Gonzaga, belonging
+to the family of the Counts Arrivabene of Mantua. The owners have never
+reentered it since 1848, and it is only the fortune of war which has
+brought them to see their beautiful seat of the Aldegatta, never, it is
+to be hoped for them, to be abandoned again. It is, as you see, ‘Mutatum
+ab illo.’ Onward have gone, then, the exiled patriots! onward will go
+the nation that owns them! The wish of every one who is compelled to
+remain behind is that the army, that the volunteers, that the fleet,
+should all cooperate, and that they should, one and all, land on
+Venetian ground, to seek for a great battle, to give the army back the
+fame it deserves, and to the country the honour it possesses. The king
+is called upon to maintain the word nobly given to avenge Novara, and
+with it the new Austrian insulting proposal. All, it is said, is ready.
+The army has been said to be numerous; if to be numerous and brave,
+means to deserve victory, let the Italian generals prove what Italian
+soldiers are worthy of. If they will fight, the country will support
+them with the boldest of resolutions--the country will accept a
+discussion whenever the Government, having dispersed all fears, will
+proclaim that the war is to be continued till victory is inscribed on
+Italy’s shield.
+
+As I am not far from Borgoforte, I am able to learn more than the mere
+cannon’s voice can tell me, and so will give you some details of the
+action against the tete-de-pont, which began, as I told you in one of
+my former letters, on the 4th. In Gorgoforte there were about 1500
+Austrians, and, on the night from the 5th to the 6th, they kept up
+from their four fortified works a sufficiently well-sustained fire, the
+object of which was to prevent the enemy from posting his guns. This
+fire, however, did not cause any damage, and the Italians were able to
+plant their batteries. Early on the 6th, the firing began all along the
+line, the Italian 16-pounders having been the first to open fire. The
+Italian right was commanded by Colonel Mattei, the left by Colonel
+Bangoni, who did excellent work, while the other wing was not so
+successful. The heaviest guns had not yet arrived owing to one of
+those incidents always sure to happen when least expected, so that the
+40-pounders could not be brought to bear against the forts until later
+in the day. The damage done to the works was not great for the moment,
+but still the advantage had been gained of feeling the strength of
+the enemy’s positions and finding the right way to attack them. The
+artillerymen worked with great vigour, and were only obliged to desist
+by an unexpected order which arrived about two p.m. from General
+Cialdini. The attack was, however, resumed on the following day, and
+the condition of the Monteggiana and Rochetta forts may be pronounced
+precarious. As a sign of the times, and more especially of the just
+impatience which prevails in Italy about the general direction of the
+army movements, it may not be without importance to notice that the
+Italian press has begun to cry out against the darkness in which
+everything is enveloped, while the time already passed since the 24th
+June tells plainly of inaction. It is remarked that the bitter gift
+made by Austria of the Venetian provinces, and the suspicious offer
+of mediation by France, ought to have found Italy in greatly different
+condition, both as regards her political and military position. Italy
+is, on the contrary, in exactly the same state as when the Archduke
+Albert telegraphed to Vienna that a great success had been obtained over
+the Italian army. These are facts, and, however strong and worthy of
+respect may be the reasons, there is no doubt that an extraordinary
+delay in the resumption of hostilities has occurred, and that at the
+present moment operations projected are perfectly mysterious. Something
+is let out from time to time which only serves to make the subsequent
+absence of news more and more puzzling. For the present the first
+official relation of the unhappy fight of the 24th June is published,
+and is accordingly anxiously scanned and closely studied. It is a
+matter of general remark that no great military knowledge is required to
+perceive that too great a reliance was placed upon supposed facts, and
+that the indulgence of speculations and ideas caused the waste of so
+much precious blood. The prudence characterising the subsequent moves
+of the Austrians may have been caused by the effects of their opponents’
+arrangements, but the Italian commanders ought to have avoided the
+responsibility of giving the enemy the option to move.
+
+It is clear that to mend things the utterance of generous and patriotic
+cries is not sufficient, and that it must be shown that the vigour of
+the body is not at all surpassed by the vigour of the mind. It is also
+clear that many lives might have been spared if there had been greater
+proofs of intelligence on the part of those who directed the movement.
+
+The situation is still very serious. Such an armistice as General von
+Gablenz could humiliate himself enough to ask from the Prussians has
+been refused, but another which the Emperor of the French has advised
+them to accept might ultimately become a fact. For Italy, the purely
+Venetian question could then also be settled, while the Italian, the
+national question, the question of right and honour which the army
+prizes so much, would still remain to be solved.
+
+GONZAGA, July 12, 1866.
+
+Travelling is generally said to be troublesome, but travelling with and
+through brigades, divisions, and army corps, I can certify to be more
+so than is usually agreeable. It is not that Italian officers or Italian
+soldiers are in any way disposed to throw obstacles in your way; but
+they, unhappily for you, have with them the inevitable cars with the
+inevitable carmen, both of which are enough to make your blood freeze,
+though the barometer stands very high. What with their indolence, what
+with their number and the dust they made, I really thought they would
+drive me mad before I should reach Casalmaggiore on my way from
+Torre Malamberti. I started from the former place at three a.m., with
+beautiful weather, which, true to tradition, accompanied me all
+through my journey. Passing through San Giovanni in Croce, to which the
+headquarters of General Pianell had been transferred, I turned to the
+right in the direction of the Po, and began to have an idea of
+the wearisome sort of journey which I would have to make up to
+Casalmaggiore. On both sides of the way some regiments belonging to the
+rear division were still camped, and as I passed it was most interesting
+to see how busy they were cooking their ‘rancio,’ polishing their arms,
+and making the best of their time. The officers stood leisurely about
+gazing and staring at me, supposing, as I thought, that I was travelling
+with some part in the destiny of their country. Here and there some
+soldiers who had just left the hospitals of Brescia and Milan made their
+way to their corps and shook hands with their comrades, from whom only
+illness or the fortune of war had made them part. They seemed glad to
+see their old tent, their old drum, their old colour-sergeant, and also
+the flag they had carried to the battle and had not at any price allowed
+to be taken. I may state here, en passant, that as many as six flags
+were taken from the enemy in the first part of the day of Custozza, and
+were subsequently abandoned in the retreat, while of the Italians
+only one was lost to a regiment for a few minutes, when it was quickly
+retaken. This fact ought to be sufficient by itself to establish the
+bravery with which the soldiers fought on the 24th, and the bravery with
+which they will fight if, as they ardently wish; a new occasion is given
+to them.
+
+As long as I had only met troops, either marching or camping on the
+road, all went well, but I soon found myself mixed with an interminable
+line of cars and the like, forming the military and the civil train of
+the moving army. Then it was that it needed as much patience to keep
+from jumping out of one’s carriage and from chastising the carrettieri,
+as they would persist in not making room for one, and being as dumb to
+one’s entreaties as a stone. When you had finished with one you had to
+deal with another, and you find them all as obstinate and as egotistical
+as they are from one end of the world to the other, whether it be on the
+Casalmaggiore road or in High Holborn. From time to time things seemed
+to proceed all right, and you thought yourself free from further
+trouble, but you soon found out your mistake, as an enormous ammunition
+car went smack into your path, as one wheel got entangled with another,
+and as imperturbable Signor Carrettiere evidently took delight at a
+fresh opportunity for stoppage, inaction, indolence, and sleep. I soon
+came to the conclusion that Italy would not be free when the Austrians
+had been driven away, for that another and a more formidable foe--an
+enemy to society and comfort, to men and horses, to mankind in general
+would have still to be beaten, expelled, annihilated, in the shape of
+the carrettiere. If you employ him, he robs you fifty times over; if you
+want him to drive quickly, he is sure to keep the animal from going
+at all; if, worse than all, you never think of him, or have just been
+plundered by him, he will not move an inch to oblige you. Surely the
+cholera is not the only pestilence a country may be visited with; and,
+should Cialdini ever go to Vienna, he might revenge Novara and the
+Spielberg by taking with him the carrettieri of the whole army.
+
+At last Casalmaggiore hove in sight, and, when good fortune and the
+carmen permitted, I reached it. It was time! No iron-plated Jacob
+could ever have resisted another two miles’ journey in such company. At
+Casalmaggiore I branched off. There were, happily, two roads, and not
+the slightest reason or smallest argument were needed to make me choose
+that which my cauchemar had not chosen. They were passing the river at
+Casalmaggiore. I went, of course, for the same purpose, somewhere else.
+Any place was good enough--so I thought, at least, then. New adventures,
+new miseries awaited me--some carrettiere, or other, guessing that I was
+no friend of his, nor of the whole set of them, had thrown the jattatura
+on me.
+
+I alighted at the Colombina, after four hours’ ride, to give the
+horses time to rest a little. The Albergo della Colombina was a great
+disappointment, for there was nothing there that could be eaten. I
+decided upon waiting most patiently, but most unlike a few cavalry
+officers, who, all covered with dust, and evidently as hungry and as
+thirsty as they could be, began to swear to their hearts’ content. In an
+hour some eggs and some salame, a kind of sausage, were brought up,
+and quickly disposed of. A young lieutenant of the thirtieth infantry
+regiment of the Pisa brigade took his place opposite, and we were soon
+engaged in conversation. He had been in the midst and worst part of the
+battle of Custozza, and had escaped being taken prisoner by what seemed
+a miracle. He told me how, when his regiment advanced on the Monte Croce
+position, which he practically described to me as having the form of an
+English pudding, they were fired upon by batteries both on their flanks
+and front. The lieutenant added, however, rather contemptuously, that
+they did not even bow before them, as the custom appears to be--that
+is, to lie down, as the Austrians were firing very badly. The cross-fire
+got, however, so tremendous that an order had to be given to keep down
+by the road to avoid being annihilated. The assault was given, the
+whole range of positions was taken, and kept too for hours, until
+the infallible rule of three to one, backed by batteries, grape, and
+canister, compelled them to retreat, which they did slowly and in order.
+It was then that their brigade commander, Major General Rey de Villarey,
+who, though a native of Mentone, had preferred remaining with his king
+from going over to the French after the cession, turning to his son, who
+was also his aide-de-camp, said in his dialect, ‘Now, my son, we must
+die both of us,’ and with a touch of the spurs was soon in front of
+the line and on the hill, where three bullets struck him almost at once
+dead. The horse of his son falling while following, his life was spared.
+My lieutenant at this moment was so overcome with hunger and fatigue
+that he fell down, and was thought to be dead. He was not so, however,
+and had enough life to hear, after the fight was over, the Austrian
+Jagers pass by, and again retire to their original positions, where
+their infantry was lying down, not dreaming for one moment of pursuing
+the Italians. Four of his soldiers--all Neapolitans he heard coming in
+search of him, while the bullets still hissed all round; and, as soon as
+he made a sign to them, they approached, and took him on their shoulders
+back to where was what remained of the regiment. It is highly creditable
+to Italian unity to hear an old Piedmontese officer praise the levies
+of the new provinces, and the lieutenant took delight in relating that
+another Neapolitan was in the fight standing by him, and firing as fast
+as he could, when a shell having burst near him, he disdainfully gave it
+a look, and did not even seek to save himself from the jattatura.
+
+The gallant lieutenant had unfortunately to leave at last, and I was
+deprived of many an interesting tale and of a brave man’s company. I
+started, therefore, for Viadana, where I purposed passing the Po, the
+left bank of which the road was now following parallel with the stream.
+At Viadana, however, I found no bridge, as the military had demolished
+what existed only the day before, and so had to look out for in
+formation. As I was going about under the porticoes which one meets in
+almost all the villages in this neighbourhood, I was struck by the sight
+of an ancient and beautiful piece of art--for so it was--a Venetian
+mirror of Murano. It hung on the wall inside the village draper’s shop,
+and was readily shown me by the owner, who did not conceal the pride he
+had in possessing it. It was one of those mirrors one rarely meets
+with now, which were once so abundant in the old princes’ castles and
+palaces. It looked so deep and true, and the gilt frame was so light,
+and of such a purity and elegance, that it needed all my resolution to
+keep from buying it, though a bargain would not have been effected very
+easily. The mirror, however, had to be abandoned, as Dosalo, the nearest
+point for crossing the Po, was still seven miles distant. By this
+time the sun was out in all its force, and the heat was by no means
+agreeable. Then there was dust, too, as if the carrettieri had been
+passing in hundreds, so that the heat was almost unbearable. At last the
+Dosalo ferry was reached, the road leading to it was entered, and the
+carriage was, I thought, to be at once embarked, when a drove of oxen
+were discovered to have the precedence; and so I had to wait. This under
+such a sun, on a shadeless beach, and with the prospect of having to
+stay there for two hours at least, was by no means pleasant. It took
+three-quarters of an hour to put the oxen in the boat, it took half an
+hour to get them on the other shore, and another hour to have the ferry
+boat back. The panorama from the beach was splendid, the Po appeared in
+all the mighty power of his waters, and as you looked with the glass at
+oxen and trees on the other shore, they appeared to be clothed in
+all the colours of the rainbow, and as if belonging to another world.
+Several peasants were waiting for the boat near me, talking about the
+war and the Austrians, and swearing they would, if possible, annihilate
+some of the latter. I gave them the glass to look with, and I imagined
+that they had never seen one before, for they thought it highly
+wonderful to make out what the time was at the Luzzara Tower, three
+miles in a straight line on the other side. The revolver, too, was a
+subject of great admiration, and they kept turning, feeling, and staring
+at it, as if they could not make out which way the cartridges were put
+in. One of these peasants, however, was doing the grand with the others,
+and once on the subject of history related to all who would hear how he
+had been to St. Helena, which was right in the middle of Moscow, where
+it was so very cold that his nose had got to be as large as his head.
+The poor man was evidently mixing one night’s tale with that of the next
+one, a tale probably heard from the old Sindaco, who is at the same time
+the schoolmaster, the notary, and the highest municipal authority in the
+place.
+
+I started in the ferry boat with them at last. While crossing they got
+to speak of the priests, and were all agreed, to put it in the mildest
+way, in thinking extremely little of them, and only differed as to what
+punishment they should like them to suffer.
+
+On the side where we landed lay heaps of ammunition casks for the corps
+besieging Borgoforte. Others were conveyed upon cars by my friends the
+carrettieri, of whom it was decreed I should not be quit for some time
+to come. Entering Guastalla I found only a few artillery officers,
+evidently in charge of what we had seen carried along the route.
+Guastalla is a neat little town very proud of its statue of Duke
+Ferrante Gonzaga, and the Croce Rossa is a neat little inn, which may be
+proud of a smart young waiter, who actually discovered that, as I wanted
+to proceed to Luzzara, a few miles on, I had better stop till next
+morning, I did not take his advice, and was soon under the gate of
+Luzzara, a very neat little place, once one of the many possessions
+where the Gonzagas had a court, a palace, and a castle. The arms over
+the archway may still be seen, and would not be worth any notice but for
+a remarkable work of terracotta representing a crown of pines and
+pine leaves in a wonderful state of preservation. The whole is so
+artistically arranged and so natural, that one might believe it to be
+one of Luca della Robbia’s works. Luzzara has also a great tower, which
+I had seen in the distance from Dosalo, and the only albergo in the
+place gives you an excellent Italian dinner. The wine might please one
+of the greatest admirers of sherry, and if you are not given feather
+beds, the beds are at least clean like the rooms themselves. Here, as it
+was getting too dark, I decided upon stopping, a decision which gave me
+occasion to see one of the finest sunsets I ever saw. As I looked from
+the albergo I could see a gradation of colours, from the purple red to
+the deepest of sea blue, rising like an immense tent from the dark green
+of the trees and the fields, here and there dotted with little white
+houses, with their red roofs, while in front the Luzzara Tower rose
+majestically in the twilight. As the hour got later the colours
+deepened, and the lower end of the immense curtain gradually
+disappeared, while the stars and the planets began shining high above.
+A peasant was singing in a field near by, and the bells of a church were
+chiming in the distance. Both seemed to harmonise wonderfully. It was a
+scene of great loveliness.
+
+At four a.m. I was up, and soon after on the road to Reggiolo, and then
+to Gonzaga. Here the vegetation gets to be more luxuriant, and every
+inch of ground contributes to the immense vastness of the whole. Nature
+is here in full perfection, and as even the telegraphic wire hangs
+leisurely down from tree to tree, instead of being stuck upon poles,
+you feel that the romantic aspect of the place is too beautiful to be
+encroached upon. All is peace, beauty, and happiness, all reveals to you
+that you are in Italy.
+
+In Gonzaga, which only a few days ago belonged to the Austrians, the
+Italian tricolour is out of every window. As the former masters retired
+the new advanced; and when a detachment of Monferrato lancers entered
+the old castle town the joy of the inhabitants seemed to be almost
+bordering on delirium. The lancers soon left, however. The flag only
+remains.
+
+July 11.
+
+Cialdini began passing the Po on the 8th, and crossed at three points,
+i.e., Carbonara, Carbonarola, and Follonica. Beginning at three o’clock
+in the morning, he had finished crossing upon the two first pontoon
+bridges towards midnight on the 9th. The bridge thrown up at Follonica
+was still intact up to seven in the morning on the 10th, but the troops
+and the military and the civil train that remained followed the Po
+without crossing to Stellata, in the supposed direction of Ponte
+Lagoscura.
+
+Yesterday guns were heard here at seven o’clock in the morning, and up
+to eleven o’clock, in the direction of Legnano, towards, I think,
+the Adige. The firing was lively, and of such a nature as to make one
+surmise that battle had been given. Perhaps the Austrians have awaited
+Cialdini under Legnano, or they have disputed the crossing of the Adige.
+Rovigo was abandoned by the Austrians in the night of the 9th and 10th.
+They have blown up the Rovigo and Boara fortresses, have destroyed the
+tete-de-pont on the Adige, and burnt all bridges. They may now seek to
+keep by the left side of this river up to Legnano, so as to get under
+the protection of the quadrilateral, in which case, if Cialdini can
+cross the river in time, the shock would be almost inevitable, and would
+be a reason for yesterday’s firing. They may also go by rail to Padua,
+when they would have Cialdini between them and the quadrilateral. In any
+case, if this general is quick, or if they are not too quick for him,
+according to possible instructions, a collision is difficult to be
+avoided.
+
+Baron Ricasoli has left Florence for the camp, and all sorts of rumours
+are afloat as to the present state of negotiations as they appear
+unmistakably to exist. The opinions are, I think, divided in the high
+councils of the Crown, and the country is still anxious to know the
+result of this state of affairs. A splendid victory by Cialdini might
+at this moment solve many a difficulty. As it is, the war is prosecuted
+everywhere except by sea, for Garibaldi’s forces are slowly advancing in
+the Italian Tyrol, while the Austrians wait for them behind the walls of
+Landaro and Ampola. The Garibaldians’ advanced posts were, by the latest
+news, near Darso.
+
+The news from Prussia is still contradictory; while the Italian press is
+unanimous in asking with the country that Cialdini should advance,
+meet the enemy, fight him, and rout him if possible. Italy’s wishes are
+entirely with him.
+
+NOALE, NEAR TREVISO, July 17, 1866.
+
+From Lusia I followed General Medici’s division to Motta, where I left
+it, not without regret, however, as better companions could not easily
+be found, so kind were the officers and jovial the men. They are now
+encamped around Padua, and will to-morrow march on Treviso, where the
+Italian Light Horse have already arrived, if I judge so from their
+having left Noale on the 15th. From the right I hear that the advanced
+posts have proceeded as far as Mira on the Brenta, twenty kilometres
+from Venice itself, and that the first army corps is to concentrate
+opposite Chioggia. This corps has marched from Ferrara straight on to
+Rovigo, which the forward movement of the fourth, or Cialdini’s corps
+d’armee, had left empty of soldiers. General Pianell has still charge
+of it, and Major-General Cadalini, formerly at the head of the Siena
+brigade, replaces him in the command of his former division. General
+Pianell has under him the gallant Prince Amadeus, who has entirely
+recovered from his chest wound, and of whom the brigade of Lombardian
+grenadiers is as proud as ever. They could not wish for a more skilled
+commander, a better superior officer, and a more valiant soldier. Thus
+the troops who fought on the 24th June are kept in the second line,
+while the still fresh divisions under Cialdini march first, as fast as
+they can. This, however, is of no avail. The Italian outposts on the
+Piave have not yet crossed it, for the reason that they must keep
+distances with their regiments, but will do so as soon as these get
+nearer to the river. If it was not that this is always done in regular
+warfare, they could beat the country beyond the Piave for a good many
+miles without even seeing the shadow of an Austrian. To the simple
+private, who does not know of diplomatic imbroglios and of political
+considerations, this sudden retreat means an almost as sudden retracing
+of steps, because he remembers that this manoeuvre preceded both the
+attacks on Solferino and on Custozza by the Austrians. To the officer,
+however, it means nothing else than a fixed desire not to face the
+Italian army any more, and so it is to him a source of disappointment
+and despondency. He cannot bear to think that another battle is
+improbable, and may be excused if he is not in the best of humour when
+on this subject. This is the case not only with the officers but with
+the volunteers, who have left their homes and the comfort of their
+domestic life, not to be paraded at reviews, but to be sent against the
+enemy. There are hundreds of these in the regular army-in the cavalry
+especially, and the Aosta Lancers and the regiment of Guides are half
+composed of them. If you listen to them, there ought not to be the
+slightest doubt or hesitation as to crossing the Isongo and marching
+upon Vienna. May Heaven see their wishes accomplished, for, unless
+crushed by sheer force, Italy is quite decided to carry war into the
+enemy’s country.
+
+The decisions of the French government are looked for here with great
+anxiety, and not a few men are found who predict them to be unfavourable
+to Italy. Still, it is hard for every one to believe that the French
+emperor will carry things to extremities, and increase the many
+difficulties Europe has already to contend with.
+
+To-day there was a rumour at the mess table that the Austrians had
+abandoned Legnano, one of the four fortresses of the quadrilateral. I do
+not put much faith in it at present, but it is not improbable, as we
+may expect many strange things from the Vienna government. It would have
+been much better for them, since Archduke Albert spoke in eulogistic
+terms of the king, of his sons, and of his soldiers, while relating the
+action of the 24th, to have treated with Italy direct, thus securing
+peace, and perhaps friendship, from her. But the men who have ruled so
+despotically for years over Italian subjects cannot reconcile themselves
+to the idea that Italy has at last risen to be a nation, and they even
+take slyly an opportunity to throw new insult into her face. You can
+easily see that the old spirit is still struggling for empire; that the
+old contempt is still trying to make light of Italians; and that the
+old Metternich ideas are still fondly clung to. Does not this deserve
+another lesson? Does not this need another Sadowa to quiet down
+for ever? Yes; and it devolves upon Italy to do it. If so, let only
+Cialdini’s army alone, and the day may be nigh at hand when the king may
+tell the country that the task has been accomplished.
+
+A talk on the present state of political affairs, and on the peculiar
+position of Italy, is the only subject worth notice in a letter from the
+camp. Everything else is at a standstill, and the movements of the fine
+army Cialdini now disposes of, about 150,000 men, are no longer full of
+interest. They may, perhaps, have some as regards an attack on Venice,
+because Austrian soldiers are still garrisoning it, and will be obliged
+to fight if they are assailed. It is hoped, if such is the case,
+that the beautiful queen of the Adriatic will be spared a scene of
+devastation, and that no new Haynau will be found to renew the deeds of
+Brescia and Vicenza.
+
+The king has not yet arrived, and it seems probable he will not come for
+some time, until indeed the day comes for Italian troops to make their
+triumphal entry into the city of the Doges.
+
+The heat continues intense, and this explains the slowness in advancing.
+As yet no sickness has appeared, and it must be hoped that the
+troops will be healthy, as sickness tries the morale much more than
+half-a-dozen Custozzas.
+
+P.S.--I had finished writing when an officer came rushing into the inn
+where I am staying and told me that he had just heard that an Italian
+patrol had met an Austrian one on the road out of the village, and
+routed it. This may or may not be true, but it was must curious to see
+how delighted every one was at the idea that they had found ‘them’ at
+last. They did not care much about the result of the engagement, which,
+as I said, was reported to have been favourable. All that they cared
+about was that they were close to the enemy. One cannot despair of an
+army which is animated with such spirits. You would think, from the
+joy which brightens the face of the soldiers you meet now about, that a
+victory had been announced for the Italian arms.
+
+DOLO, NEAR VENICE, July 20, 1866.
+
+I returned from Noale to Padua last evening, and late in the night I
+received the intimation at my quarters that cannon was heard in the
+direction of Venice. It was then black as in Dante’s hell, and raining
+and blowing with violence--one of those Italian storms which seem to
+awake all the earthly and heavenly elements of creation. There was no
+choice for it but to take to the saddle, and try to make for the front.
+No one who has not tried it can fancy what work it is to find one’s way
+along a road on which a whole corps d’amee is marching with an enormous
+materiel of war in a pitch dark night. This, however, is what your
+special correspondent was obliged to do. Fortunately enough, I had
+scarcely proceeded as far as Ponte di Brenta when I fell in with an
+officer of Cialdini’s staff, who was bound to the same destination,
+namely, Dolo. As we proceeded along the road under a continuous shower
+of rain, our eyes now and then dazzled by the bright serpent-like
+flashes of the lightning, we fell in with some battalion or squadron,
+which advanced carefully, as it was impossible for them as well as for
+us to discriminate between the road and the ditches which flank it, for
+all the landmarks, so familiar to our guides in the daytime, were in one
+dead level of blackness. So it was that my companion and myself, after
+stumbling into ditches and out of them, after knocking our horses’ heads
+against an ammunition car, or a party of soldiers sheltered under some
+big tree, found ourselves, after three hours’ ride, in this village of
+Dolo. By this time the storm had greatly abated in its violence, and
+the thunder was but faintly heard now and then at such a distance as
+to enable us distinctly to hear the roar of the guns. Our horses
+could scarcely get through the sticky black mud, into which the white
+suffocating dust of the previous days had been turned by one night’s
+rain. We, however, made our way to the parsonage of the village, for we
+had already made up our minds to ascend the steeple of the church to get
+a view of the surrounding country and a better hearing of the guns
+if possible. After a few words exchanged with the sexton--a staunch
+Italian, as he told us he was--we went up the ladder of the church
+spire. Once on the wooden platform, we could hear more distinctly the
+boom of the guns, which sounded like the broadsides of a big vessel.
+Were they the guns of Persano’s long inactive fleet attacking some of
+Brondolo’s or Chioggia’s advanced forts? Were the guns those of some
+Austrian man-of-war which had engaged an Italian ironclad; or were they
+the ‘Affondatore,’ which left the Thames only a month ago, pitching into
+Trieste? To tell the truth, although we patiently waited two long hours
+on Dolo church spire, when both I and my companion descended we were not
+in a position to solve either of these problems. We, however, thought
+then, and still think, they were the guns of the Italian fleet which had
+attacked an Austrian fort.
+
+CIVITA VECCHIA, July 22, 1866.
+
+Since the departure from this port of the old hospital ship ‘Gregeois’
+about a year ago, no French ship of war had been stationed at Civita
+Vecchia; but on Wednesday morning the steam-sloop ‘Catinat,’ 180
+men, cast anchor in the harbour, and the commandant immediately on
+disembarking took the train for Rome and placed himself in communication
+with the French ambassador. I am not aware whether the Pontifical
+government had applied for this vessel, or whether the sending it was
+a spontaneous attention on the part of the French emperor, but, at any
+rate, its arrival has proved a source of pleasure to His Holiness, as
+there is no knowing what may happen In troublous times like the present,
+and it is always good to have a retreat insured.
+
+Yesterday it was notified in this port, as well as at Naples, that
+arrivals from Marseilles would be, until further notice, subjected to
+a quarantine of fifteen days in consequence of cholera having made its
+appearance at the latter place. A sailing vessel which arrived from
+Marseilles in the course of the day had to disembark the merchandise
+it brought for Civita Vecchia into barges off the lazaretto, where the
+yellow flag was hoisted over them. This vessel left Marseilles five days
+before the announcement of the quarantine, while the ‘Prince Napoleon’
+of Valery’s Company, passenger and merchandise steamer, which left
+Marseilles only one day before its announcement, was admitted this
+morning to free pratique. Few travellers will come here by sea now.
+
+MARSEILLES, July 24.
+
+Accustomed as we have been of late in Italy to almost hourly bulletins
+of the progress of hostilities, it is a trying condition to be suddenly
+debarred of all intelligence by finding oneself on board a steamer for
+thirty-six hours without touching at any port, as was my case in coming
+here from Civita Vecchia on board the ‘Prince Napoleon.’ But, although
+telegrams were wanting, discussions on the course of events were rife
+on board among the passengers who had embarked at Naples and Civita
+Vecchia, comprising a strong batch of French and Belgian priests
+returning from a pilgrimage to Rome, well supplied with rosaries and
+chaplets blessed by the Pope and facsimiles of the chains of St. Peter.
+Not much sympathy for the Italian cause was shown by these gentlemen
+or the few French and German travellers who, with three or four
+Neapolitans, formed the quarterdeck society; and our Corsican captain
+took no pains to hide his contempt at the dilatory proceedings of
+the Italian fleet at Ancona. We know that the Prussian minister, M.
+d’Usedom, has been recently making strenuous remonstrances at Ferrara
+against the slowness with which the Italian naval and military forces
+were proceeding, while their allies, the Prussians, were already near
+the gates of Vienna; and the conversation of a Prussian gentleman
+on board our steamer, who was connected with that embassy, plainly
+indicated the disappointment felt at Berlin at the rather inefficacious
+nature of the diversion made in Venetia, and on the coast of Istria by
+the army and navy of Victor Emmanuel. He even attributed to his minister
+an expression not very flattering either to the future prospects of
+Italy as resulting from her alliance with Prussia, or to the fidelity of
+the latter in carrying out the terms of it. I do not know whether this
+gentleman intended his anecdote to be taken cum grano salis, but I
+certainly understood him to say that he had deplored to the minister the
+want of vigour and the absence of success accompanying the operations of
+the Italian allies of Prussia, when His Excellency replied: ‘C’est bien
+vrai. Ils nous ont tromps; mais que voulez-vous y faire maintenant? Nous
+aurons le temps de les faire egorger apres.’
+
+It is difficult to suppose that there should exist a preconceived
+intention on the part of Prussia to repay the sacrifices hitherto made,
+although without a very brilliant accompaniment of success, by the
+Italian government in support of the alliance, by making her own
+separate terms with Austria and leaving Italy subsequently exposed to
+the vengeance of the latter, but such would certainly be the inference
+to be drawn from the conversation just quoted.
+
+It was only on arriving in the port of Marseilles, however, that the
+full enmity of most of my travelling companions towards Italy and the
+Italians was manifested. A sailor, the first man who came on board
+before we disembarked, was immediately pounced upon for news, and
+he gave it as indeed nothing less than the destruction, more or less
+complete, of the Italian fleet by that of the Austrians. At this
+astounding intelligence the Prussian burst into a yell of indignation.
+‘Fools! blockheads! miserables! Beaten at sea by an inferior force! Is
+that the way they mean to reconquer Venice by dint of arms? If ever they
+do regain Venetia it will be through the blood of our Brandenburghers
+and Pomeranians, and not their own.’ During this tirade a little old
+Belgian in black, with the chain of St. Peter at his buttonhole by way
+of watchguard, capered off to communicate the grateful news to a group
+of his ecclesiastical fellow-travellers, shrieking out in ecstasy:
+
+‘Rosses, Messieurs! Ces blagueurs d’Italiens ont ete rosses par
+mer, comme ils avaient ete rosses par terre.’ Whereupon the reverend
+gentlemen congratulated each other with nods, and winks, and smiles,
+and sundry fervent squeezes of the hand. The same demonstrations would
+doubtless have been made by the Neapolitan passengers had they belonged
+to the Bourbonic faction, but they happened to be honest traders with
+cases of coral and lava for the Paris market, and therefore they merely
+stood silent and aghast at the fatal news, with their eyes and mouths as
+wide open as possible. I had no sooner got to my hotel than I inquired
+for the latest Paris journal, when the France was handed me, and I
+obtained confirmation in a certain degree of the disaster to the Italian
+fleet narrated by the sailor, although not quite in the same formidable
+proportions.
+
+Before quitting the subject of my fellow-passengers on board the ‘Prince
+Napoleon’ I must mention an anecdote related to me, respecting the state
+of brigandage, by a Russian or German gentleman, who told me he
+was established at Naples. He was complaining of the dangers he had
+occasionally encountered in crossing in a diligence from Naples to
+Foggia on business; and then, speaking of the audacity of brigands in
+general, he told me that last year he saw with his own eyes; in broad
+daylight, two brigands walking about the streets of Naples with messages
+from captured individuals to their relations, mentioning the sums which
+had been demanded for their ransoms. They were unarmed, and in the
+common peasants’ dresses, and whenever they arrived at one of the houses
+to which they were addressed for this purpose, they stopped and opened a
+handkerchief which one of them carried in his hand, and took out an ear,
+examining whether the ticket on it corresponded with the address of the
+house or the name of the resident. There were six ears, all ticketed
+with the names of the original owners in the handkerchief, which were
+gradually dispensed to their families in Naples to stimulate: prompt
+payment of the required ransoms. On my inquiring how it was that the
+police took no notice of such barefaced operations, my informant told me
+that, previous to the arrival of these brigand emissaries in town,
+the chief always wrote to the police authorities warning them against
+interfering with them, as the messengers were always followed by spies
+in plain clothes belonging to the band who would immediately report
+any molestation they might encounter in the discharge of their delicate
+mission, and the infallible result of such molestation would be first
+the putting to death of all the hostages held for ransom; and next,
+the summary execution of several members of gendarmery and police force
+captured in various skirmishes by the brigands, and held as prisoners of
+war.
+
+Such audacity would seem incredible if we had not heard and read of so
+many similar instances of late.
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A very doubtful benefit
+     Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning
+     As becomes them, they do not look ahead
+     Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists
+     Fourth of the Georges
+     Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate
+     Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold
+     It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us
+     Men overweeningly in love with their creations
+     Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike
+     Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer
+     Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied
+     Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction
+     The social world he looked at did not show him heroes
+     The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity
+     Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient
+     We trust them or we crush them
+     We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever
+
+
+
+
+ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}
+
+[This etext was prepared from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company
+edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk]
+
+Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealth
+of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long
+to run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall
+propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their
+station, like the ladies of Arthur’s Court when they were reduced to the
+ordeal of the mantle.
+
+There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition;
+and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of
+cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the
+perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience.
+The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional
+periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the
+sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood
+where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.
+
+Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands more
+than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift
+in the Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startling
+exhibition of the dyer’s hand, if he is without it. People are ready to
+surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides;
+all except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle
+to penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. The
+necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count
+him during centuries in the singular number.
+
+‘C’est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes
+gens,’ Moliere says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be
+over-estimated.
+
+Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character
+unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.
+
+We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is to
+say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which
+if you prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone that has
+finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily
+to be set rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision of
+circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is but
+one step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text which
+cannot be reproduced], the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his
+dislike as an objection in morality.
+
+We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselves
+antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
+excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that
+may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together that
+a wink will shake them.
+
+‘... C’est n’estimer rien qu’estioner tout le monde,’
+
+and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the Comic of
+Comedy.
+
+Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughers
+would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a
+performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in
+our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the
+stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived
+on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above
+the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy
+will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other will
+think that the speaking of it seriously brings us into violent contrast
+with the subject.
+
+Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of the
+Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression
+of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head of
+Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled in
+shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as
+Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles
+was the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began
+similarly as a combative performance, under a licence to deride and
+outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond the
+Aristophanic example: worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is
+more abominable than frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from the
+quality of some of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and
+women who sat through an Athenian Comic play, that they could have had
+small delicacy in other affairs when they had so little in their choice
+of entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for the
+regulated licence of plain speaking proper to the festival of the god,
+and claimed by the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the fact
+that it was a festival in a season of licence, in a city accustomed to
+give ear to the boldest utterance of both sides of a case. However that
+may be, there can be no question that the men and women who sat through
+the acting of Wycherley’s Country Wife were past blushing. Our tenacity
+of national impressions has caused the word theatre since then to prod
+the Puritan nervous system like a satanic instrument; just as one has
+known Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister
+smoke, as though they had a later recollection of the place than the
+lowing herds. Hereditary Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to
+this day, in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It
+has subsided altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it
+is an error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it had
+once good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.
+
+We shall find ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us,
+if we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the
+drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: ‘Comme un point fixe fait remarquer
+l’emportement des autres,’ as Pascal says. And were there more in this
+position, Comic genius would flourish.
+
+Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners might be imaged in the person of
+a blowsy country girl--say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsy,
+who, when at home, ‘never disobeyed her father except in the eating of
+green gooseberries’--transforming to a varnished City madam; with a loud
+laugh and a mincing step; the crazy ancestress of an accountably fallen
+descendant. She bustles prodigiously and is punctually smart in her
+speech, always in a fluster to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogs
+on the Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid the crocodile. If
+the monster catches her, as at times he does, she whips him to a froth,
+so that those who know Dulness only as a thing of ponderousness, shall
+fail to recognise him in that light and airy shape.
+
+When she has frolicked through her five Acts to surprise you with the
+information that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in the world
+outside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry the lady in the
+light of day, it is to the credit of her vivacious nature that she does
+not anticipate your calling her Farce. Five is dignity with a trailing
+robe; whereas one, two, or three Acts would be short skirts, and
+degrading. Advice has been given to householders, that they should
+follow up the shot at a burglar in the dark by hurling the pistol after
+it, so that if the bullet misses, the weapon may strike and assure the
+rascal he has it. The point of her wit is in this fashion supplemented
+by the rattle of her tongue, and effectively, according to the testimony
+of her admirers. Her wit is at once, like steam in an engine, the motive
+force and the warning whistle of her headlong course; and it vanishes
+like the track of steam when she has reached her terminus, never
+troubling the brains afterwards; a merit that it shares with good wine,
+to the joy of the Bacchanalians. As to this wit, it is warlike. In the
+neatest hands it is like the sword of the cavalier in the Mall, quick to
+flash out upon slight provocation, and for a similar office--to wound.
+Commonly its attitude is entirely pugilistic; two blunt fists rallying
+and countering. When harmless, as when the word ‘fool’ occurs, or
+allusions to the state of husband, it has the sound of the smack of
+harlequin’s wand upon clown, and is to the same extent exhilarating.
+Believe that idle empty laughter is the most desirable of recreations,
+and significant Comedy will seem pale and shallow in comparison. Our
+popular idea would be hit by the sculptured group of Laughter holding
+both his sides, while Comedy pummels, by way of tickling him. As to a
+meaning, she holds that it does not conduce to making merry: you might
+as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht. Morality is a duenna to be
+circumvented. This was the view of English Comedy of a sagacious
+essayist, who said that the end of a Comedy would often be the
+commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise again on the
+performers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan,
+behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the
+ladies present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep,
+covertly askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily
+fringed eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.
+
+‘Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.’-TERENCE.
+
+That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called
+Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
+city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the face
+behind it.
+
+Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting
+it as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial
+Comedy, like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra’s
+Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in
+his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
+the realism of those ‘fictitious half-believed personages,’ as he
+calls them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company,
+uncaressable as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have
+now the effect of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing,
+in the morning light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have
+been praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober,
+and of high reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world
+to admire. These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue,
+Peggy, Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last
+year’s clothes in a fashionable fine lady’s wardrobe, and it must be an
+exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
+with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
+Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
+their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors
+in that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open
+to question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced
+the national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our
+nursery-songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is
+unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they
+are no better than they should be: and they will not, when they have
+improved in manners, care much to see themselves as they once were. That
+comes of realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but the
+consequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be said
+of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.
+
+The French make a critical distinction in ce qui remue from ce qui
+emeut--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the
+realistic comedy it is an incessant remuage--no calm, merely bustling
+figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve’s Way of the World, which
+failed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our comedy alive on
+its merits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor much
+quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.
+
+The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
+renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having such
+a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out,
+they know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed
+the Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give his
+characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint in
+raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose
+of the play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and
+softening the object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke
+de Montausier, {3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to
+St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as
+to make it permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human
+creatures to live in society, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of
+one, though he is drawn in light outline, without any forcible human
+colouring. Our English school has not clearly imagined society; and
+of the mind hovering above congregated men and women, it has imagined
+nothing. The critics who praise it for its downrightness, and for
+bringing the situations home to us, as they admiringly say, cannot but
+disapprove of Moliere’s comedy, which appeals to the individual mind to
+perceive and participate in the social. We have splendid tragedies, we
+have the most beautiful of poetic plays, and we have literary comedies
+passingly pleasant to read, and occasionally to see acted. By literary
+comedies, I mean comedies of classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from
+Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence; or else comedies of
+the poet’s personal conception, that have had no model in life, and are
+humorous exaggerations, happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of
+Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger’s Justice Greedy we can
+all of us refer to a type, ‘with fat capon lined’ that has been and
+will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais
+could set him moving with real animation. Probably Justice Greedy would
+be comic to the audience of a country booth and to some of our friends.
+If we have lost our youthful relish for the presentation of characters
+put together to fit a type, we find it hard to put together the
+mechanism of a civil smile at his enumeration of his dishes. Something
+of the same is to be said of Bobadil, swearing ‘by the foot of Pharaoh’;
+with a reservation, for he is made to move faster, and to act. The comic
+of Jonson is a scholar’s excogitation of the comic; that of Massinger a
+moralist’s.
+
+Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the
+comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be
+found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they
+are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great
+poetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my present
+comparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not
+grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of
+society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns,
+Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict
+and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in
+the poetically comic.
+
+His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section.
+One may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him
+and Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. Had
+Shakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period of
+our history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well as
+humanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athens
+was enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand to the composition of
+romantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.
+
+Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles
+thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comic
+poet. He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions,
+the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full
+activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
+extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians,
+sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids,
+inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois
+circle will not furnish it, for the middle class must have the
+brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern;
+otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct.
+Yet, though the King was benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the
+French Court that we are indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind
+in society. For the amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were
+written, which are dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower,
+class than intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were
+sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great
+works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works
+that were perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to
+launch on streams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an
+enemy’s vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais les devots, as the Prince de
+Conde explained the cabal raised against it to the King.
+
+The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy
+in teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
+Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon
+made popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
+exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity
+of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to
+be idiotic in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new
+nonsense; but they had to see the comedy several times before they were
+consoled in their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.
+
+The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
+‘I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,’ he said. It is one
+of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of
+the opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
+applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
+fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the
+world best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading
+us into sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream
+of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows,
+make acute and balanced observers. Moliere is their poet.
+
+Of this class in England, a large body, neither Puritan nor
+Bacchanalian, have a sentimental objection to face the study of the
+actual world. They take up disdain of it, when its truths appear
+humiliating: when the facts are not immediately forced on them, they
+take up the pride of incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that
+they suppose an ideal one. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps
+approve, if it mingles with pathos to shake and elevate the feelings.
+They approve of Satire, because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells
+of carrion, which they are not. But of Comedy they have a shivering
+dread, for Comedy enfolds them with the wretched host of the world,
+huddles them with us all in an ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used
+by any exalted variety as a scourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted
+variety is to come under the calm curious eye of the Comic spirit,
+and be probed for what you are. Men are seen among them, and very
+many cultivated women. You may distinguish them by a favourite phrase:
+‘Surely we are not so bad!’ and the remark: ‘If that is human nature,
+save us from it!’ as if it could be done: but in the peculiar Paradise
+of the wilful people who will not see, the exclamation assumes the
+saving grace.
+
+Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow they
+do not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to be
+shown moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer that it
+does; numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain
+of sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle:
+and Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their
+wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound
+sense. The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in
+it. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though palpably a
+waiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same attribute in
+the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In Congreve’s
+Way of the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the sprightliest male
+figure of English comedy.
+
+But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who
+fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable
+to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of
+caprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimental
+fiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of the Ecole des
+Femmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of Comedy are like women
+of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: they
+seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they use
+their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a
+pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of men
+with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object,
+namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring
+them to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women
+coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw
+together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher
+discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away
+to the nursery. Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the
+eye they cast on life: and they are equally unpopular with our wilful
+English of the hazy region and the ideal that is not to be disturbed.
+
+Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic idea, we lose a large
+audience among our cultivated middle class that we should expect to
+support Comedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as
+the Bacchanalian.
+
+Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idle
+laughers, and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an
+analysis of Wycherley’s Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the
+Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to
+hit the mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the
+Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his
+foot and hair on the pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for
+writers to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable
+when we find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the Comic in narrative,
+producing an elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master
+of the Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching to
+the presentable in farce.
+
+These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but in
+our literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are the
+ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life
+as a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious
+of fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:
+perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the
+society we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock
+images of this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive,
+as well as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look
+abroad with their own eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking
+for themselves. Life, we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something
+strangely mixed; nor is Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation
+from France was noxious; a noble entertainment spoilt to suit the
+wretched taste of a villanous age; and the later imitations of it,
+partly drained of its poison and made decorous, became tiresome,
+notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetual recurring of the same
+situations, owing to the absence of original study and vigour of
+conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the
+fact of our not producing matter for original study, is repeated in
+succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at second
+hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in the manner of
+‘below stairs.’ Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a version of the
+ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at least, in accord
+with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams can be made; but
+it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedy justly
+treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly mishandled,
+the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection upon life. It is
+deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure.
+Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so shrieking a
+scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while
+administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip
+himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous.
+Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin,
+displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her
+better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and
+Belise. He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest
+language, the simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear
+reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate
+reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever.
+The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning
+and interest. {5} His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from
+one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent
+realistic French Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing
+with every pulsation of an organic structure. If Life is likened to the
+comedy of Moliere, there is no scandal in the comparison.
+
+Congreve’s Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his
+own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing,
+and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the
+stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded
+discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the
+curtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of a
+wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets
+a sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might
+be called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect
+portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner
+of her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salient
+as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness
+or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of
+wounds to a woman’s virtue, if she ‘keeps them from air.’ In The Way
+of the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more
+diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here,
+however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not
+ashamed to lay traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for
+the train between certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the
+improprieties to be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere’s.
+That of the first is a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for
+steel; cast for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty when
+out of it. To shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere’s wit is like a
+running brook, with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the
+wood through which its business is to find a way. It does not run in
+search of obstructions, to be noisy over them; but when dead leaves
+and viler substances are heaped along the course, its natural song is
+heightened. Without effort, and with no dazzling flashes of achievement,
+it is full of healing, the wit of good breeding, the wit of wisdom.
+
+‘Genuine humour and true wit,’ says Landor, {7} ‘require a sound and
+capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Fontaine
+are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been
+graver than Pascal. Few men have been wittier.’
+
+To apply the citation of so great a brain as Pascal’s to our countryman
+would be unfair. Congreve had a certain soundness of mind; of capacity,
+in the sense intended by Landor, he had little. Judging him by his wit,
+he performed some happy thrusts, and taking it for genuine, it is a
+surface wit, neither rising from a depth nor flowing from a spring.
+
+‘On voit qu’il se travaille e dire de bons mots.’
+
+He drives the poor hack word, ‘fool,’ as cruelly to the market for wit
+as any of his competitors. Here is an example, that has been held up for
+eulogy:
+
+WITWOUD: He has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, etc. etc.
+
+MIRABEL: A fool, and your brother, Witwoud?
+
+WITWOUD: Ay, ay, my half-brother. My half-brother he is; no nearer, upon
+my honour.
+
+MIRABEL: Then ‘tis possible he may be but half a fool.
+
+By evident preparation. This is a sort of wit one remembers to have
+heard at school, of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been guilty
+of oneself, a trifle later. It was, no doubt, a blaze of intellectual
+fireworks to the bumpkin squire, who came to London to go to the theatre
+and learn manners.
+
+Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force,
+and a succinctness of style peculiar to him. He had correct judgement,
+a correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow range, in
+snapshots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious language. He
+hits the mean of a fine style and a natural in dialogue. He is at
+once precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style you will
+acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a classic,
+and is worthy of treading a measure with Moliere. The Way of the World
+may be read out currently at a first glance, so sure are the accents of
+the emphatic meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness and
+cunning polish of the sentences. You have not to look over them before
+you confide yourself to him; he will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated,
+but was far from surpassing him. The flow of boudoir Billingsgate in
+Lady Wishfort is unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the tongue.
+It spins along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury,
+and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife.
+
+Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine. It is a piece of
+genius in a writer to make a woman’s manner of speech portray her.
+You feel sensible of her presence in every line of her speaking.
+The stipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her fine lady’s
+delicacy, and fine lady’s easy evasions of indelicacy, coquettish
+airs, and playing with irresolution, which in a common maid would be
+bashfulness, until she submits to ‘dwindle into a wife,’ as she says,
+form a picture that lives in the frame, and is in harmony with Mirabel’s
+description of her:
+
+‘Here she comes, i’ faith, full sail, with her fan spread, and her
+streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.’
+
+And, after an interview:
+
+‘Think of you! To think of a whirlwind, though ‘twere in a whirlwind,
+were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind
+and mansion.’
+
+There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant and no other, in her voice,
+when she is encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who is ‘sure she
+has a mind to him’:
+
+MILLAMANT: Are you? I think I have--and the horrid man looks as if he
+thought so too, etc. etc.
+
+One hears the tones, and sees the sketch and colour of the whole scene
+in reading it.
+
+Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitching
+whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the
+lively conversational play of a beautiful mouth.
+
+But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. What she utters adds to her
+personal witchery, and is not further memorable. She is a flashing
+portrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not of
+those who do. In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower class,
+in the proportion that one of Gainsborough’s full-length aristocratic
+women is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair Venetian head.
+
+Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far the
+realistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour; and
+of where it falls short. Celimene is a woman’s mind in movement, armed
+with an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear eyes for the world,
+and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world, and is
+most at home in it. She is attracted to Alceste by her esteem for his
+honesty; she cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of the man is
+diseased.
+
+Rousseau, in his letter to D’Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope,
+discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him
+forth for an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only a
+misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in: he has a touching
+faith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of
+sweet simpleness. Nor is he the principal person of the comedy to which
+he gives a name. He is only passively comic. Celimene is the active
+spirit. While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed upon
+her to make the best of him, and control herself, as much as a witty
+woman, eagerly courted, can do. By appreciating him she practically
+confesses her faultiness, and she is better disposed to meet him
+half.way than he is to bend an inch: only she is une ame de vingt ans,
+the world is pleasant, and if the gilded flies of the Court are silly,
+uncompromising fanatics have their ridiculous features as well. Can she
+abandon the life they make agreeable to her, for a man who will not be
+guided by the common sense of his class; and who insists on plunging
+into one extreme--equal to suicide in her eyes--to avoid another? That
+is the comic question of the Misanthrope. Why will he not continue to
+mix with the world smoothly, appeased by the flattery of her secret and
+really sincere preference of him, and taking his revenge in satire of
+it, as she does from her own not very lofty standard, and will by and by
+do from his more exalted one?
+
+Celimene is worldliness: Alceste is unworldliness. It does not quite
+imply unselfishness; and that is perceived by her shrewd head. Still he
+is a very uncommon figure in her circle, and she esteems him, l’homme
+aux rubans verts, ‘who sometimes diverts but more often horribly vexes
+her,’ as she can say of him when her satirical tongue is on the run.
+Unhappily the soul of truth in him, which wins her esteem, refuses to
+be tamed, or silent, or unsuspicious, and is the perpetual obstacle to
+their good accord. He is that melancholy person, the critic of everybody
+save himself; intensely sensitive to the faults of others, wounded by
+them; in love with his own indubitable honesty, and with his ideal of
+the simpler form of life befitting it: qualities which constitute the
+satirist. He is a Jean Jacques of the Court. His proposal to Celimene
+when he pardons her, that she should follow him in flying humankind, and
+his frenzy of detestation of her at her refusal, are thoroughly in the
+mood of Jean Jacques. He is an impracticable creature of a priceless
+virtue; but Celimene may feel that to fly with him to the desert: that
+is from the Court to the country
+
+‘Ou d’etre homme d’honneur on ait la liberte,’
+
+she is likely to find herself the companion of a starving satirist, like
+that poor princess who ran away with the waiting-man, and when both were
+hungry in the forest, was ordered to give him flesh. She is a fieffee
+coquette, rejoicing in her wit and her attractions, and distinguished by
+her inclination for Alceste in the midst of her many other lovers;
+only she finds it hard to cut them off--what woman with a train does
+not?--and when the exposure of her naughty wit has laid her under
+their rebuke, she will do the utmost she can: she will give her hand to
+honesty, but she cannot quite abandon worldliness. She would be unwise
+if she did.
+
+The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers of plots would see no
+indication of life in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in the
+idea. As with the singing of the sky-lark out of sight, you must love
+the bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest flight of
+the Comic Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand the
+Misanthrope: you must be receptive of the idea of Comedy. And to love
+Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough
+not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.
+
+Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes, said to have been the most
+celebrated of his works. This misogynist is a married man, according to
+the fragment surviving, and is a hater of women through hatred of his
+wife. He generalizes upon them from the example of this lamentable
+adjunct of his fortunes, and seems to have got the worst of it in the
+contest with her, which is like the issue in reality, in the polite
+world. He seems also to have deserved it, which may be as true to the
+copy. But we are unable to say whether the wife was a good voice of her
+sex: or how far Menander in this instance raised the idea of woman
+from the mire it was plunged into by the comic poets, or rather satiric
+dramatists, of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him and
+the New Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly to the abuse, and for
+a diversity, to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame.
+Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a
+certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither
+professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two
+Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for
+tenderness. But the condition of honest women in his day did not permit
+of the freedom of action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and
+consequently it is below our mark of pure Comedy.
+
+Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of
+me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to
+love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently
+given us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn
+of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too
+masterful display of lordly authority, leading to regrets, of the
+kind known to intemperate men who imagined they were fighting with the
+weaker, as the fragments indicate.
+
+Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two,
+the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior in
+comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the
+Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more
+dashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the
+last-named comedy. There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to
+nothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the
+Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum--in this as in the
+preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander’s plays are counted
+by many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times. The
+favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and
+if some of his rivals here and there surpassed him in comic force, and
+out-stripped him in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that
+had previously in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of
+its due reward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic
+poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags
+Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the older
+poet. Their aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite
+dissimilar. But it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian
+beauty of style was the delight of his patrons, should rank Menander
+at the highest. In what degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander,
+whether, as he states of the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus,
+verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes--the description of the last
+words of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral, for instance--remains
+conjectural. For us Terence shares with his master the praise of an
+amenity that is like Elysian speech, equable and ever gracious; like the
+face of the Andrian’s young sister:
+
+‘Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.’
+
+The celebrated ‘flens quam familiariter,’ of which the closest
+rendering grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful
+confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest
+friend, and has but her lover left to her; ‘she turned and flung herself
+on his bosom, weeping as though at home there’: this our instinct
+tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines of
+Terence, compared with the original fragments, show that he embellished
+them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to do other than devote
+his genius to the honest translation of such pieces as the above.
+Menander, then; with him, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and
+Shakespeare and Moliere have this beautiful translucency of language:
+and the study of the comic poets might be recommended, if for that only.
+
+A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander. What we have of him
+in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; {8} and
+is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, the
+Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one.
+The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the comic illumining
+character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, a
+Superstitious, an Incredulous, etc., point to suggestive domestic
+themes.
+
+Terence forwarded manuscript translations from Greece, that suffered
+shipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the way
+home. The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction. So we
+have the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander, with a few
+sketches of plots--one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whom
+we should have liked to contrast with Harpagon--and a multitude of small
+fragments of a sententious cast, fitted for quotation. Enough remains to
+make his greatness felt.
+
+Without undervaluing other writers of Comedy, I think it may be said
+that Menander and Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of the
+feelings and the idea. In each of them there is a conception of
+the Comic that refines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of the
+Heautontimorumenus, and in the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere have
+given the principal types to Comedy hitherto. The Micio and Demea of the
+Adelphi, with their opposing views of the proper management of youth,
+are still alive; the Sganarelles and Arnolphes of the Ecole des Maris
+and the Ecole des Femmes, are not all buried. Tartuffe is the father of
+the hypocrites; Orgon of the dupes; Thraso, of the braggadocios; Alceste
+of the ‘Manlys’; Davus and Syrus of the intriguing valets, the Scapins
+and Figaros. Ladies that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language
+wears the nodding plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to
+Philaminte and Belise of the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty
+women have the tongue of Celimene. The reason is, that these two poets
+idealized upon life: the foundation of their types is real and in the
+quick, but they painted with spiritual strength, which is the solid in
+Art.
+
+The idealistic conceptions of Comedy gives breadth and opportunities of
+daring to Comic genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it creates.
+How, for example, shall an audience be assured that an evident and
+monstrous dupe is actually deceived without being an absolute fool? In
+Le Tartuffe the note of high Comedy strikes when Orgon on his return
+home hears of his idol’s excellent appetite. ‘Le pauvre homme!’ he
+exclaims. He is told that the wife of his bosom has been unwell. ‘Et
+Tartuffe?’ he asks, impatient to hear him spoken of, his mind suffused
+with the thought of Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he
+croons, ‘Le pauvre homme!’ It is the mother’s cry of pitying delight at
+a nurse’s recital of the feats in young animal gluttony of her cherished
+infant. After this masterstroke of the Comic, you not only put faith in
+Orgon’s roseate prepossession, you share it with him by comic sympathy,
+and can listen with no more than a tremble of the laughing muscles to
+the instance he gives of the sublime humanity of Tartuffe:
+
+‘Un rien presque suffit pour le scandaliser, Jusque-le, qu’il se vint
+l’autre jour accuser D’avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere, Et de
+l’avoir tuee avec trop de colere.’
+
+And to have killed it too wrathfully! Translating Moliere is like
+humming an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist of
+the pure tones without flourish.
+
+Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in Madame Pernelle, incredulous
+of the revelations which have at last opened his own besotted eyes, is a
+scene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell previously cast on the
+mind. There we feel the power of the poet’s creation; and in the sharp
+light of that sudden turn the humanity is livelier than any realistic
+work can make it.
+
+Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in
+Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola. The Frate Timoteo of
+this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue
+with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment.
+Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian priestly pose.
+
+DONNA: Credete voi, che’l Turco passi questo anno in Italia?
+
+F. TIM.: Se voi non fate orazione, si.
+
+Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries,
+cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian
+gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of the
+Republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian Scribe in style.
+
+The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished the
+idea of the Menteur to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believe
+that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie. There
+is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity. Spanish Comedy is
+generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of
+marionnettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troop of the corps
+de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an
+animated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, something other than the true
+idea of Comedy. Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as
+the Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another, famine-stricken; and
+all the tragic elements are on the stage. Don Juan is a comic character
+that sends souls flying: nor does the humour of the breaking of a dozen
+women’s hearts conciliate the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood.
+
+German attempts at Comedy remind one vividly of Heine’s image of his
+country in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, with
+a sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverse
+effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor
+old Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his
+left, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of the
+German Comic in the contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light of
+the Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of the
+man, but no more.
+
+The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their
+Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather
+monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of
+unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar
+humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet
+attained to: sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there
+a Volkslied or Marchen shows a national aptitude for stout animal
+laughter; and we see that the literature is built on it, which is
+hopeful so far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the
+Broad Grin, that seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and
+reaches its perfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers
+at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of ‘the good Rhine wine,’
+and be of German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness
+of the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and
+the poor voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account
+for the absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land. I
+shall speak of it again in the second section of this lecture.
+
+Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely
+susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where the
+veil is over women’s-faces, you cannot have society, without which the
+senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters of
+grossness to slake its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse than
+Italians--much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their system
+of treating women is worse.
+
+M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master
+of critical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arab
+gentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficult
+creatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab spoke in praise of
+many good results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and
+the charm of conversing with them. He was questioned why his countrymen
+took no measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty. He
+jumped out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the
+sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid
+conceit, with affected humility of manner: ‘YOU can look on them without
+perturbation--but WE!’... And after this profoundly comic interjection,
+he added, in deep tones, ‘The very face of a woman!’ Our representative
+of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab’s pride of
+inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the
+civilizing medium of his race.
+
+There has been fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization where
+Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality
+of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb the
+somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the Comic
+Muse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests
+in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let them look with their
+clearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that where they have
+no social freedom, Comedy is absent: where they are household drudges,
+the form of Comedy is primitive: where they are tolerably independent,
+but uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental
+version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if they
+listened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds
+are undirected by the Comic Muse: as the sentimental man, to his
+astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could
+receive a lesson. But where women are on the road to an equal footing
+with men, in attainments and in liberty--in what they have won
+for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair
+civilization--there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to
+the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is,
+as it would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions, the wisest of
+delightful companions.
+
+Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will be
+acknowledged that in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea, we
+are losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly perpetually
+sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure,
+with many whims, many strange ailments and strange doctors. Plenty of
+common-sense is in the world to thrust her back when she pretends to
+empire. But the first-born of common-sense, the vigilant Comic, which is
+the genius of thoughtful laughter, which would readily extinguish her at
+the outset, is not serving as a public advocate.
+
+You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under pressure
+of some pertinacious piece of light-headedness, to grow impatient and
+angry. That is a sign of the absence, or at least of the dormancy, of
+the Comic idea. For Folly is the natural prey of the Comic, known to
+it in all her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the
+springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her
+chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no
+rest.
+
+Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by comic
+intelligence. What is it but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally
+lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane? If we do not
+feign when we say that we despise Folly, we shut the brain. There is
+a disdainful attitude in the presence of Folly, partaking of the
+foolishness to Comic perception: and anger is not much less foolish than
+disdain. The struggle we have to conduct is essence against essence. Let
+no one doubt of the sequel when this emanation of what is firmest in us
+is launched to strike down the daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism:
+such being Folly’s parentage, when it is respectable.
+
+Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and carried on
+too ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the attack. She has time
+to get behind entrenchments. She is ready to stand a siege, before the
+heavily armed man of science and the writer of the leading article or
+elaborate essay have primed their big guns. It should be remembered that
+she has charms for the multitude; and an English multitude seeing her
+make a gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, certainly
+willing to lend her a cheer. Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hire
+her own man of science, her own organ in the Press. If ultimately she is
+cast out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks.
+She can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought
+sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn rather gloomily,
+after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our midst able
+men and men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual
+navigation. Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the
+poison of delusion while Folly is passing from the state of vapour to
+substantial form.
+
+O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,
+Moliere! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when
+you do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a
+renovating air--the South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.
+
+No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers. They
+abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in
+the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.
+
+But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and
+the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public
+life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.
+
+The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using
+humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables
+to treat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of a
+kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.
+
+A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced
+age. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to
+the period of his death. There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he
+was a man of profound egoism. Hence an argument arose, and was warmly
+sustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world of
+troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband their
+strength for the sake of living on. Can it be possible, the argument
+ran, for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of a
+hundred? Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him to
+the oak of the forest--a venerable comparison.
+
+The argument was conducted on both sides with spirit and earnestness,
+lightened here and there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic playful,
+reminding one of the serious pursuit of their fun by truant boys, that
+are assured they are out of the eye of their master, and now and then
+indulge in an imitation of him. And well might it be supposed that the
+Comic idea was asleep, not overlooking them! It resolved at last
+to this, that either Duke Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity
+in clinging to life so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a
+resistance to the enemy. As one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth
+is glad to get out again at the entrance, the argument ran about to
+conclude with its commencement.
+
+Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and particularly
+the argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of THE CENTENARIAN,
+with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubborn
+vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question
+for contention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should
+die, to the identical minute, that he may preserve the respect of
+his fellows, followed by a systematic attempt to make an accurate
+measurement in parallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party, and
+a string of yawns by the other, of the veteran’s power of enduring
+life, and our capacity for enduring HIM, with tremendous pulling on both
+sides.
+
+Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the
+disputants like very lightning? There are questions, as well as persons,
+that only the Comic can fitly touch.
+
+Aristophanes would probably have crowned the ancient tree, with the
+consolatory observation to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs of
+the Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness of coming of a
+strong stock. The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have been aimed
+at the disputants. For the sole ground of the argument was the old man’s
+character, and sophists are not needed to demonstrate that we can very
+soon have too much of a bad thing. A Centenarian does not necessarily
+provoke the Comic idea, nor does the corpse of a duke. It is not
+provoked in the order of nature, until we draw its penetrating
+attentiveness to some circumstance with which we have been mixing our
+private interests, or our speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensible
+to the Comic, has the privilege of arousing it; and the laying of a dull
+finger on matters of human life is the surest method of establishing
+electrical communications with a battery of laughter--where the Comic
+idea is prevalent.
+
+But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, and we had an Aristophanes
+to barb and wing it, we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers now
+pouring forth on us like public fountains would be cut short in the
+street and left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters thrust into
+their mouths. We should throw off incubus, our dreadful familiar--by
+some called boredom--whom it is our present humiliation to be just alive
+enough to loathe, never quick enough to foil. There would be a bright
+and positive, clear Hellenic perception of facts. The vapours of
+Unreason and Sentimentalism would be blown away before they were
+productive. Where would Pessimist and Optimist be? They would in any
+case have a diminished audience. Yet possibly the change of despots,
+from good-natured old obtuseness to keen-edged intelligence, which is by
+nature merciless, would be more than we could bear. The rupture of the
+link between dull people, consisting in the fraternal agreement that
+something is too clever for them, and a shot beyond them, is not to
+be thought of lightly; for, slender though the link may seem, it is
+equivalent to a cement forming a concrete of dense cohesion, very
+desirable in the estimation of the statesman.
+
+A political Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchic
+licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to
+have him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might
+be with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to
+make them spin along more briskly.
+
+He hated with the politician’s fervour the sophist who corrupted
+simplicity of thought, the poet who destroyed purity of style, the
+demagogue, ‘the saw-toothed monster,’ who, as he conceived, chicaned
+the mob, and he held his own against them by strength of laughter, until
+fines, the curtailing of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately
+the ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the expense of the
+chorus, threw him altogether on dialogue, and brought him under the law.
+After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the
+men of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it;
+and that he was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military
+coxcombry, and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He had
+the Comic poet’s gift of common-sense--which does not always include
+political intelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the
+Old Comedy turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon,
+the disciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten
+Thousand. Aristophanes might say that if his warnings had been followed
+there would have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition
+under Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could
+arrest it. To gaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural
+conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or
+wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and bearing in mind the
+instruments he played on and the audience he had to win, there is an
+idea in his comedies: it is the Idea of Good Citizenship.
+
+He is not likely to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an
+unapproachable. Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle:
+
+‘But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.’
+
+Aristophanes was ‘profane,’ under satiric direction, unlike his rivals
+Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to
+believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of
+Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness,
+as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women,
+which he did not. He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain
+greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount
+Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give
+him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the
+Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of
+Grattan, before he is in motion.
+
+But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of minors
+are vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a
+country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with
+enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a
+Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I
+think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.
+This laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer,
+using laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple,
+the laughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he
+speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. And
+he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly
+national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at
+times no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features
+of our common likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method
+were studied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be
+revived.
+
+Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with
+this primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the
+grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They
+have the basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. They
+cordially dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though
+it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros sel, nor the polished
+Frenchman’s mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a
+monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary
+about, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the
+pensive monarch surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own,
+they look so. And they are given to looking in the glass. They must see
+that something ails them. How much even the better order of them will
+endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting
+them is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age,
+where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception
+shuffled the guests and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact
+estimate of the strength of each one printed on them: and still this
+house continued to be the most popular in England; nor did the lady ever
+appear in print or on the boards as the comic type that she was.
+
+It has been suggested that they have not yet spiritually comprehended
+the signification of living in society; for who are cheerfuller, brisker
+of wit, in the fields, and as explorers, colonisers, backwoodsmen?
+They are happy in rough exercise, and also in complete repose. The
+intermediate condition, when they are called upon to talk to one
+another, upon other than affairs of business or their hobbies, reveals
+them wearing a curious look of vacancy, as it were the socket of an eye
+wanting. The Comic is perpetually springing up in social life, and, it
+oppresses them from not being perceived.
+
+Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, who happens to have enrolled
+himself in a Burial Company, politely entreats the others to inscribe
+their names as shareholders, expatiating on the advantages accruing to
+them in the event of their very possible speedy death, the salubrity
+of the site, the aptitude of the soil for a quick consumption of their
+remains, etc.; and they drink sadness from the incongruous man, and
+conceive indigestion, not seeing him in a sharply defined light, that
+would bid them taste the comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newly
+elected member of our Parliament celebrates his arrival at eminence by
+the publication of a book on cab-fares, dedicated to a beloved female
+relative deceased, and the comment on it is the word ‘Indeed.’ But,
+merely for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon scene of yesterday in
+the hunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, having broken his
+collar-bone, trots away very soon after, against medical interdict,
+half put together in splinters, to the most distant meet of his
+neighbourhood, sure of escaping his doctor, who is the first person he
+encounters. ‘I came here purposely to avoid you,’ says the patient. ‘I
+came here purposely to take care of you,’ says the doctor. Off they
+go, and come to a swollen brook. The patient clears it handsomely: the
+doctor tumbles in. All the field are alive with the heartiest relish of
+every incident and every cross-light on it; and dull would the man have
+been thought who had not his word to say about it when riding home.
+
+In our prose literature we have had delightful Comic writers. Besides
+Fielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr. Elton
+might walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged for them.
+Galt’s neglected novels have some characters and strokes of shrewd
+comedy. In our poetic literature the comic is delicate and graceful
+above the touch of Italian and French. Generally, however, the English
+elect excel in satire, and they are noble humourists. The national
+disposition is for hard-hitting, with a moral purpose to sanction it; or
+for a rosy, sometimes a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in its verging
+upon tenderness, and with a singular attraction for thick-headedness, to
+decorate it with asses’ ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. But
+the Comic is a different spirit.
+
+You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to
+detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and
+more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and
+accepting the correction their image of you proposes.
+
+Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die
+for the other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right
+moment; but if the wits were sufficiently quick for them to perceive
+that they are in a comic situation, as affectionate couples must be
+when they quarrel, they would not wait for the moon or the almanac, or
+a Dorine, to bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, that they
+should join hands and lips.
+
+If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you
+are slipping into the grasp of Satire.
+
+If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod,
+to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under
+a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious
+whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of Irony.
+
+If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a
+smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to
+your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you
+expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.
+
+The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening
+and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be
+confounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them, differing from
+satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and
+from humour, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating a
+broader than the range of this bustling world to them.
+
+Fielding’s Jonathan Wild presents a case of this peculiar distinction,
+when that man of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of a
+trial in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of
+the opposite party; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it is
+immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own ‘party’
+should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into villains’
+ratiocination. {9} And the Comic is not cancelled though we should
+suppose Jonathan to be giving play to his humour. I may have dreamed
+this or had it suggested to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I do
+not find it.
+
+Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who is ever certain of his
+condemnation by the opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, and
+will be satiric.
+
+The look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic. His method
+of correcting the sentimental writer is a mixture of the comic and the
+humorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour. But both the conception
+and the presentation of Alceste and of Tartuffe, of Celimene and
+Philaminte, are purely comic, addressed to the intellect: there is no
+humour in them, and they refresh the intellect they quicken to detect
+their comedy, by force of the contrast they offer between themselves and
+the wiser world about them; that is to say, society, or that assemblage
+of minds whereof the Comic spirit has its origin.
+
+Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poetic satire that we
+have example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong comic
+sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which
+is directly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy, judged by
+philosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency. ‘So
+bald er philosophirt ist er ein Kind,’ Goethe says of him. Carlyle sees
+him in this comic light, treats him in the humorous manner.
+
+The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a
+storage of bile.
+
+The Ironeist is one thing or another, according to his caprice. Irony is
+the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object,
+or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting
+to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its
+intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of
+ambiguity.
+
+The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the
+feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But
+the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of
+the Comic poet.
+
+Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him.
+The juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
+opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the
+two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound
+in one by laughter. The knight’s great aims and constant mishaps, his
+chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along
+the highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks
+out of derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking
+through the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in
+the loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
+narrative.
+
+The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy
+in his laughter.
+
+Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our
+description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of
+festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under
+the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear
+solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and
+infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged
+thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the
+lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. The
+comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid
+comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. But
+ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will fly
+straight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will
+also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful
+choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of
+his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often
+wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon
+History or Society are given to be capricious. They are, as in the
+case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings
+are primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the other hand, is an
+interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity
+kept in restraint. The French lay marked stress on mesure et gout,
+and they own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple
+justness and taste. We can teach them many things; they can teach us in
+this.
+
+The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the
+society he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of
+men’s intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world
+upon their characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or
+surroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his work
+and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober
+estimate of our civilized qualities. The aim and business of the Comic
+poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view
+taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile
+to sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of
+laughter. Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to
+see it in life. Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself
+than that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to
+Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness
+in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.
+Caleb Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble
+household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character. In
+the case of ‘poor relatives,’ on the other hand, it is the rich, whom
+they perplex, that are really comic; and to laugh at the former,
+not seeing the comedy of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision.
+Humourist and Satirist frequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit
+of the grotesque, to the exclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting
+moment in the history of the Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of
+Europe burst into tears at a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell’s on the
+cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as
+their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into
+action, it would be farcical. It is too gross for Comedy.
+
+Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead
+of our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the
+Comic idea. But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect. Most
+of doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any
+intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea of
+Comedy.
+
+The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter
+of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile;
+often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind
+directs it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.
+
+One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I
+take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of
+true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
+
+If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and
+it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when
+contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the
+light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;
+never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached
+to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features
+are studied. It has the sage’s brows, and the sunny malice of a faun
+lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness
+of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was
+once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress
+lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the
+order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind,
+mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one
+of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having
+leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness.
+Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and
+shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of
+proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical,
+pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived
+or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities,
+congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting
+dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and
+violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration
+one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice;
+are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the
+bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique
+light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the
+Comic Spirit.
+
+Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to
+deny the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working
+conjunction.
+
+You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded
+in common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the
+Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation.
+You will, in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light,
+yourself illuminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and
+doomed quarry of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its presence and
+to see it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you
+in what you are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of
+satirical heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share
+the sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely
+demonstrate their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himself
+on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de
+l’Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of
+studies in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high
+fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we
+know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane.
+Look there for your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are
+one of this our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it,
+and would not if you could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not
+overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride
+is greatly moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you
+from worlds of imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not
+hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it:
+Shakespeare overflows: there is a mild moon’s ray of it (pale with
+super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet)
+in Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half
+obscuring Cowper. It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that,
+by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office:
+and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils
+the lamp: as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body
+of Moliere: at which the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.
+
+We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the
+worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much
+assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its
+appearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.
+Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and
+the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by
+the Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree
+that it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when
+one of the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like
+reassuring daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that
+you take it in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air
+for food. That which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better
+part; let that go to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs.
+Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they will retain the ideas
+of the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their
+garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The
+boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice
+friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions. Such
+treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness
+to the comic laugh is a step in civilization. To shrink from being an
+object of it is a step in cultivation. We know the degree of refinement
+in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but
+we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished by the great
+breadth of their power of laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is
+refined by that love to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it
+may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have risen to the height
+of Moliere. Embrace them both, and you have the whole scale of laughter
+in your breast. Nothing in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene
+in The Frogs, when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their thrashings from
+the hands of businesslike OEacus, to discover which is the divinity
+of the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and
+each, under the obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his
+horrible bellow--the god’s iou--iou being the lustier--means only
+the stopping of a sneeze, or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an
+invocation to some deity: and the slave contrives that the god shall
+get the bigger lot of blows. Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don
+Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine
+Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter. But it is not
+illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere’s laughter, in
+his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as colour to
+our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible laughter;
+but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit. They quicken the
+mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the mind accepts
+them because they are clear interpretations of certain chapters of the
+Book lying open before us all. Between these two stand Shakespeare and
+Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in one; with much of
+the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere’s delicacy.
+
+The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
+harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with
+a sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your
+habitation to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among
+powerful brains too. You will not find poets--or but a stray one,
+over-worshipped. You will find learned men undoubtedly, professors,
+reputed philosophers, and illustrious dilettanti. They have in them,
+perhaps, every element composing light, except the Comic. They read
+verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not under
+that vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present,
+which we have taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance; they
+speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip
+in grossness, is usually a form of pugnacity.
+
+Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of
+the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in
+the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of
+the rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an
+irritable personality. A very learned English professor crushed an
+argument in a political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily:
+‘Are you aware, sir, that I am a philologer?’
+
+The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the
+professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may
+become their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at
+least a fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society
+named polite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be
+petting a bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a
+spiritualist: ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is
+besides addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of
+its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their
+attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from
+giddiness and preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better
+out of a circle that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by
+abandoning, and always confuses. The school that teaches gently what
+peril there is lest a cultivated head should still be coxcomb’s, and the
+collisions which may befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more
+to be recommended than the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with
+material.
+
+Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops
+of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not
+covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and
+cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid
+a visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was
+introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took
+so cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first
+professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
+esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the
+vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude
+of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless
+admirer the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty
+caballeros:--‘Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
+Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case
+I stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore
+impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,
+hypocrite!’ The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it
+is given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was
+driven forth.
+
+Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The
+Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
+not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in
+Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic
+training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,
+nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them
+to smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when they
+are excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance,
+they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry because
+one of German blood has been convicted of crime in a foreign country.
+They are acute critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy.
+Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La
+Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin
+and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities
+of the caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the
+difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.
+
+The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded
+in his graces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a
+marching army, in defence of a good case or a bad--a big or a little.
+His irony is a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a
+blast from a dragon’s mouth. He must and will be Titan. He stamps his
+foe underfoot, and is astonished that the creature is not dead, but
+stinging; for, in truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a
+god.
+
+When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontier
+at the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L’ami Fritz at the Theatre
+Francais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which
+is grimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of the
+play--when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of character
+tells. They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, good
+speculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. That so
+gifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collects
+the waters of laughter to make the wells, should show at a disadvantage,
+I hold for a proof, instructive to us, that the discipline of the comic
+spirit is needful to their growth. We see what they can reach to in that
+great figure of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing people;
+they are conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and
+at intervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with
+their women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and
+be shapelier. Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will then come to
+them to cut some figures out of the block, show them the mirror, enliven
+and irradiate the social intelligence.
+
+Modern French comedy is commendable for the directness of the study
+of actual life, as far as that, which is but the early step in such a
+scholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring the picture.
+A consequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision
+of the writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters.
+The Muse of most of them is an Aventuriere. She is clever, and a certain
+diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object of
+this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either,
+having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a nostalgie de
+la boue, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed in
+her course of deception when she is about to gain her end. A very good,
+innocent young man is her victim, or a very astute, goodish young man
+obstructs her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion of the
+decorous world by knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted in the
+progress of Aventurieres downward; he will not help them to ascend. The
+world is with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension they
+aspire to; but what sort of a figure is he? The triumph of a candid
+realism is to show him no hero. You are to admire him (for it must be
+supposed that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as a credibly
+living young man; no better, only a little firmer and shrewder, than the
+rest. If, however, you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, you
+are likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case to plead against
+him. True, and the author has not said anything to the contrary; he has
+but painted from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections of
+unphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen he has presented in the
+bright and narrow circle of a spy-glass.
+
+I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but the
+Comic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and
+portable, and that is an advantage. There is a benefit to men in taking
+the lessons of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and to
+writers it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme, and even
+if they have no idea to present, they must prove that they have made the
+public sit to them before the sitting to see the picture. And writing
+for the stage would be a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style,
+into which some great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a
+definite plan, and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoric
+market, in the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories and in
+journalism; attached to the machinery forcing perishable matter on a
+public that swallows voraciously and groans; might, with encouragement,
+be attending to the study of art in literature. Our critics appear to
+be fascinated by the quaintness of our public, as the world is when
+our beast-garden has a new importation of magnitude, and the creatures
+appetite is reverently consulted. They stipulate for a writer’s
+popularity before they will do much more than take the position of
+umpires to record his failure or success. Now the pig supplies the most
+popular of dishes, but it is not accounted the most honoured of animals,
+unless it be by the cottager. Our public might surely be led to try
+other, perhaps finer, meat. It has good taste in song. It might be
+taught as justly, on the whole, and the sooner when the cottager’s view
+of the feast shall cease to be the humble one of our literary critics,
+to extend this capacity for delicate choosing in the direction of the
+matter arousing laughter.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1} A lecture delivered at the London Institution, February 1st, 1877.
+
+{2} Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in THE OLD
+BACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to one
+another.
+
+{3} Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows the
+foundation of the character of Alceste.
+
+{4} See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter I, for Fielding’s opinion of
+our Comedy. But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in the
+quasi-philosophical bathetic.
+
+{5} Femmes Savantes:
+
+BELISE: Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la grammaire?
+
+MARTINE: Qui parle d’offenser grand’mere ni grand-pere?’
+
+The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth of a rustic.
+
+{6} Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model of Iago, as by
+the hand of an enterprising urchin. He apostrophizes his ‘invention’
+repeatedly. ‘Thanks, my invention.’ He hits on an invention, to say:
+‘Was it my brain or Providence? no matter which.’ It is no matter which,
+but it was not his brain.
+
+{7} Imaginary Conversations: Alfieri and the Jew Salomon.
+
+{8} Terence did not please the rough old conservative Romans; they liked
+Plautus better, and the recurring mention of the vetus poeta in
+his prologues, who plagued him with the crusty critical view of his
+productions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader.
+
+{9} The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph defends himself: ‘YOUR
+VIRTUE! I shall never survive it!’ etc., is another instance.--Joseph
+Andrews. Also that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth: ‘But such
+are the friendships of women.’--Amelia.
+
+
+
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS FOR THE PG SHORT WORKS OF MEREDITH:
+
+     A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it
+     A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans
+     A generous enemy is a friend on the wrong side
+     A very doubtful benefit
+     A great oration may be a sedative
+     A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle
+     Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below
+     Adversary at once offensive and helpless provokes brutality
+     All are friends who sit at table
+     All flattery is at somebody’s expense
+     Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning
+     As becomes them, they do not look ahead
+     As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos
+     Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
+     Be what you seem, my little one
+     Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues
+     Bed was a rock of refuge and fortified defence
+     But I leave it to you
+     Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
+     Causes him to be popularly weighed
+     Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists
+     Civil tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine
+     Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite
+     Dangerous things are uttered after the third glass
+     Distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked
+     Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war
+     Eccentric behaviour in trifles
+     Everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach
+     Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality
+     Excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony
+     Face betokening the perpetual smack of lemon
+     Fourth of the Georges
+     Generally he noticed nothing
+     Gentleman in a good state of preservation
+     Good jokes are not always good policy
+     Gratitude never was a woman’s gift
+     Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance
+     Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate
+     His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody
+     Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold
+     I who respect the state of marriage by refusing
+     I make a point of never recommending my own house
+     I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe
+     I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate
+     If I do not speak of payment
+     Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind
+     In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt
+     Indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked
+     Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies?
+     Intellectual contempt of easy dupes
+     Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples
+     Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?
+     It was harder to be near and not close
+     It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us
+     Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men
+     Lend him your own generosity
+     Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy
+     Loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off
+     Men love to boast of things nobody else has seen
+     Men overweeningly in love with their creations
+     Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
+     Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike
+     Nature is not of necessity always roaring
+     Naughtily Australian and kangarooly
+     Never reckon on womankind for a wise act
+     No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters
+     Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer
+     Not in love--She was only not unwilling to be in love
+     Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted
+     Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
+     Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife
+     Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant
+     Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied
+     Pitiful conceit in men
+     Primitive appetite for noise
+     Rapture of obliviousness
+     Rejoicing they have in their common agreement
+     Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
+     Rich and poor ‘s all right, if I’m rich and you’re poor
+     Self-incense
+     Self-worship, which is often self-distrust
+     She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
+     She sought, by looking hard, to understand it better
+     She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time
+     She began to feel that this was life in earnest
+     She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas
+     Sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes
+     So are great deeds judged when the danger’s past (as easy)
+     Soft slumber of a strength never yet called forth
+     Spare me that word “female” as long as you live
+     Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction
+     Sunning itself in the glass of Envy
+     Suspects all young men and most young women
+     Suspicion was her best witness
+     Sweet treasure before which lies a dragon sleeping
+     Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation
+     That which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
+     The intricate, which she takes for the infinite
+     The social world he looked at did not show him heroes
+     The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost
+     The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity
+     The mildness of assured dictatorship
+     Their idol pitched before them on the floor
+     They miss their pleasure in pursuing it
+     This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure
+     Tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back
+     Two principal roads by which poor sinners come to a conscience
+     Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient
+     We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever
+     We like well whatso we have done good work for
+     We trust them or we crush them
+     Weak reeds who are easily vanquished and never overcome
+     Weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a full one
+     Were I chained, For liberty I would sell liberty
+     When we see our veterans tottering to their fall
+     When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her
+     Wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness
+     Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land
+     Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man
+     Your devotion craves an enormous exchange
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Entire Short Works of George
+Meredith, by George Meredith
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