'■-,>. \^_Li,'~2ic, ■■••^* >i* "-i.? '-i. ?LL mori^ig-ilicic hnu been a little gather- ing of people outside the gate. It was the ' day on which Mr. Meredith was to be, as they say, buried. He had been, as they say, cremated. The funeral coach CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR 5006.D5 1897a Diana of the crossways, a novel 3 1924 014 153 161 :5oob DIANA OF THE CROSSWATS m Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 41 531 61 M DIANA OF THE CR088WAYS ^ m&el BY GEORGE MEREDITH REVISED EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY GEORGE MEREDITH John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. INSCRIBED TO FREDERICK POLLOCK CONTENTS OHAP. PAOB I. OP DIARIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEROINE 1 II. AN IRISH BALL 17 m. THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN SMITH 28 IV. CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO 37 V. CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE 49 VI. THE COUPLE 58 VII. THE CRISIS 66 VIII. IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN LEARN TO RESPECT ONE ANOTHER 74 IX. SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER 87 X. THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT 95 XI. RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD , . . 100 XII. BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA 107 XIII. TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION. . 114 Viil CONTENTS CHAP. XIV. GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND OF HER FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP ^^3 XV. INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER .... 136 XVI. TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING 1^^ XVII. "THE PRINCESS EGERIA " 160 XVIII. THE AUTHORESS 1'^ XIX. A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOON- LIGHT 1^8 XX. DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH 187 XXI. <'THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE" 196 XXII. BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER: THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND 208 XXIII. RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE world's GOOD WOMEN 217 XXIV. INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION 226 XXV. ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OP TURNINGS 232 XXVI. IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OP LESSONS 241 XXVII. CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION. 254 XXVIII. DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OP THE TASK FOR DIANA 269 XXIX. SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY .... 281 XXX. IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE 295 XXXI. A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN INTRUSION OP THE LOVE- GOD 303 CONTENTS ix GHAF. fASB XXXII. WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CR0SSWAY8 309 XXXIII. EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OP A MINE IN A NEWS- PAPER ARTICLE 315 XXXIV. IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIM- INAL'S JUDGE MAY BE LOVE'S CRIMINAL . . 321 XXXV. REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER TIME OF TRIUMPH . 328 XXXVI. IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLBSSNE8S OP WOMEN WITH BRAINS 337 XXXVII. AN EXHIBITION OP SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY 347 XXXVIII. CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT 357 XXXIX. OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN ANTI- CLIMAX 363 XL. IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THRICE WHIMSICAL . 374 XLI. CONTAINS A REVELATION OP THE ORIGIN OP THE TIGRESS IN DIANA 384 XXII. THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE POB LIBERTY AND BUN INTO HARNESS . . . 392 XLIII. NUPTIAL CHAPTER ; AND OF HOW A BARELY WILL- ING WOMAN WAS LED TO BLOOM WITH THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT 402 A lady of high distinction for wit and beauty, the daughter of an illustrious Irish House, came under the shadow of a calumny. It has latterly been examined and exposed as baseless. The story of '■'■Diana of the Crossways" is to be read as fiction. DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS CHAPTER I OP DIAEIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEEOINE Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then be- coming-famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her. It is otherwise in his case : and a general fling at the sex we may deem pardonable, for doing, as little harm to womankind as the stone of an urchin cast upon the bosom of mother Earth; though men must look some day to have it returned to them, which is a certainty;, — and indeed full surely will our idle-handed youngster too, in his riper season, be heard complaining of a strange assault of wanton missiles, coming on him he knows not whence; for we are all of us distinctly marked to get back what we give, even from th« thing named inanimate nature. The "Leaves feom the Diary of Henry Wilmees" are studded with examples of the dinner-table wit of the time, not always worth quotation twice; for smart remarks have their measured distances, many requiring to be a brule pourpoint, or within throw of the pistol, to make it hit; in other words, the majority of them are addressed directly to our muscular system, and they have no effect when we stand beyond the range. On the contrary, they reflect sombrely on the springs of hilarity in the genera- tion preceding us ; — with due reserve of credit, of course, 1 2 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS to an animal vivaciousness that seems to have wanted so small an incitement. Our old yeomanry farmers returning to their beds over ferny commons under bright moonlight from a neighbour's harvest-home, eased their bubbling breasts with a ready roar not unakin to it. _ Still the promptness to laugh is an excellent progenitorial founda- tion for the wit to come in a people ; and undoubtedly the diarial record of an imputed piece of wit is witness to the spouting of laughter. This should comfort us while we skim the sparkling passages of the "Leaves." When a nation has acknowledged that it is as yet but in the fisti- cuff stage of the art of condensing our purest sense to golden sentences , a readier appreciation will be extended to the gift: which is to strike not the dazzled eyes, the unantieipating nose, the ribs, the sides, and stun us, twirl us, hoodwink, mystify, tickle and twitch, by dexterities of lingual sparring and shufling, but to strike roots in the mind, the Hesperides of good things. We shall then set a price on the "unusual combination." A witty woman is a treasure ; a witty Beauty is a power. Has she actual beauty, actual wit? — not simply a tidal material beauty that passes current any pretty flippancy or staggering pretentiousness? Grant the combination, she will appear a veritable queen of her period, fit for homage ; at least meriting a disposition to believe the best of her, in the teeth of foul rumour; because the well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the precious drops of right reason, wisdom's lightning ; and no soul possess- ing and dispensing it can justly be a target for the world, however well armed the world confronting her. Our tem- porary world, that Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin in one, supposes it possible for a woman to be mentally active up to the point of spiritual clarity and also fleshly vile ; a guide to life and a biter at the fruits of death ; both open mind and hypocrite. It has not yet been taught to appreciate a quality certifying to sound citizenship as authoritatively as acres of land in fee simple, or coffers of bonds, shares and stocks, and a more imperishable guaran- tee. The multitude of evil reports which it takes for proof, are marshalled against her without question of the nature of the victim, her temptress beauty being a suffi- OP DIAEIES AND DIAEISTS 3 ciently presumptive delinquent. It does not pretend to know t£e whole, or naked body of the facts; it knows enough for its fumy dubiousness; and excepting the sen- timental of men, a rocket-headed horde, ever at the heels of fair faces for ignition, and up starring away at a hint of tearfulness ; — excepting further by chance a solid champion man, or some generous woman capable of faith in the pelted solitary of her sex, our temporary world blows direct East on her shivering person. The scandal is warrant for that; the circumstances of the scandal emphasize the warrant. And how clever she is ! Clever- ness is an attribute of the selecter missionary lieutenants of Satan. We pray to be defended from her cleverness : she flashes bits of speech that catch men in their unguarded corner. The wary stuff their ears, the stolid bid her best sayings rebound on her reputation. Nevertheless the world, as Christian, remembers its professions, and a por- tion of it joins the burly in morals by extending to her a rough old charitable mercifulness ; better than sentimental ointment, but the heaviest blow she has to bear, to a char- acter swimming for life. That the lady in question was much quoted, the Diaries and Memoirs testify. Hearsay as well as hearing was at work to produce the abundance; and it was a novelty in England, where (in company) the men are the pointed talkers, and the women conversationally fair Circassians. They are, or they know that they should be ; it comes to the same. Happily our civilization has not prescribed the veil to them. The mutes have here and there a sketch or label attached to their names : they are " strikingly hand- some ; " they are " very good-looking ; " occasionally they are noted as " extremely entertaining : " in what manner, is inquired by a curious posterity, that in so many matters is left unendingly to jump the empty and gaping figure of interrogation over its own full stop. Great ladies must they be, at the web of politics, for us to hear them cited discoursing. Henry Wilmers is not content to quote the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, he attempts a portrait. Mrs. War- wick is "quite Grecian." She might "pose for a statue." He presents her in carpenter's lines, with a dab of school- box colours, effective to those whom the Keepsake fashion 4 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS can stir. She has a straight nose, red lips, raven hair, black eyes, rich complexion, a remarkably fine bust, and she walks well, and has an agreeable voice ; likewise " deli- cate extremities." The writer was created for popularity, had he chosen to bring his art into our literary market. Perry Wilkinson is not so elaborate : he describes her in his " EecoUeetions '' as a splendid brune, eclipsing all the blondes coming near her : and " what is more, the beautiful creature can talk." He wondered, for she was young, new to society. Subsequently he is rather ashamed of his won- derment, and accounts for it by "not having known she was Irish." She "turns out to be Dan Merion's daughter. "^ We may assume that he would have heard if she had any whiff of a brogue. Her sounding of the letter R a trifle scrupulously is noticed by Lady Pennon : " And last, not least, the lovely Mrs. Warwick, twenty minutes be- hind the dinner-hour, and r-r-really fearing she was late." After alluding to the soft influence of her beauty and ingenuousness on the vexed hostess, the kindly old mar- chioness adds, that it was no wonder she was late, "for just before starting from home she had broken loose from her husband for good, and she entered the room absolutely houseless ! " She was not the less " astonishingly brilliant." Her observations were often "so unexpectedly droll I laughed till I cried." Lady Pennon became in consequence one of the stanch supporters of Mrs. Warwick. Others were not so easily won. Perry Wilkinson holds a balance when it goes beyond a question of her wit and beauty. Henry Wilmers puts the case aside, and takes her as he finds her. His cousin, the clever and cynical Dorset Wilmers, whose method of conveying his opinions without stating them was famous, repeats on two occasions when her name appears in his pages, " handsome, lively, witty," and the stressed repetition of calculated brevity while a fiery scandal was abroad concerning the lady, implies weighty substance — the reservation of a con- stable's truncheon, that could legally have knocked her character down to the pavement. We have not to ask what he judged. But Dorset Wilmers was a political opponent of the eminent Peer who yields the second name to the scandalj and politics in his day flushed the con- OP DIARIES AiJD DIAEISTS 5 ceptions of men. His short references to "that Warwick- Dannisburgh affair " are not verbally malicious. He gets wind of the terms of Lord Danuisburgh's will and testa- ment, noting them without comment. The oddness of the instrument in one respect may have served his turn; we have no grounds for thinking him malignant. The death of his enemy closes his allusions to Mrs. Warwick. He was growing ancient, and gout narrowed the circle he whirled in. Had he known this "handsome, lively, witty " apparition as a woman having political and social views of her own, he would not, one fancies, have been so stingless. Our England exposes a sorry figure, in his Eeminiscences. He struck heavily, round and about him, wherever he moved; he had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast dis- colouration. His unadorned harsh substantive statements, excluding the adjectives, give his Memoirs the appearance of a body of facts, attractive to the historic Muse, which has learnt to esteem those brawny sturdy giants marching club on shoulder, independent of henchman, in preference to your panoplied knights with their puffy squires, once her favourites, and wind-filling to her columns, ultimately found indigestible. His exhibition of his enemy Lord Dannisburgh is of the class of noble portraits we see swinging over inn-portals, grossly unlike in likeness. The possibility of the man's doing or saying this and that adumbrates the improbability : he had something of the character capable of it, too much good sense for the performance. We would think so, and still the shadow is round our thoughts. Lord Dannis- burgh was a man of ministerial tact, official ability. Pagan morality; an excellent general manager, if no genius in statecraft. But he was careless of social opinion, unbut- toned, and a laugher. We know that he could be chival- rous toward women, notwithstanding the perplexities he brought on them, and this the Dorset-Diary does not show. His chronicle is less mischievous as regards Mrs. Warwick than the paragraphs of Perry Wilkinson, a gossip present- ing an image of perpetual chatter, like the waxen-faced Street advertizements of light and easy dentistry. He has no belief, no disbelief; names the pro-party and the con; 6 DIANA OP THE CBOSS-WAYS recites the case, and discreetly, over-discreetly; and pic- tures the trial, tells the list of witnesses, records the ver- dict: so the case went, and some thought one thing, some another thing : only it is reported for positive that a min- iature of the incriminated lady was cleverly smuggled over to the jury, and juries sitting upon these cases, ever since their bedazzlement by Phryne, as you know. . . . And then he relates an anecdote of the husband, said to have been not a bad fellow before he married his Diana; — and the naming of the Goddess reminds him that the second person in the indictment is now everywhere called ' The elderly shepherd;' — but immediately after the bridal bells this husband became sour and insupportable; and either she had the trick of putting him publicly in the wrong, or he lost all shame in playing the churlish domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry Wil- kinson gives us two or three ; one on the authority of a personal friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the fair Diana would let loose her sil- very laugh in the intervals. She was hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with bitter mimicry, "yang — yang — yang ! " and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead. She had outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were making. Perhaps her too-dead ensu- ing silence, as of one striving to bring back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap between the wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy as soon as the trumpet proclaimed it. But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other purpose than that of an apology, is a mis- erable vindication of innocence. The more we have of them the darker the inference. In delicate situations the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous apol- ogists. Those trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The liberty she allowed herself in speech and action must have been trying to her defenders in a land like ours ; for here, and able to throw its shadow on our giddy upper- OP DIARIES AND DIAEISTS 7 circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though it may sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist- player. She did not wish it the reverse, even when claim- ing a space for laughter : " the breath of her soul ," as she called it, and as it may be felt in the early youth of a lively nature. She, especially, with her multitude of quick perceptions and imaginative avenues, her rapid sum- maries, her sense of the comic, demanded this aerial freedom. We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple was likened to another union always in a Court of Law. There was a distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England and Ireland changing their parts, until later, after the breach, when the Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resem- blance to the yoked Islands. Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of the woman. He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her story had not to be told. But these are not reporting columns; very little of it shall trouble them. The position is faced, and that is all. The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest. It asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization not being yet of the purest. That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law is instinctive. She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the chase. Let her escape uumangled, it will pass in the record that she did once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking her cunninger than the virtuous, which never put themselves in such positions, but ply the distaff at home. Never should reputation of woman trail a scent! How true! and true also that the women of wax- work never do; and that the women of happy marriages do not; nor the women of holy nunneries; nor the women lucky in their arts. It is a test of the civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to the spectacle. Thousands have reflected on a Diarist's power to cancel our Burial Service. Not alone the cleric's good work is upset by him, but the sexton's as well. He howks the graves, and transforms the quiet worms, busy on a single poor peaceable body, into winged serpents that disorder 8 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS Bky and earth with a deadly flight of zig-zags, like mili- tary rockets, among the living. And if these are given to cry too much, to have their tender sentiments considered, it cannot be said that History requires the flaying of them. A gouty Diarist, a sheer gossip Diarist, may thus, in the bequest of a trail of reminiscences, explode our temples (for our very temples have powder in store), our treasuries, our homesteads, alive with dynamitic stuff; nay, discon- cert our inherited veneration, dislocate the intimate con- nexion between the tugged flaxen forelock and a title. No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers. No blame whatever, one would say, if he had been less copious, or not so subservient, in recording the lady's utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be terse, quite spon- taneous, as this lady's assuredly was here and there, she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of holding it up to the withering glare of print: she herself, quoting an obscure maxim-monger, says of these lapidary sentences, that fhey have merely ^'■tlie value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit," and tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides flattering the world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are golden. Henry Wilmers notes a multitude of them. " The talk fell upon our being creatures of habit, and how far it was good: She said: — It is there that we see ourselves crutched between love grown old and indif- ference ageing to love." Critic ears not present at the conversation catch an echo of maxims and aphorisms over- channel, notwithstanding a feminine thrill in the irony of "ageing to love." The quotation ranks rather among the testimonies to her charm. She is fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence out of piany, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of a common accusation : — " Men may have rounded Seraglio Point : they have not yet doubled Cape Turk." It is war, and on the male side, Ottoman war. her experience reduced her to think so positively. Her main personal experience was in the social class which is prim- itively venatorial still, canine under its polish. OP DIAEIES AND DIAKISTS 9 She held a brief for her beloved Ireland. She closes a discussion upon Irish agitation by saying rather neatlj^: " You have taught them it is English as well as common human nature to feel an interest in the dog that has bitten you." The dog periodically puts on madness to win attention ; we gather then that England, in an angry tremour, tries him with water-gruel to prove him sane. Of the Irish priest (and she was not of his retinue), when he was deemed a revolutionary, Henry Wilmers notes her saying : " Be in tune with him ; he is in the key-note for harmony. He is shepherd, doctor, nurse, comforter, anecdotist and fun-maker to his poor flock; and you won- der they see the burning gateway of their heaven in him? Conciliate the priest." It has been partly done, done late, when the poor flock have found their doctoring and shepherding at other hands: their "bulb-food and fiddle," that she petitioned for, to keep them from a complete shaving oft' their patch of bog and scrub soil, without any perception of the tremendous trans- atlantic magnification of the fiddle, and the splitting dis- cord of its latest inspiriting jig. And she will not have the consequences of the " weariful old Irish duel between Honour and Hunger judged by bread and butter juries." She had need to be beautiful to be tolerable in days when Englishmen stood more openly for the strong arm to maintain the Union. Her troop of enemies was of her summoning. Ordinarily her topics were of wider range, and those of a woman who mixed hearing with reading, and obser- vation with her musings. She has no doleful ejaculatory notes, of the kind peculiar to women at war, containing one-third of speculative substance to two of sentimental — a feminine plea for comprehension and a squire ; and it was probably the reason (as there is no reason to suppose an emotional cause) why she exercised her evident sway over the mind of so plain and straightforward an English- man as Henry Wilmers. She told him that she read rapidly, "a great deal at one gulp," and thought in flashes 1 — a way with the makers of phrases. She wrote, she con- 10 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS fessed, laboriously. The desire to prune, compress, over- charge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a sharp necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion; prose was the heavy task. "To be pointedly rational," she said, "is a greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium." She did not talk as if it would have been so, he remarks. One is not astonished at her appearing an "actress" to the flat-minded. But the basis of her woman's nature was pointed flame. In the fulness of her history we perceive nothing histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth, she never trifled with feel- ing; and if she did so with some showy phrases and occa- sionally proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to do, her moods of reflection were direct, always large and honest, universal as well as feminine. Her saying that "A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of brotherhood to mankind," is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She has golden apples in her apron. IShe says of life: " When I fail to cherish it in every fiore the fires within are waning," and that drives like rain to the roots._i She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea: "From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out of slime, must appear our one constant hero." It can be read maliciously, but abstain. She says of Romance : " The young who avoid that region \ escape the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial crown." Of ' Poetry: " Those that have souls meet their fellows there." But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sen- timental people, in her phrase, "fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism," to the delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than for music. For our world is all but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her reflections are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says, "The vices of the world's nobler half in this day are feminine." We have to guard against " half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient charity " ■ — against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues, dis- tinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it OP DIARIES AND DIARISTS 11 is our finding it in books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not "chameleon" her pen from the colour of her audience : she was not of the uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant inter- preters of popular appetite, and going or gone to sound- lessness and the icy shades. ! Touches inward are not absent : " To have the sense of the eternal in life is a short flight for the soul. To have had it, is the soul's vitality." And also : " Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature's refuge and final temptation. Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh. Spirit must brand the flesh, that it may live." You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by prefer- ence light-handed; and her saying of oratory, that '^ It is always the more impressive for the spice of temper which renders it untrustworthy," is light enough. On Politics she is rhetorical and swings : she wrote to spur a junior politician: "It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity, to the covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms of Titans to the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius." I What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her [nature. She saw their existing posture clearly, yet be- lieved, as men disincline to do, that they growj She says that " In their judgements upon women men are females, voices of the present (sexual) dilemma." They desire to have " a still woman, who can make a constant society of her pins and needles." They create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness. " We live alone, and do not much feelat till we are visited." Love is presume- ably the visitor. LOf the greater loneliness of women, she says : " It is due to the prescribed circumscription of their minds, of which they become aware in agitation. Were the walls about them beaten down, they would understand that solitariness is a common human fate and the one chance of growth, like space for timberjj^ As to the sen- sations of women after the beating down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of the timorous would yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest, according to the sage prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few 12 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS would form a vanguard. And we are informed that the beginning of a motive life with women must be in the head, equally with men (by no means a truism when she wrote). Also that "men do not so much fear to lose the hearts of thoughtful women as their strict attention to their graces." The present market is what men are for preserving: an observation of still reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips, showing her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith, as she says, " we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing us from the animals." The instances of her drollery are rather hinted by the Diarists for the benefit of those who had met her and could inhale the atmosphere at a word. Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of i-oast meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath. They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A^^^^, after she had accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks ; " as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God," sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting at the roast we might have thought differently. Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers' unanimous eulogy of her humour and pathos : — the " merry clown and poor panta- loon demanded of us in every work of fiction," she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their knees. We are informed by Lady Pennon of " the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in Paris ; " and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French and English styles of pushing fl.atteries — "piping to the charmed animal," as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place : but Lady Pennon was acquainted with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the " wonderful truth " of that representation. OF DIAKIES AND DIARISTS 13 Diarists of amusing passages are under an obligation to paint us a realistic revival of the time, or we miss the relish. The odour of the roast, and more, a slice of it is required, unless the humorous thing be preternaturally spirited to walk the earth as one immortal among a num- ber less numerous than the mythic Gods. "He gives good dinners, " a candid old critic said, when asked how it was that he could praise a certain poet. In an island of chills and fogs, coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum, the comic and other perceptions are dependent on the stirring ot' the gastric juices. And such a revival by any of us would be impolitic, were it a possible attempt, before our systems shall have been fortified by philosophy. Then may it be allowed to the Diarist simply to relate, and we can copy from him. Then, ah ! then, moreover, will the novelist's Art, now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuftte of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer bafie the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant's — a century a day. And imagine the celestial refresh- ment'of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why, when you behold it you love it — and you will not encourage it? — or only when presented by dead hands? Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning, she comes up, not the fairest part of her upper- 14 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS most! Peruse your Realists — really your castigators for not having yet embraced Philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is unimpeachable, flower-like, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of roses. In this fashion she grew, says histor- ical fiction; thus does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well as exhibiting the outer. And how may you know that you have reached to Phi- losophy? You touch her skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of sentimentalism. You are one with her when — but I would not have you a thou- sand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental route: — that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to the point of original impetus , where you have to be unwound for another whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the former, merely and badly aping the latter; — fine flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? — and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert, here and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appe- tite, sustained by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in har- monics as it may, it' will have these gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependent figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket. A thousand years! You may count full many a thou- sand by this route before you are one with divine Philos- ophy. Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the senses, Reality's infinite sweetness; for these things are in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary OF DIAEIES AND DIAEISTS 15 of actual Life, the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring, philosophy's elect handmaiden. To such an end let us bend our aim to work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth. If in any branch of us we fail in growth, there is , you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old monster that waits to pull us down; cer- tainly the branch, possibly the tree ; and for the welfare of Life we fall. You are acutely conscious of yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics. Be wary of him in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff. You must feed on something. Matter that is not nourishing to brains can help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps. Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is internal his- tory, and to suppose it dull is the profound est of errors; how deep, you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime; they are intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic, they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity. But sharply comic, adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the inter- winding with human affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet, between whom and us yawn Time's most hollow jaws. Surely we owe a little to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our country. Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawn- ing breach, if only perusers will rally to the philosophic standard. They are sick of the woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive; one can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say that they would be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement. They would perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance ior an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold them fast. But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected. The example might, one hopes, create a taste. A great modern writer, of clearest eye and head, now de- parted, capable in activity of presenting thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared 16 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive brainstuff. He could have done it, and he is of the departed! Had he dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity on a level with History, to an interest surpassing the narrative of public deeds as vividly as man's heart and brain in their union excel his plain lines of action to eruption. The everlasting pantomime, suggested by Mrs. "Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not unrighteously, by our graver seniors. They name this Art the pasture of idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to reading; and which scon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort of stuff at least. The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction, under the shining multitude of its profes- sors. They are fast capping the candle. Instead, there- fore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you. History without her is the skeleton map of events: Fiction a picture of figures modelled on no skeleton-anatomy. But each, with Philoso- phy in aid, blooms, and is humanly shapely. To demand of us truth to nature, excluding Philosophy, is really to bid a pumpkin caper. As much as legs are wanted for the dance, Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable. Fiction implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in with this heavenly preserva- tive helpmate, her inspiration and her essence. You have to teach your imagination of the feminine image you have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it must temper its fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the overdainty. Or, to speak in the philosophic tongue, you must turn en yourself, resolutely track and seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship : and if you prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our upper skies. "So well do we know ourselves, that we one and all determine to know a purer," says the heroine of my AN IRISH BALL 17 columns. /Philosophy in fiction tells, among various other matters, of the perils of this intimate acquaintance with a flattering familiar in the " purer " — a person who more than ceases to be of use to us after his ideal shall have led up men from their flint and arrowhead caverns to inter- communicative daylight. For when the tictitious creature has performed that service of helping to civilize the world, it becomes the most dangerous of delusions, causing first the individual to despise the mass, and then to join the mass in crushing the individual. Wherewith let us to our story, the froth being out of the bottle. CHAPTEE II AN lEISH BALL In the Assembly Eooms of the capital city of the Sister Island there was a public Ball, to celebrate the return to Erin of a British hero of Irish blood, after his victorious Indian campaign; a mighty struggle splendidly ended; and truly could it be said that all Erin danced to meet him ; but this was the pick of the dancing, past dispute the pick of the supping. Outside those halls tlie supping was done ■ in Lazarus fashion, mainly through an excessive straining of the organs of hearing and vision, which imparted the readiness for more, declared by physicians to be the state inducing to sound digestion. Some one spied the figure of tne hero at a window and was fed; some only to hear the tale chewed the cud of it; some told of having seen him mount the steps; and sure it was that at an hour of the night, no matter when, and never mind a drop or two of cloud, he would come down them again, and have an Irish cheer to freshen his pillow. For 't is Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too. Farther away, over field and bogland, the whiskies did their excellent an- cient service of watering the dry and drying the damp, to the toast of " Lord Larrian, God bless him ! he 's an honour 2 18 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS to the old country ! " and a bit of a sigh to follow, hints of a story, and loud laughter, a drink, a deeper sigh, settling into conversation upon the brave Lord Larrian's deeds, and an Irish regiment he favoured — had no taste for the enemy without the backing of his "boys." Not he. Why, he 'd never march to battle and they not handy; because when he struck he struck hard, he said. And he has a wound on the right hip and two fingers off his left hand; has bled for England, to show her what Irishmen are when they 're well treated. The fine old warrior standing at the upper end of the long saloon, tall, straight, grey -haired, martial in his aspect and decorations, was worthy to be the flag-pole for enthusiasm. His large grey eyes lightened from time to time as he ranged them over the floating couples, and dropped a word of inquiry to his aide, Captain Sir Lukin Dunstane, a good model of a cavalry officer, though some- what a giant, equally happy with his chief in passing the troops of animated ladies under review. He named as many as were known to him. Reviewing women exqui- sitely attired for inspection, all variously and charmingly smiling, is a relief after the monotonous regiments of men. Ireland had done her best to present the hero of her blood an agreeable change; and he too expressed a patriotic satisfaction on hearing that the faces most admired by him were of the native isle. He looked upon one that came whirling up to him on a young officer's arm and swept oif into the crowd of tops, for a considerable while before he put bis customary question. She was returning on the spin when he said, — " Who is she? " Sir Lukin did not know. "She's a new bird; she nodded to my wife; I '11 ask." He manoeuvred a few steps cleverly to where his wife reposed. The information he gathered for the behoof of his chief was, that the handsome creature answered to the name of Miss Merion; Irish; aged somewhere between eighteen and nineteen ; a dear friend of his wife's , and he ought to have remembered her; but she was a child when he saw her last. "Dan Merion died, I remember, about the day of my AN IRISH BALL 19 sailing for India," said the General. "She may be his daughter." The bright cynosure rounded up to hira in the web of the waltz, with her dark eyes for Lady Dunstane, and vanished again among the twisting columns. He made his way, handsomely bumped by an apologetic pair, to Lady Dunstane, beside whom a seat was vacated for him ; and he trusted she had not over-fatigued herself. " Confess," she replied; "you are perishing to know more than Lukin has been able to tell you. Let me hear that you admire her : it pleases me ; and you shall hear what will please you as much, I promise you. General." " I do. Who would n't ? " said he frankly. " She crossed the Channel expressly to dance here to-night at the public Ball in honour of you." " Where she appears, the first person falls to second rank, and accepts it humbly." " That is grandly spoken." " She makes everything in the room dust round a blazing jewel." " She makes a poet of a soldier. Well, that you may understand how pleased I am, she is my dearest friend, though she is younger than I, as may be seen ; she is the only friend I have. I nursed her when she was an infant ; my father and Mr. Dan Merion were chums. We were parted by my marriage and the voyage to India. We have not yet exchanged a syllable : she was snapped up, of course, the moment she entered the room. I knew she would be a taking girl : how lovely, I did not guess. You are right, she extinguishes the others. She used to be the sprightliest of living creatures, and to judge by her letters, that has not faded. She 's in the market. General." Lord Larrian nodded to everything he heard, concluding with a mock doleful shake of the head. " My poorest sub- altern ! " he sighed, in the theatrical but cordially melan- choly style of green age viewing Cytherea's market. His poorest subaltern was richer than he in the where- withal to bid for such prizes. " What is her name in addition to Merion ? " " Diana Antonia Merion. Tony to me, Diana to the world." 20 DIANA OP THE CROSSWAYS " She lives over there ? " "In England, or anywhere; wherever she is taken in. She will live, I hope, chiefly with me." "And honest Irish ? " " Oh, she 's Irish." " Ah ! " the General was Irish to the heels that night. Before further could be said the fair object of the dialogue came darting on a trip of little runs, both hands out, all her face one tender sparkle of a smile ; and her cry proved the quality of her blood : " Emmy ! Emmy ! my heart ! " " My dear Tony ! I should not have come but for the hope of seeing you here." Lord Larriau rose and received a hurried acknowledgment of his courtesy from the usurper of his place. " Emmy ! we might kiss and hug ; we 're in Ireland. I burn to I But you're not still ill, dear? Say no! That Indian fever must have gone. You do look a dash pale, my own ; you 're tired." " One dance has tired me. Why were you so late ? " " To give the others a chance ? To produce a greater impression by suspense ? No and no. I wrote you I was with the Pettigrews. We caught the coach, we caught the boat, we were only two hours late for the Ball ; so we did wonders. And good Mrs. Pettigrew is pining somewhere to complete her adornment. I was in the crush, spying for Emmy, when Mr. Mayor informed me it was the duty of every Irishwoman to dance her toes oif , if she 'd be known for what she is. And twirl ! a man had me by ihe waist, and I dying to find you." " Who was the man ? " " Not to save these limbs from the lighted stake could I tell you ! " " You are to perform a ceremonious bow to Lord Larrian." " Chatter first ! a little ! " The plea for chatter was disregarded. It was visible that the hero of the night hung listening and in expectation. He and the Beauty were named to one another, and they chatted through a quadrille. Sir Lukin introduced a fellow Harrovian of old days, Mr. Thomas Eedworth, to his wife. "Our weather-prophet, meteorologist," he remarked, to set them going ; " you remember, iu India, my pointing to AN lEISH BALL 21 you his name in a newspaper-letter on the subject. He was generally safe for the cricketing days." Lady Dunstane kindly appeared to call it to mind, and she led upon the theme — queried at times by an abrupt " Eh ? " and " I beg pardon," for manifestly his gaze and one of his ears, if not the pair, were given to the young lady discoursing with Lord Larrian. Beauty is rare ; luckily is it rare, or, judging from its effect on men, and the very stoutest of them, our world would be internally a more dis- tracted planet than we see, to the perversion of business, courtesy, rights of property, and the rest. She perceived an incipient victim, of the hundreds she anticipated, and she very tolerantly talked on : " The weather and women have some resemblance they say. Is it true that he who reads the one can read the other ? " Lord Larrian here burst into a brave old laugh, exclaim- ing, " Oh ! good ! " Mr. Kedworth knitted his thick brows. " I beg pardon ? Ah ! women ! Weather and women ? !N"o ; the one point more variable in women makes all the difference." " Can you tell me what the General laughed at ? " The honest Englishman entered the trap with prompti- tude. " She said : — who is she, may I ask you ? " Lady Dunstane mentioned her name. Daughter of the famous Dan Merion ? The young lady merited examination for her father's sake. But when re- minded of her laughter-moving speech, Mr. Redworth bungled it ; he owned he spoilt it, and candidly stated his inability to see the fun. " She said, St. George's Channel in a gale ought to be called St. Patrick's — something — I missed some point. That quadrille-tune, the Pastourelle, or something . . ." " She had experience of the Channel last night," Lady Dunstane pursued, and they both, while in seeming con- verse, caught snatches from their neighbours, during a pause of the dance. The sparkling Diana said to Lord Larrian, "You really decline to make any of us proud women by dancing to-night ? " The General answered : " I might do it on two stilts ; I can't on one." He touched his veteran leg. 22 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAyS "But surely," said she, "there's always an inspiration coming to it from its partner in motion, if one of them takes the step." He signified a woeful negative. " My dear young lady, you say dark things to grey hairs ! " She rejoined : " If we were over in England, and you fixed on me the stigma of saying dark things, I should never speak without being thought obscure." " It 's because you flash too brightly for them." " I think it is rather the reminiscence of the tooth that once received a stone when it expected candy." Again the General laughed ; he looked pleased and warmed. " Yes, that 's their way, that's their way ! " and he repeated her words to himself, diminishing their im- portance as he stamped them on his memory, but so heartily admiring the lovely speaker, that he considered her wit an honour to the old country, and told her so. Irish prevailed up to boiling-point. Lady Dunstaue, not less gratified, glanced up at Mr. Kedworth, whose brows bore the knot of perplexity over a strong stare. He, too, stamped the words on his memory, to see subsequently whether they had a vestige of meaning. Terrifically precocious, he thought her. Lady Dunstane, in her quick sympathy with her friend, read the adverse mind in his face. And her reading of the mind was right, wrong altogether her deduction of the corresponding sentiment. Music was resumed to confuse the hearing of the eaves- droppers. They beheld a quaint spectacle : a gentleman, obviously an Englishman, approached, with the evident intention of reminding the Beauty of the night of her engagement to him, and claiming her, as it were, in the lion's jaws. He advanced a foot, withdrew it, advanced, withdrew ; eager for his prize, not over enterprising ; in awe of the illus- trious General she entertained — presumeably quite un- aware of the pretender's presence ; whereupon a voice was heard : " Ob ! if it was minuetting you meant before the lady, I'd never have disputed your right to perform, sir." Eor it seemed that there were two claimants in the field, an Irishman and an Englishman ; and the former, having a livelier sense of the situation, hung aloof in waiting for AN IKISH BALL 23 her eye ; the latter directed himself to strike bluntly at his prey ; and he continued minuetting, now rapidly blink- ing, flushed, angry, conscious of awkwardness and a tangle incapable of extrication. He began to blink horribly under the raillery of his rival. The General observed him, but as an object remote and minute, a fly or gnat. The face of the brilliant Diana was entirely devoted to him she amused. Lady Dunstane had the faint lines of a decorous laugh on her lips, as she said : " How odd it is that our men show to such disadvantage in a Ball-room. I have seen them in danger, and there they shine first of any, and one is proud of them. They should always be facing the ele- ments or in action." She glanced at the minuet, which had become a petrified figure, still palpitating, bent for- ward, an interrogative reminder. Mr. Redworth reserved his assent to the proclamation of any English disadvantage. A whiff of Celtic hostility in the atmosphere put him on his mettle. " Wherever the man is tried," he said. " My lady ! " the Irish gentleman bowed to Lady Dun- stane. " I had the honour . . . Sullivan Smith ... at the castle . . ," She responded to the salute, and Mr. Sullivan Smith proceeded to tell her, half in speech, half in dots most luminous, of a civil contention between the English gentle- man and himself, as to the possession of the loveliest of partners for this particular ensuing dance, and that they had simultaneously made a rush from the Lower Courts, namely, their cards, to the Upper, being the lady; and Mr. Sullivan Smith partly founded his preferable claim on her Irish descent, and on his acquaintance with her eminent defunct father — one of the ever-radiating stars of his quenchless country. Lady Dunstane sympathized with him for his not intrud- ing his claim when the young lady stood pre-engaged, as well as in humorous appreciation of his imaginative logic. "There will be dancing enough after supper," she said. " If I could score one dance with her, I 'd go home supperless and feasted," said he. " And that 's not saying much among the hordes of hungry troopers tip-toe for the 24 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS signal to the buffet. See, my lady, the gentleman, as we call him ; there he is working his gamut perpetually up to da capo. Oh ! but it 's a sheep trying to be wolf; he 's sheep- eyed and he 's wolf-fanged, pathetic and larcenous ! Oh, now ! who 'd believe it ! — the man has dared ... I 'd as soon think of committing sacrilege in a cathedral ! " The man was actually, to quote his indignant rival, " breaching the fortress," and pointing out to Diana Merion "her name on his dirty scrap of paper" : a shocking sight when the lady's recollection was the sole point to be aimed at, and the only umpire. " As if all of us could n't have written that, and had n't done it ! " Mr. Sullivan Smith groaned disgusted. He hated bad manners, particularly in cases involving ladies ; and the bad manners of a Saxon fired his antagonism to the race; individual members of which he boasted of forgiving and embracing, honouring. So the man blackened the race for him, and the race was excused in the man. But his hatred of bad manners was vehement, and would have extended to a fellow-country- man. His own were of the antecedent century, therefore venerable. Diana turned from her pursuer with a comic woeful lift- ing of the brows at her friend. Lady Dunstane motioned her fan, and Diana came, bending head. " Are you bound in honour ? " " I don't think I am. And I do want to go on talking with the General. He is so delightful and modest — my dream of a true soldier ! — telling me of his last big battle, bit by bit, to my fishing." "Put off this person for a square dance down the list, and take out Mr. Eedworth — Miss Diana Merion, Mr. Eedworth : he will bring you back to the General, who must not totally absorb you, or he will forfeit his popularity." Diana instantly struck a treaty with the pertinacious advocate of his claims, to whom, on his relinquishing her, Mr. Sullivan Smith remarked : " Oh ! sir, the law of it, where a lady 'a concerned ! You 're one for evictions, I should guess, and the anti-human process. It 's that letter of the law that stands between you and me and mi«e and yours. But you've got your congee, and my blessing on ye ! " AN IRISH BALL 25 *• It was a positive engagement," said the enemy. Mr. Sullivan Smith derided him. " And a pretty partner you've pickled for yourself when she keeps her positive engagement ! " He besought Lady Dunstane to console him with a turn. She pleaded weariness. He proposed to sit beside her and divert her. She smiled, but warned him that She was Eng- lish in every vein. He interjected : " Irish men and Eng- lish women ! though it 's putting the cart before the horse — the copper pennies where the gold guineas should be. So here's the gentleman who takes the oyster, like the lawyer of the fable. English is he ? But we read, the last shall be first. And English women and Irish men make the finest coupling in the universe." " Well, you must submit to see an Irish woman led out by an English man," said Lady Dunstane, at the same time informing the obedient Diana, then bestowing her hand on Mr. Redworth to please her friend, that he was a schoolfellow of her husband's. " Favour can't help coming by rotation, except in very extraordinary circumstances, and he was ahead of me with you, and takes my due, and 't would be hard on me if I were n't thoroughly indemnified." Mr. Sullivan Smith bowed. "You gave them just the start over the frozen minute for conversation ; they were total strangers, and he does n't appear a bad sort of fellow for a temporary mate, though he 's not perfectly sure of his legs. And that we '11 excuse to any man leading out such a fresh young beauty of a Bright Eyes — like the stars of a winter's night in the frosty season over Columkill, or where you will, so that 's in Ireland, to be sure of the likeness to her." " Her mother was half English." " Of course she was. And what was my observation about the coupling ? Dan Merion would make her Irish all over. And she has a vein of Spanish blood in her ; for he had ; and she 's got the colour. — But you spoke of their coupling — or I did. Oh, a man can hold his own with an English roly-poly mate : he 's not stifled. But a woman has n't his power of resistance to dead weight. She 's volatile, she 's frivolous, a rattler and gabbler — have n't I heard what they say of Irish girls over there ? She marries, 26 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS and it's the end of her sparkling. She must choose at home for a perfect harmonious partner." . Lady Dunstane expressed her opinion that her couple danced excellently together. " It 'd be a bitter thing to see, if the fellow could n't dance, after leading her out ! " sighed Mr. Sullivan Smith. " I heard of her over there. They call her the Black Pearl, and the Irish Lily — ■ because she 's dark. They rack their poor brains to get the laugh of us." "And I listen to you," said Lady Dunstane. "Ah! if -all England, half, a quarter, the smallest piece of the land were like you, my lady, I'd be loyal to the finger-nails. Now, is she engaged ? — when I get a word with her ? " " She is nineteen, or nearly, and she ought to have five good years of freedom, I think." " And five good years of serfdom I 'd serve to win her ! " A look at him under the eyelids assured Lady Dunstane that there would be small chance for Mr. Sullivan Smith, after a life of bondage, if she knew her Diana, in spite of his tongue, his tact, his lively features and breadth of shoulders. Up he sprang. Diana was on Mr. Eedworth's arm. "No refreshments," she said; and "this is my refresh- ment," taking the seat of Mr. Sullivan Smith, who ejaculated, — "I must go and have that gentleman's name." He wanted a foe. " You know you are ready to coquette with the General at any moment, Tony," said her friend. "Yes, with the General! " " He is a noble old man." " Superb. And don't say ' old man. ' With his uniform and his height and his grey head, he is like a glorious October day just before the brown leaves fall." Diana hummed a little of the air of Planxty Kelly, the favourite of her childhood, as Lady Dunstane well remem- bered, and they smiled together at the scenes and times it recalled. "Do you still write verses, Tony?" " I could about him. At one part of the fight he thought AN lEISH BALL 27 he would be beaten. He was overmatched in artillery, and it was a cavalry charge he thundered on them, riding across the field to give the word of command to the couple of regiments, riddled to threads, that gained the day. That is life — when we dare death to live ! I wonder at men, who are mere, being anything but soldiers! I told you, madre, my own Emmy, I forgave you for marrying, because it was a soldier." " Perhaps a soldier is to be the happy man. But you have not told me a word of yourself. What has been done with the old Crossways?" "The house, you know, is mine. And it's all I have: ten acres and the house, furnished, and let for less than two hundred a year. Oh ! how I long to evict the tenants ! They can't have my feeling for the place where I was born. They 're people of tolerably good connections, middling wealthy, I suppose, of the name of Warwick, and, as far as I can understand, they stick there to be near the Sussex Downs, for a nephew, who likes to ride on them. I 've a half engagement, barely legible, to visit them on an indefinite day, and can't bear the idea of strangers masters in the old house. I must be driven there for shelter, for a roof, some month. And I could make a pilgrimage in rain or snow just to doat on the outside of it. That's your Tony." "She 's my darling." "I hear myself speak! But your voice or mine, madre, it 's one soul. Be sure I am giving up the ghost when I cease to be one soul with you, dear and dearest! No secrets, never a shadow of a deception, or else I shall feel I am not fit to live. Was I a bad correspondent when you were in India? " " Pretty well. Copious letters when you did write." " I was shy. 1 knew I should be writing to Emmy and another, and only when I came to the flow could I forget him. He is very finely built; and I dare say he has a head. I read of his deeds in India and quivered. But he was just a bit in the way. Men are the barriers to perfect naturalness, at least, with girls, I think. You wrote to me in the same tone as ever, and at first I had a struggle to reply. And 1, who have such pride in being always jnyself ! " 28 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS Two staring semi-circles had formed, one to front the Hero, the other the Beauty. These half moons impercepti- bly dissolved to replenish, and became a fixed obstruction. " Yes, they look, " Diana made answer to Lady Dunstane's comment on the curious impertinence. She was getting used to it, and her friend had a gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect naturalness. "You are often in the world — dinners, dances?" she said. "People are kind." "Any proposals?" "Nibbles." "Quite heart-free?" "Absolutely." Diana's unshadowed bright face defied all menace of an eclipse. The block of sturdy gazers began to melt. The General had dispersed his group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm, construed as the signal for pro- cession to the supper-table. CHAPTER III THE INTERIOR OF ME. EEDWOETH AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN SMITH "It may be as well to take Mr. Eedworth's arm; you will escape the crush for you," said Lady Dunstane to Diana. "I don't sup. Yes! go! You must eat, and he is handi- est to conduct you." Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour. She murmured, to soften her conscience, "Poor Mrs. Pettigrew!" And once more Mr. Eedworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom of a happiness resembling tempest. He talked, and knew not what he uttered. To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his business, and he performed it. Oddly, for a man who had no loaded MB. KEDWOETH AND MR. SULLIVAN SMITH 29 design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he fell upon calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she sat at the table and he stood behind her. Others were wrangling for places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne: she had them; the lady under his charge to a certainty would have them ; so far good; and he had seven hundred pounds per annum — seven hundred and fifty, in a favourable aspect, at a stretch. . . . " Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera of Carini's," he said, in full accord with her taste, " and Tellio for tenor, certainly." — A fair enough sum for a bachelor : four hundred per- sonal income, and a prospect of higher dividends to increase it; three hundred odd from his office, and no immediate prospects of an increase there; no one died there, no elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors could be persuaded to die ; they were too tough to think of retiring. Say, seven hundred and fifty. . . . eight hun- dred, if the commerce of the country fortified the Bank his property was embarked in; or eight-fifty: or nine, ten. . . . "I could call him my poet also," Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in poets. " His letters are among the best ever written — or ever published : the raciest English I know. Frank, straight out: capital descriptions. The best English letter-writers are as good as the French — You don't think so? — in their way, of course. I dare say we don't sufficiently cultivate the art. We require the supple tongue a closer intercourse of society gives." — Eight or ten hundred. Comfortable enough for a man in chambers. To dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be stark nonsense: and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to set his reckoning on deaths : — if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative assassin. But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office ! Clearly they intended him to remain a bachelor for life. And they sent him over to Ireland on inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty. . . . 30 DIANA OP THE CEOSS"WAYS "Think war the finest subject for poets?" he exclaimed. "Flatly no: I don't think it. I think exactly the reverse. It brings out the noblest traits in human character? I won't own that even. It brings out some: but under excitement, when you have not always the real man. — Pray don't sneer at domestic life. Well, there was a sus- picion of disdain. — Yes, I can respect the hero, military or civil ; with this distinction, that the military hero aims at personal reward — " " He braves wounds and death," interposed Diana. " Whereas the civilian hero — " " Pardon me, let me deny that the soldier-hero aims at a personal reward," she again interposed. "He gets it." "If he is not beaten." "And then he is no longer a hero." "He is to me." She had a woman's inveterate admiration of the profes- sion of arms. Mr. Eedworth endeavoured to render prac- ticable an opening in her mind to reason. He admitted the grandeur of the poetry of Homer. We are a few cen- turies in advance of Homer. We do not slay damsels for a sacrifice to propitiate celestial wrath; nor do we revel in details of slaughter. He reasoned with her; he repeated stories known to him of civilian heroes, and won her assent to the heroical title for their deeds, but it was languid, or not so bright as the deeds deserved — or as the young lady could look; and he insisted on the civilian hero, impelled by some unconscious motive to make her see the thing he thought, also the thing he was — his plain mind and matter-' of-fact nature. Possibly she caught a glimpse of that. After a turn of fencing, in which he was impressed by the vibration of her tones when speaking of military heroes, she quitted the table, saying: "An argument be- tween one at supper and another handing plates, is rather unequal if eloquence is needed. As Pat said to the con- stable when his hands were tied, you beat me with the fists, but my spirit is towering and kicks freely." — Eight hundred? a thousand a year, two thousand, are as nothing in the calculation of a householder who means that the mistress of the house shall have the choicest of MB. KEDWOETH ANB ME. SULLIVAN SMITH 31 the fruits and flowers of the Tour Quarters ; and Thomas Redworth had vowed at his first outlook on the world of women, that never should one of the sisterhood coming under his charge complain of not having them in profu- sion. Consequently he was a settled bachelor. In the character of disengaged and unaspiring philosophical bach- elor, he reviewed the revelations of her character betrayed by the beautiful virgin devoted to the sanguine coat. The thrill of her voice in speaking of soldier-heroes shot him to the yonder side of a gulf. Not knowing why, for he had no scheme, desperate or other, in his head, the least affrighted of men was frightened by her tastes, and by her aplomb, her inoffensiveness in freedom of manner and self- suflS.ciency — sign of purest breeding: and by her easy, peerless vivacity, her proofs of descent from the blood of Dan Merion — a wildish blood. The candour of the look of her eyes in speaking, her power of looking forthright at men, and looking the thing she spoke, and the play of her voluble lips, the significant repose of her lips in silence, her weighing of the words he uttered, for a moment before the prompt apposite reply, down to her simple quotation of Pat, alarmed him; he did not ask himself why. His manly self was not intruded on his cogitations. A mere eight hundred or thousand per annum had no place in that midst. He beheld her quietly selecting the position of dignity to suit her: an eminent military man, or states'- man, or wealthy nobleman: she had but to choose. A war would offer her the decorated soldier she wanted. A war ! Such are women of this kind ! The thought revolted him, and pricked his appetite for supper. He did service by Mrs. Pettigrew, to which lady Miss Merion, as she said, promoted him, at the table, and then began to refresh in person, standing, "Malkin! that 's the fellow's name; " he heard close at his ear. Mr. Sullivan Smith had drained a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr. Redworth's quick stare. "Malkin! And now we '11 see whether the interior of him is grey, or black, or tabby, or tortoise-shell, or any other colour of the Malkin breed." 82 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS He explained to Mr. Eedworth that he had summoned Mr. Malkin to answer to him as a gentleman for calling Miss Merion a jilt. "The man, sir, said in my hearing, she jilted him, and that 's to call the lady a jilt. There 's not a point of difference, not a shade. I overheard him. I happened by the blessing of Providence to be by when he named her publicly jilt. And it 's enough that she 's a lady to have me for her champion. The same if she had been an Esquimaux squaw. I '11 never live to hear a lady insulted," " You don't mean to say you 're the donkey to provoke a duel!" Mr. Eedworth burst out gruffly, through turkey and stuffing. " And an Irish lady, the young Beauty of Erin ! " Mr. Sullivan Smith was flowing on. He became frigid, he politely bowed : " Two, sir, if you have n't the grace to withdraw the offensive term before it cools and can't be obliterated." " Fiddle ! and go to the deuce ! " Mr. Eedworth cried. "Would a soft slap o' the cheek persuade you, sir? " " Try it outside, and don't bother me with nonsense oi that sort at my supper. If I 'm struck, I strike back. 1 keep my pistols for bandits and law-breakers. Here," said Mr. Eedworth, better inspired as to the way of treating an ultra of the isle ; " touch glasses : you 're a gentleman, and won't disturb good company. By-and-by." The pleasing prospect of by-and-by renewed in Mr Sullivan Smith his composure. They touched the foamins- glasses: upon which, in a friendly manner, Mr. Sullivai Smith proposed that they should go outside as soon as Mr. Eedworth had finished supper — quite finished supper : f oi the reason that the term " donkey " affixed to him was like a minster cap of schooldays, ringing bells on his topknot, and also that it stuck in his gizzard. Mr. Eedworth declared the term to be simply hypothet- ical. " If you fight, you 're a donkey for doing it. But you won't fight." "But I will fight." "He won't fight." " Then for the honour of your country you must. But I 'd rather have him first, for I have n't drunk with him, MR. EEDWOKTH AND ME. SULLIVAN SMITH. 33 and it should be a case of necessity to put a bullet or a couple of inches of steel through the man you 've drunk with. And what 's in your favour, she danced with ye. She seemed to take to ye, and the man she has the smallest sugar-melting for is sacred if he 's not sweet to me. If he retracts ! " " Hypothetically, No." "But supposititiously? " "Certainly." " Then we grasp hands on it. It 's Malkin or nothing ! " said Mr. Sullivan Smith, swinging his heel moodily to wander in search of the foe. How one sane man could name another a donkey for fighting to clear an innocent young lady's reputation, passed his rational conception. Sir Lukin hastened to Mr. Eedworth to have a talk over old schooldays and fellows. "I '11 tell you what," said the civilian, "there are Irish- men and Irishmen. I 've met cool heads and long heads among them, and you and I knew Jack Derry, who was good at most things. But the burlesque Irishman can't be caricatured. Nature strained herself in a fit of absurdity to produce him, and all that Art can do is to copy." This was his prelude to an account of Mr. Sullivan Smith, whom, as a specimen, he rejoiced to have met. "There's a chance of mischief," said Sir Lukin. "I know nothing of the man he calls Malkin. I '11 inquire presently." He talked of his prospects, and of the women. Fair ones, in his opinion, besides Miss Merion were parading; he sketched two or three of his partners with a broad brush of epithets. "It won't do for Miss Morion's name to be mixed up in a duel," said Eedworth. "Not if she 's to make her fortune in England," said Sir Lukin. "It 's probably all smoke." The remark had hardly escaped him when a wreath of metaphorical smoke, and fire, and no mean report, startled the company of supping gentlemen. At the pitch of his voice, Mr. Sullivan Smith denounced Mr. Malkin in pres- ence for a cur masquerading as a cat. ,__ "And that is not the scoundrel's prime offence. For 3 34 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS what d' ye think? He trumps up an engagement to dance ■with a beautiful lady, and because she can't remember, binds her to an oath for a dance to come, and then, hold- ing her prisoner to 'm, he sulks, the dirty dog-cat goes and sulks, and he won't dance and won't do anything but screech up in corners that he 's jilted. He said the word. Dozens of gentlemen heard the word. And I demand an apology of Misterr Malkin — or . . I And none of your guerrier nodding and bravado, Misterr Malkin, at me, if you please. The case is for settlement between gentle- men." The harassed gentleman of the name of Malkin, driven to extremity by the worrying, stood in braced preparation for the English attitude of defence. His tormentor drew closer to him. "Mind, I give you warning, if you lay a finger on me I '11 knock you down," said he. Most joyfully Mr. Sullivan Smith uttered a low melo- dious cry. " For a specimen of manners, in an assembly of ladies and gentlemen ... I ask ye ! " he addressed the ring about him, to put his adversary entirely in the wrong before provoking the act of war. And then , as one intend- ing gently to remonstrate, he was on the point of stretch- ing out his finger to the shoulder of Mr. Malkin, when Eedworth seized his arm, saying : "I'm your man : me first: you 're due to me." Mr. Sullivan Smith beheld the vanishing of his foe in a cloud of faces. Now was he wroth on patently reasonable grounds. He threatened Saxondom. Man up, man down, he challenged the race of short-legged, thickset, wooden- "pated curmudgeons : and let it be pugilism if their white livers shivered at the notion of powder and ball. Eed- worth, in the struggle to haul him away, received a blow from him. "And you've got it! you would have it!" roared the Celt. "Excuse yourself to the company for a misdirected effort," Eedworth said; and he observed generally: "No Irish gentleman strikes a blow in good company." " But that 's true as Writ ! And I offer excuses — if you '11 come along with me and a couple of friends. The thing has been done before by torchlight — and neatly." ME. EEDWOETH AND ME. SULLIVAN SMITH 35 "Come along, and come alone," said Eedworth. A way was cleared for them. Sir Lukin hurried up to Redworth, who had no doubt of his ability to manage Mr. Sullivan Smith. He managed that fine-hearted but purely sensational fellow so well that Lady Dunstane and Diana, after hear- ing in some anxiety o| the hubbub below, beheld them entering the long saloon amicably, with the nods and looks of gentlemen quietly accordant. A little later, Lady Dunstane questioned Eedworth, and he smoothed her apprehensions, delivering himself, much to her comfort, thus: "In no case would any lady's name have been raised. The whole affair was nonsensical. He 's a capital fellow of a kind, capable of behaving like a man of the world and a gentleman. Only he has, or thinks he has, like lots of his countrymen, a raw wound — something that itches to be grazed. Champagne on that I . . . Irishmen, as far as I have spen of them, are, like horses, bundles of nerves; and you must manage them, as you do with all nervous creatures, with firmness, but good temper. You must never get into a fury of the nerves yourself with them. Spur and whip they don't want; they '11 be off with you in a jiffy if you try it. They want the bridle-rein. That seems to me the secret of Irish character. We English are not bad horsemen. It 's a wonder we blunder so in our management of such a people." " I wish you were in a position to put your method to the proof," said she. He shrugged. " There 's little chance of it ! " To reward him for his practical discretion, she contrived that Diana should give him a final dance; and the beauti- ful girl smiled quickly responsive to his appeal. He was, moreover, sensible in her look and speech that he had advanced in her consideration to be no longer the mere spinning stick, a young lady's partner. By which he humbly understood that her friend approved him. A gentle delirium enfolded his brain. A householder's life is often begun on eight hundred a year: on less: on much less: — sometimes on nothing but resolution to make a fitting income, carving out a fortune. Eight hundred may 36 DIAiTA OF THE CEOSSWAYS stand as a superior basis. That sum is a distinct point of vantage. If it does not mean a carriage and Parisian mil- linery and a station for one of the stars of society, it means at any rate security ; and then, the heart of the man being strong and sound . . . "Yes," he replied to her, "I like my experience of Ire- land and the Irish ; and better than I thought I should. St. George's Channel ought to be crossed oftener by both of us." "I 'm always glad of the signal," said Diana. He had implied the people of the two islands. He allowed her interpretation to remain personal, for the sake of a creeping deliciousness that it carried through his blood. " Shall you soon be returning to England? " he ventured to ask. "I am Lady Dunstane's guest for some months." " Then you will. Sir Lukin has an estate in Surrey. He talks of quitting the Service." " I can't believe it ! " His thrilled blood was chilled. She entertained a sen- timent amounting to adoration for the profession of arms ! Gallantly had the veteran General and Hero held on into the night, that the festivity might not be dashed by his departure; perhaps, to a certain degree, to prolong his enjoyment of a flattering scene. At last Sir Lukin had the word from him, and came to his wife. Diana slipped across the floor to her accommodating chaperon, whom, for the sake of another five minutes with her beloved Emma, she very agreeably persuaded to walk in the train of Lord Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nod- ding heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale, even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr. Thomas Eedworth. At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth hearing. The rain it rained, and hats were form- less, as in the first conception of the edifice, backs were damp, boots liquidly musical, the pipe of consolation smoked with difficulty, with much pulling at the stem, but the cheer arose magnificently, and multiplied itself, ' HINTS OF DIAJTA'S EXPERIENCES 37 touching at the same moment the heavens and Diana's heart — at least, drawing them together; for she felt exalted, enraptured, as proud of her countrymen as of their hero. " That 's the natural shamrock, after the artificial ! " she heard Mr. Eedworth say, behind her. She turned and sent one of her brilliant glances flying over him, in gratitude for a timely word well said. And she never forgot the remark, nor he the look. CHAPTER IV CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA's EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO A FORTNIGHT after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes had crossed the Channel back to Eng- land, and old Ireland was left to her rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously. The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web, not without colour : the ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke of the city's chimneys, if you prefer plain language. At a flrst inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect. Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: twice she read the stalking advertizement of the attrac- tions of Copsley, and hearing Diana call it " the plush of speech," she shuddered; she decided that a place where her husband's family had lived ought not to stand forth meretriciously spangled and daubed, like a show-booth at 38 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS a fair, for a bait; though the grandiloquent man of adver- tizing letters assured Sir Lukin that a public agape for the big and gaudy mouthful is in no milder way to be caught; as it is apparently the case. She withdrew the trumpeting placard. Eetract we likewise " banner of the metropolis." That plush of speech haunts all efforts to swell and illuminate citizen prose to a princely poetic. Yet Lady Dunstane herself could name the bank of smoke, when looking North-eastward from her summer- house, the flag of London: and she was a person of the critical mind, well able to distinguish between the simple metaphor and the superobese. A year of habitation in- duced her to conceal her dislike of the place in love: cat's love, she owned. Here, she confessed to Diana, she would > wish to live to her end. It seemed remote, where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks ; but she kept one secret from her friend. Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South. Seven counties rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the Copsley windows. Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the grounds held both flaming horizons. So much of the heavens and of earth is rarely granted to a dwelling. The drawback was the structure, which had no charm, scarce a face. " It is written that I should live in barracks," Lady Dunstane said. The colour of it taught white to impose a sense of gloom. Her cat's love of the familiar inside corners was never able to embrace the outer walls. Her sensitiveness, too, was racked by the presen- tation of so pitiably ugly a figure to the landscape. She likened it to a coarse-featured country wench, whose clean- ing and decorating of her countenance makes complexion grin and ruggedness yawn. Dirty, dilapidated, hung with weeds and parasites, it would have been more tolerable. She tried the effect of various creepers, and they were as a staring paint. What it was like then, she had no heart to say. One may, however, fall on a pleasureable resignation in accepting great indemnities, as Diana bade her believe, HINTS OP DIANA'S EXPERIENCES 39 when the first disgust began to ebb. "A good hundred over there would think it a Paradise for an asylum : " she signified London. Her friend bore such reminders meekly. They were readers of books of all sorts , political, philo- sophical, economical, romantic; and they mixed the diverse readings in thought, after the fashion of the ardently youthful. Eomance affected politics, transformed economy, irradiated philosophy. They discussed the knotty ques- tion, Why things were not done, the things being con- fessedly to do; and they cut the knot. Men, men calling themselves statesmen, declined to perform that operation, because, forsooth, other men objected to have it performed on them. And common humanity declared it to be for the common weal 1 If so, then it is clearly indicated as a course of action : we shut our eyes against logic and the vaunted laws of economy. They are the knot we cut; or would cut, had we the sword. Diana did it to the tune of Garryowen or Planxty Kelly. for a despot! The cry was for a beneficent despot, naturally : a large-minded benev« '6leat despot. In short, a despot to obey their bidding. Thoughtful young people who think through the heart soon come to this conclusion. The heart is the beneficent despot they would be. He cures those miseries ; he creates the novel harmony. He sees all difficulties through his own sanguine hues. He is the musical poet of the prob- lem, demanding merely to have it solved that he may sing: clear proof of the necessity for solving it immediately. /' Thus far in their pursuit of methods for the government of a nation, to make it happy, Diana was leader. Her fine ardour and resonance, and more than the convincing ring of her voice, the girl's impassioned rapidity in rushing through any perceptible avenue of the labyrinth, or beat- ing down obstacles to form one, and coming swiftly to some solution, constituted her the chief of the pair of democratic rebels in questions that clamoured for instant solution. By dint of reading solid writers, using the brains they possessed, it was revealed to them gradually that their particular impatience came perhaps of the most earnest desire to get to a comfortable termination of the inquiry : — the heart aching for mankind sought a nest for itself. At this point Lady Dunstane took the lead. Diana 40 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS had to be tugged to follow. She could not accept a " per- haps " that cast dubiousness on her disinterested champion- ship. She protested a perfect certainty of the single aim of her heart outward. But she reflected. She discovered that her friend had gone ahead of her. The discovery was reached, and even acknowledged, be- fore she could persuade herself to swallow the repulsive truth. O self 1 self ! self ! are we eternally masking in a domino that reveals your hideous old face when we could be most positive we had escaped you ? Eternally ! the desolating answer knelled. Nevertheless the poor, the starving, the overtaxed in labour, they have a right to the cry of Now 1 now ! They have ; and if a cry could conduct us to the secret of aiding, healing, feeding, elevating them, we might swell the cry. As it is, we must lay it on our wits patiently to track and find the secret ; and meantime do what the individual with his poor pittance can. A miserable contribution! sighed the girl. Old Self was perceived in the sigh. She was haunted. After all, one must live one's life. Placing her on a lower pedestal in her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an advantage in getting inward eyes. " It 's infinitely better I should know it, Emmy — I 'm a reptile ! Pleasure here, pleasure there, I 'm always think- ing of pleasure. 1 shall give up thinking and take to drifting. Neither of us can do more than open purses; and mine 's lean. If the old Crossways had no tenant, it would be a purse all mouth. And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I say with my whole strength — yes, I am sure, in spite of the men professing that they are practical, the rich will not move without a goad. I have and hold — you shall hunger and covet, until you are strong enough to force my hand: — that's the speech of the wealthy. And they are Christians. In name, i Well, I thank heaven I 'm at war with myself."! ^ "You always manage to strike out a sentence worth remembering, Tony," said Lady Dunstane. " At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we can have." It suited her, frail as her health was, and her wisdom HINTS OP DIANA'S EXPEBIBNCES 41 striving to the spiritual of happiness. War with herself was far from happiness in the bosom of Diana. She wanted external life, action, fields for energies, to vary the struggle. It fretted and rendered her ill at ease. In her solitary rides with Sir Lukin through a long winter season, she appalled that excellent but conventionally-minded gen- tleman by starting, nay supporting, theories next to pro- fane in the consideration of a land-owner. She spoke of Reform : of the Repeal of the Corn Laws as the simple beginning of the grants due to the people. She had her ideas, of course, from that fellow Eedworth, an occasional visitor at Copsley; and a man might be a donkey and think what he pleased, since he had a vocabulary to back his opinions. A woman, Sir Lukin held, was by nature a mute in politics. Of the thing called a Eadical woman, he could not believe that she was less than monstrous : " with a nose," he said ; and doubtless, horse teeth, hatchet jaws, slatternly in the gown, slipshod, awful. As for a girl, an unmarried, handsome girl, admittedly beautiful, her inter- jections, echoing a man, were ridiculous, and not a little annoying now and then, for she could be piercingly sarcas- tic. Her vocabulary in irony was a quiverful. He ad- mired her and liked her immensely ; complaining only of her turn for unfeminine topics. He pardoned her on the score of the petty difference rankling between them in reference to his abandonment of his Profession, for here she was patriotically wrong-headed. Everybody knew that he had sold out in order to look after his estates of Copsley and Dunena, secondly : and in the first place, to nurse and be a companion to his wife. He had left her but four times in five months; he had spent just three weeks of that time away from her in London. No one could doubt of his having kept his pledge, although his wife occupied her- self with books and notions and subjects foreign to his taste — his understanding, too, he owned. And Eedworth had approved of his retirement, had a contempt for soldier- ing. " Quite as great as yours for civilians, I can tell you," Sir Lukin said, dashing out of politics to the vexatious per- sonal subject. Her unexpressed disdain was ruffling. " Mr. Eedworth recommends work : he respects the work- ing soldier," said Diana. 42 DIAJSTA OF THE CEOSSWAYS Sir Lukin exclaimed that he had been a working soldier; he was ready to serve if his country wanted him. He directed her to anathematize Peace, instead of scorning a fellow for doing the duties next about him : and the men- tion of Peace fetched him at a bound back to politics. He quoted a distinguished Tory orator, to the effect, that any lengthened term of peace bred maggots in the heads of the people. "Mr. Eedworth spoke of it: he translated something from Aristophanes for a retort," said Diana. "Well, we're friends, eh?" Sir Lukin put forth a hand. She looked at him surprised at the unnecessary call for a show of friendship ; she touched his hand with two tips of her fingers, remarking, " I should think so, indeed." He deemed it prudent to hint to his wife that Diana Merion appeared to be meditating upon Mr. Eedworth. " That is a serious misfortune, if true," said Lady Dunstane. She thought so for two reasons : Mr. Eedworth generally disagreed in opinion with Diana, and contradicted her so flatly as to produce the impression of his not even sharing the popular admiration of her beauty ; and, further, she hoped for Diana to make a splendid marriage. The nibbles threatened to be snaps and bites. There had been a proposal, in an epistle, a quaint effusion, from a gentle- man avowing that he had seen her and had not danced with her on the night of the Irish ball. He was rejected, but Diana groaned over the task of replying to the unfortunate applicant, so as not to wound him. " Shall I have to do this often, I wonder ? " she said. "Unless you capitulate," said her friend. Diana's exclamation : " May I be he art-free for another ten years ! " encouraged Lady Dunstane to suppose her husband quite mistaken. In the Spring Diana went on a first pilgrimage to her old home. The Crossways, and was kindly entertained by the uncle and aunt of a treasured nephew, Mr. Augustus Warwick. She rode with him on the Downs. A visit of a week humanized her view of the intruders. She wrote almost tenderly of her host and hostess to Lady Dunstane : they had but "the one fault of spoiling their nephew." HINTS OP DIANA'S EXPBEIBNCES 43 Him slie described as a " gentlemanly official," a picture of him. His age was thirty-four. He seemed " fond of her scenery ." Then her pen swept over the Downs like a fly- ing horse. Lady Dunstane thought no more of the gentle- manly ofiicial. He was a barrister who did not practise : in nothing the man for Diana. Letters came from the house of the Pettigrews in Kent ; from London ; from Hal- ford Manor in Hertfordshire; from Lockton Grange in Lincolnshire : after which they ceased to be the thrice weekly; and reading the latest of them, Lady Dunstane imagined a flustered quill. The letter succeeding the omission contained no excuse, and it was brief. There was a strange interjection, as to the wearifulness of con- stantly wandering, like a leaf off the tree. Diana spoke of looking for a return of the dear winter days at Copsley. That was her station. Either she must have had some dis- turbing experience, or Copsley was dear for a Eedworth reason thought the anxious peruser; musing, dreaming, putting together divers shreds of correspondence and test- ing them with her intimate knowledge of Diana's character. Lady Dunstane conceived that the unprotected beautiful girl had suffered a persecution, it might be an insult. She spelt over the names of the guests at the houses. Lord Wroxeter was of evil report : Captain Eampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety. | And it is impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover every dame and damsel present. She has to depend on the women being discreet, the men civilized/ " How brutal men can be ! " was one of Diana's inci- dental remarks, in a subsequent letter, relating simply to masculine habits. In those days the famous ancestral plea of " the passion for his charmer " had not been altogether socially quashed down among the provinces, where the bottle maintained a sort of sway, and the beauty which inflamed the sons of men was held to be in coy expectation of violent effects upon their boiling blood. There were, one hears that there still are, remnants of the pristine male, who, if resisted in their suing, conclude that they are scorned, and it infuriates them : some also whose " passion for the charmer " is an instinct to pull down the standard of the sex, by a bully imposition of sheer physical ascen- 44 DIANA OF THE CR0SSWAT3 dency, ■whenever they see it flying with an air of gallant independence : and some who dedicate their lives to a study of the arts of the Lord of Eeptiles, until they have worked the crisis for a display of him in person. Assault or siege, they have achieved their triumphs ; they have dominated a frailer system of nerves, and a young woman without father, or brother, or husband, to defend her, is cryingly a weak one, therefore inviting to such an order of heroes. Lady Dunstane was quick-witted and had a talkative hus- band ; she knew a little of the upper social world of her time. She was heartily glad to have Diana by her side again. Not a word of any serious experience was uttered. Only on one occasion while they conversed, something being mentioned of her tolerance, a flush of swarthy crimson shot over Diana, and she frowned, with the outcry, " Oh ! I have discovered that I can be a tigress ! " Her friend pressed her hand, saying, " The cause a good one 1 " "Women have to fight." Diana said no more. There had been a bad experience of her isolated position in the world. Lady Dunstane now indulged a partial hope that Mr. Redworth might see in this unprotected beautiful girl a person worthy of his esteem. He had his opportunities, and evidently he liked her. She appeared to take more cordially to him. She valued the sterling nature of the man. But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly. Both ladies noticed in him an abstractedness of look, often when conversing, as of a man in calculation ; they put it down to an ambitious mind. Yet Diana said then, and said always, that it was he who had first taught her the art of observing. On the whole, the brilliant mar- riage seemed a fairer prospect for her; how reasonable to anticipate. Lady Dunstane often thought when admiring the advance of Diana's beauty in queenliness, for never did woman carry her head more grandly, more thrillingly make her presence felt; and if only she had been an actress showing herself nightly on a London stage, she would be- fore now have met the superb appreciation, melancholy to reflect upon ! HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES 43 Diana regained her happy composure at Copsley. She had, as she imagined, no ambition. The dulness of the place conveyed a charm to a nature recovering from dis- turbance to its clear smooth flow. Air, light, books, and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted. She rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr. Eedworth, for companion ; or with Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among them. " Twenty years younger ! " he said to her, shrugging, with a merry smile drawn a little at the corners to sober sour- ness ; and she vowed to her friend that she would not have had the heart to refuse him. " Though, " said she, " speak- ing generally, I cannot tell you what a foreign animal a husband would appear in my kingdom." Her experience had wakened a sexual aversion, of some slight kind, enough to make her feminine pride stipulate for perfect indepen- dence, that she might have the calm out of which imagina- tion spreads wing. Imagination had become her broader life, and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain of it, certainly is a foreign animal : he is a discordant note. He contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy. He is gross fact, a leash, a muzzle, har- ness, a hood, whatever is detestable to the free limbs and senses.,' It amused Lady Dunstane to hear Diana say, one evening when their conversation fell by hazard on her future, that the idea of a convent was more welcome to her than the most splendid marriage. " For," she added, " as I am sure I shall never know anything of this love they rattle about and rave about, I shall do well to keep to my good single path ; and I have a warning within me that a step out of it will be a wrong one — for me, dearest l"/' She wished her view of the yoke to be considered purely personal, drawn from no examples and comparisons. The excellent Sir Lukin was passing a great deal of his time in London. His wife had not a word of blame for him ; he was a respectful husband, and attentive when present; but so uncertain, owing to the sudden pressure of engagements, that Diana, bound on a second visit to The Crossways, doubted whether she would be able to quit her friend, whose condition did not allow of her being left solitary at Copsley. He came nevertheless a day before Diana's 46 DIAIfA OF THE CBOSSWATS appointed departure on her round of visits. She was pleased with him, and let him see it, for the encouragement of a husband in the observance of his duties. One of the horses had fallen lame, so they went out for a walk, at Lady Dunstane's request. It was a delicious afternoon of Spring, with the full red disk of sun dropping behind the brown beech-twigs. She remembered long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods — jaws of another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified woods, might be ex- cused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a little ludicrous in him. She played tolerantly second to it ; she quoted a snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition that she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon. Ah ! how fine ! grand ! He would rather hear that than any opera : it was diviner! "Yes, the best poetry is," she assented. "On your lips," he said. She laughed. " I am not a particu- larly melodious reciter." He vowed he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. Ah ! she was going to leave. — " Yes, and you will find my return quite early enough," said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly. His fist was raised on the length of the arm, as if in invocation. " Not in the whole of London is there a woman worthy to fasten your shoe-buckles ! My oath on it ! I look ; I can't spy one." Such was his flattering eloquence. She told him not to think it necessary to pay her com- pliments. " And here, of all places ! " They were in the heart of the woods. She found her hand seized — her waist. Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path. — What did she hear ? And from her friend's husband ! / If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman ; the tigress she had detected In her composition did not require to be called forth ; half-a-dozen words, direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, HINTS OF Diana's expbkiences 47 with the eyes burning over them, sufficed for the work of defence. — " The man. who swore loyalty to Emma ! " Her reproachful repulsion of eyes was unmistakable, withering ; as masterful as a superior force on his muscles. — What thing had he been taking her for ? — She asked it within : and he of himself, in a reflective gasp. Those ej'es of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above : she had the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder — Oh ! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear ! ..." A momentary aberration . . . her beauty ... he deserved to be shot ! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head ... on his honour ! never again ! "/' Once in the roadway, and Copsley visible, she checked her arrowy pace for breath, and almost commiserated the dejected wretch in her thankfulness to him for silence. Nothing exonerated him, but at least he had the grace not to beg secresy. That would have been an intolerable whine of a poltroon, adding to her humiliation. He abstained ; he stood at her mercy without appealing. She was not the woman to take poor vengeance. But, oh! she was profoundly humiliated, shamed through and through. The question, was I guilty of any lightness — anything to bring this on me ? would not be laid. And how she pitied her friend ! This house, her heart's home, was now a wreck to her : nay, worse, a hostile citadel. The burden of the task of meeting Emma with an open face, crushed her like very guilt. Yet she succeeded. After an hour in her bedchamber she managed to lock up her heart and summon the sprite of acting to her tongue and features : which ready attendant on the suffering female host performed his liveliest throughout the evening, to Emma's amusement, and to the culprit ex-dragoon's astonishment ; in whom, to tell the truth of him, her sparkle and fun kindled the sense of his being less criminal than he had supposed, with a dim vision of himself as the real proven donkey for not having been a harmless dash more so- But, to be just as well as penetrating, this was only the effect of her personal charm on his nature. So it spurred him a moment, when it struck this doleful man that to have secured one kiss of those fresh and witty sparkling lips he would endure forfeits, pangs, anything 48 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS save the hanging of his culprit's head before his Emma, Reflection washed him clean. Secresy is not a medical restorative, by no means a good thing for the baffted amorously-adventurous cavalier, unless the lady's character shall have been firmly established in or over his hazy wagging noddle. Reflection informed him that the honour- able, generous, proud girl spared him for the sake of the house she loved. After a night of tossing, he rose right heartily repentant. He showed it in the best manner, not dramatically. On her accepting his offer to drive her down to the valley to meet the coach, a genuine illumination of pure gratitude made a better man of him, both to look at and in feeling. She did not hesitate to consent ; and he had half expected a refusal. She talked on the way quite as usual, cheerfully, if not altogether so spiritedly. A flash of her matchless wit now and then reduced him to that abject state of man beside the fair person he has treated high cavalierly, which one craves permission to describe as pulp. He was utterly beaten. The sight of Eedworth on the valley road was a relief to them both. He had slept in one of the houses of the valley, and spoke of having had the intention to mount to Copsley. Sir Lukin proposed to drive him back. He glanced at Diana, still with that calculating abstract air of his ; and he was rallied. He confessed to being absorbed in railways, the new lines of railways projected to thread the land and fast mapping it. " You 've not embarked money in them ? " said Sir Lukin. The answer was : " I have ; all I possess." And Redworth for a sharp instant set his eyes on Diana, indifferent to Sir Lukin's bellow of stupefaction at such gambling on the part of a prudent fellow. He asked her where she was to be met, where written to, during the Summer, in case of his wishing to send her news. She replied : " Copsley will be the surest. I am always in communication with Lady Dunstane." She coloured deeply. The recollection of the change of her feeling for Copsley suffused her maiden mind. The strange blush prompted ah impulse in Eedworth THE SCRtrPTJLOUS GENTLEMAN 49 to speak to her at once of Ms venture in railways. But what would she understand of them, as connected with the mighty stake he was playing for ? He delayed. ' The coach came at a trot of the horses, admired by Sir^Lukin, round a corner. She entered it, her maid followed, the door banged, the horses trotted. She was off. Her destiny of the Crossways tied a knot, barred a gate, and pointed to a new direction of the road on that fine spring morning, when beech-buds were near the burst, cowslips yellowed the meadow-flats, and skylarks quivered upward. For many long years Eedworth had in his memory, for a comment on procrastination and excessive scrupulousness in his calculating faculty, the blue back of a coach. He declined the vacated place beside Sir Lukin, promis- ing to come and spend a couple of days at Copsley in a fortnight — Saturday week. He wanted, he said, to have a talk with Lady Dunstane. Evidently he had railways on the brain, and Sir Lukin warned his wife to be guarded against the speculative mania, and advise the man, if she could. CHAPTER V CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE On the Saturday of his appointment Eedworth arrived at Copsley, with a shade deeper of the calculating look under his thick brows, habitual to him latterly. He found Lady Dunstane at her- desk, pen in hand, the paper untouched ; and there was an appearance of trouble about her somewhat resembling his own, as he would have observed, had he been open-minded enough to notice anything, except that she was writing a letter. He begged her to continue it; he proposed to read a book till she was at leisure. "I have to write, and scarcely know how," said she, clearing her face to make the guest at home, and taking a chair by the fire, " I would rather chat for half an hour." 4 50 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS She spoke of the -weather, frosty, but tonic ; bad for the last days of hunting, good for the farmer and the country, let us hope. Eedworth nodded assent. It might be surmised that he was brooding over those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. Ah ! those railways ! She was not long coming to the wailful exclamation upon them, both to express her personal sorrow at the disiigurement of our dear England, and lead to a little, modest offering of a woman's counse^ to the rash adventurer ; for thus could she serviceably put aside her perplexity awhile. Those railways ! When would there be peace in the land ? Where one single nook of shelter and escape from them ! And the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses, shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an intolerable afliction. " I speak rather as an invalid," she admitted; "I conjure up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the night beneath one's windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the landscape ; hideous accidents too. They will be wholesale and past help. Imagine a collision ! I have borne many changes with equanimity, I pretend to a certain degree of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured ... a sort of barbarous Maori visage — England in a Kew Zealand mask. You may call it the sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly sentimental : I love my country. I do love quiet, rural England. Well, and I love beauty, I love simplicity. All that will be destroyed by the refuse of the towns flooding the land — barring accidents, as Lukin says. There seems nothing else to save us." Eedworth acquiesced. " Nothing." " And you do not regret it ? " he was asked. "Not a bit. We have already exchanged opinions on the subject. Simplicity must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman. As for beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption. A bushelful of non- sense is talked pro and con : it always is at an innovation. What we are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is all." THE SCKUPTJLOXJS GENTLEMAN 51 " And establishing a new field for the speculator.'* " Yes, and I am one, and this is the matter I wanted to discuss with you, Lady Dunstane," said Kedworth, bending forward, the whole man devoted to the point of business. She declared she was complimented ; she felt the com- pliment, and trusted her advice might be useful, faintly remarking that she had a woman's head : and " not less " was implied as much as "not more," in order to give strength to her prospective opposition. All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table. He might within a year have a tolerable fortune : and, of course, he might be ruined. He did not expect it; still he fronted the risks. " And now," said he, " I come to you for counsel. I am not held among my acquaintances to be a marrying man, as it's called." He paused. Lady Dunstane thought it an occasion to praise him for his considerateness. "Yoa involve no one but yourself, you mean?" Her eyes shed approval. " Still the day may come. ... I say only that it may : and the wish to marry is a rosy colouring . . . equal to a flying chariot in conducting us across diffi- culties and obstructions to the deed. And then one may have to regret a previous rashness." These practical men are sometimes obtuse : she dwelt on that vision of the future. He listened, and resumed : " My view of marriage is, that no man should ask a woman to be his wife unless he is well able to support her in the comforts, not to say luxuries, she is accustomed to." His gaze had wandered to the desk ; it fixed there. " That is Miss Merlon's writing," he said. "The letter?" said Lady Dunstane, and she stretched out her hand to press down a leaf of it. " Yes ; it is from her." "Is she quite well ? " " I suppose she is. She does not speak of her health." He looked pertinaciously ia the direction of the letter, and it was not rightly mannered. That letter, of all others, was covert and sacred to the friend. It contained the weightiest of secrets. " I have not written to her," said Eedworth. He was astonishing : " To whom ? To Diana ? You 62 DIAKA OF TKE CEOSSWAYS could very well have done so, only I fancy she knows nothing, has never given a thought to railway stocks and shares; she has a loathing for speculation." " And speculators too, I dare say." " It is extremely probable." Lady Dunstane spoke with an emphasis, for the man liked Diana, and would be moved by the idea of forfeiting her esteem. " She might blame me if I did anything dishonourable." " She certainly would." " She will have no cause." Lady Dunstane began to look, as at a cloud charged with remote explosions : and still for the moment she was un- suspecting. But it was a flitting moment. When he went on, and very singularly droning to her ear : " The more a man loves a woman, the more he should be positive, before asking her, that she will not have to consent to a loss of position, and I would rather lose her than fail to give her all — not be sure, as far as a man can be sure, of giving her all I think she 's worthy of : " then the cloud shot a lightning flash, and the doors of her understanding swung wide to the entry of a great wonderment. A shock of pain succeeded it. Her sympathy was roused so acutely that she slipped over the reflective rebuke she would have ad- dressed to her silly delusion concerning his purpose in speaking of his affairs to a woman. Though he did not mention Diana by name, Diana was clearly the person. And why had he delayed to speak to her ? — Because of this venture of his money to make him a fortune, for the assur- ance of her future comfort! Here was the best of men for the girl, not displeasing to her ; a good, strong, trustworthy man, pleasant to hear and to see, only erring in being a trifle too scrupulous in love : and a fortnight back she would have imagined he had no chance ; and now she knew that the chance was excellent in those days, with this revelation in Diana's letter, which said that all chance was over. " The courtship of a woman," he droned away, " is in my mind not fair to her until a man has to the full enough to sanction his asking her to marry him. And if he throws all he possesses on a stake ... to win her — give her what she has a right to claim, he ought. . . . Only at present the prospect seems good ... He ought of course to wait. THE SCEUPULOUS GENTLEMAN 63 Well, the value of the stock I hold has doubled, and it in- creases. I am a careful watcher of the market. I have friends — brokers and railway Directors. I can rely on them." " Pray," interposed Lady Dunstane, " specify — I am rather in a mist — the exact point upon which you do me the honour to consult me." She ridiculed herself for having imagined that such a man would come to consult her upon a point of business. " It is," he replied, " this : whether, as affairs now stand with me — I have an income from my ofiice, and personal property . . . say between thirteen and fourteen hundred a year to start with — whether you think me justified in ask- ing a lady to share my lot ? " " Why not ? But will you name the lady ? " "Then I may write at once? In your judgement . . . Yes, the lady. I have not named her. I had no right. Besides, the general question first, in fairness to the peti- tioner. You might reasonably stipulate for more for a friend. She could make a match, as you have said . . ." he muttered of " brilliant, " and " the highest ; " and his humbleness of the honest man enamoured touched Lady Dunstane. She saw him now as the man of strength that she would have selected from a thousand suitors to guide her dear friend. She caught at a straw : " Tell me, it is not Diana ? " " Diana Merion ! " As soon as he had said it he perceived pitjr, and he drew himself tight for the stroke. "She's in love with some one ?" " She is engaged." He bore it well. He was a big-chested fellow, and that excruciating twist within of the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their course to grind the contrary to that of the heart, was revealed in one short lift and gasp, a compression of the tremendous change he underwent. " Why did you not speak before ? " said Lady Dunstane. Her words were tremulous. " I should have had no justification." " you might have won her ! " She could have wept ; her sympathy and her self-condolence under disappoint- 54 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS ment at Diana's conduct joined to swell the feminine flood. The poor fellow's quick breathing and blinking reminded her of cruelty in a retrospect. She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by hinting it without hurting: "Women really are not puppets. They are not so excessively luxurious. It is good for young women in the early days of marriage to rough it a little." She found herself droning, as he had done. He had ears for nothing but the fact. "Then I am too late!" "I have heard it to-day." " She is engaged ! Positively?" Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. She had to answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart's friend. The task of answering it was now doubled. " I fear so, I fancy so," she said, and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might possibly be a loophole behind the lines. "Then I must make my mind up to it," said Eedworth. "I think I '11 take a walk." She smiled kindly. "It will be our secret." "I thank you with all my heart. Lady Dunstane." He was not a weaver of phrases in distress. His blunt reserve was eloquent of it to her, and she liked him the better; could have thanked him too for leaving her promptly. When she was alone she took in the contents of the letter at a hasty glimpse. It was of one paragraph, and fired its shot like a cannon with the muzzle at her breast : — " My own Emmy, — I have been asked in marriage by Mr. Warwick, and have accepted him. Signify your approval, for I have decided that it is the wisest thing a waif can do. We are to live at The Crossways for four months of the year, so I shall have Dada in his best days and all my youngest dreams, my sunrise and morning dew, surrounding me; my old home for my new one. I write THE SCRtrPULOUS GENTLEMAN 65 iu haste, to you first, burning to hear from you. Send your blessing to yours in life and death, through all transformations, "TONT." That was all. Not a word of the lover about to be deco- rated with the title of husband. No confession of lave, nor a single supplicating word to her friend, in excuse for the abrupt decision to so grave a step. Her previous description of him, as a " gentlemanly of&cial " in his appearance, conjured him up most distastefully. True, she might have made a more lamentable choice; — a silly lordling, or a hero of scandals ; but if a gentlemanly official ■was of stabler mould, he failed to harmonize quite so well with the idea of a creature like Tony. Perhaps Mr. Eed- worth also failed in something. Where was the man fitly to mate her! Mr. Eedworth, however, was manly and trustwijrthy, of the finest Saxon type in build and in char- acter. : He had great qualities, and his excess of scrupu- lousness was most pitiable.^ She read: "The wisest thing a waif can do." It bore a sound of desperation. Avowedly Tony had accepted him without being in love. Or was she masking the passion? No: had it been a case of love, she would have written very differently to her friend. Lady Dunstane controlled the pricking of the wound inflicted by Diana's novel exercise in laconics where the fullest flow was due to tenderness, and despatched felici- tations upon the text of the initial line: "Wonders are always happening." She wrote to hide vexation beneath surprise ; naturally betraying it. " I must hope and pray that you have not been precipitate." Her curiosity to inspect the happiest of men, the most genuine part of her letter, was expressed coldly. When she had finished the composition she perused it, and did not recognize herself in her language, though she had been so guarded to cover the wound her Tony dealt their friendship — in some degree injuring their sex. For it might now, after such an example, verily seem that women are incapable of a trans- lucent perfect confidence : — their impulses, caprices, des- perations, tricks of concealment, trip a heart-whole 56 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS friendship. Well, to-morrow, if not to-day, the tripping may be expected ! Lady Dunstane resigned herself sadly to a lowered view of her Tony's character. This was her unconscious act of reprisal. Her brilliant beloved Tony, dazzling but in beauty and the gifted mind, stood as one essentially with the common order of women. She wished to be settled, Mr. Warwick proposed, and for the sake of living at The Crossways she accepted him — she, the lofty scorner of loveless marriages ! who had said — how many times! that nothing save love excused it! She degraded their mutual high standard of womankind. Diana was in eclipse, full three parts. The bulk of the gentlemanly ofiicial she had chosen obscured her. But I have written very carefully, thought Lady Dunstane, dropping her answer into the post-bag. She had, indeed, been so care- ful, that to cloak her feelings , she had written as another person. ^ Women with otiose husbands have a task . to preserve friendship, f j_J8.edworth carried his burden through the frosty air at a pace to melt icicles in Greenland. He walked unthink- ingly, right ahead, to the red West, as he discovered when pausing to consult his watch. Time was left to return at the same pace and dress for dinner; he swung round and picked up remembrances of sensations he had strewn by the wayj She knew these woods; he was walking in her footprSs; she was engaged to be married. Yes, his prin- ciple, never to ask a woman to marry him, never to court her, without bank-book assurance of his ability to sup- port her in cordial comfort, was right. He maintained it, and owned himself a donkey for having stuck to it. Between him and his excellent principle there was war, without the slightest division. Warned of the danger of losing her, he would have done the same again, confessing himself donkey for his pains. The principle was right, because it was due to the woman. His rigid adherence to the principle set him belabouring his donkey-ribs, as the proper due to himself. For he might have had a chance, all through two Winters. The opportunities had been numberless. Here, in this beech wood; near that thorn- bush; on the juniper slope; from the corner of chalk and sand in junction, to the corner of clay and chalk; all the THE SCKUPULOTJS GENTLEMAN 57 length of the wooded ridge he had reminders of her presence and his priceless chances : and still the standard of his conduct said No, while his heart bled. He felt that a chance had been. More sagacious than Lady Dunstane, from his not nursing a wound, he divined in the abruptness of Diana's resolution to accept a suitor, a sober reason, and a iitting one, for the wish that she might be settled. And had he spoken ! — If he had spoken to her, she might have given her hand to him, to a dis- honourable brute! A blissful brute. But a worse than donkey. Yes, his principle was right, and he lashed with it, and prodded with it, drove himself out into the sour wilds where bachelordom crops noxious weeds without a hallowing luminary, and clung to it, bruised and bleeding though he was. The gentleness of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit that was rather like purgatory sweet- ened by angelical tears. He was glad to go, wretched in having gone. She diverted the incessant conflict between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly sovereign, principle. Away from her, he was the victim of a flagellation so dire that it almost drove him to revolt against the lord he served, and somehow the many mem- ories at Copsley kept him away. Sir Lukin, when speak- ing of Diana's "engagement to that fellow Warwick," exalted her with an extraordinary enthusiasm, exceedingly hard for the silly beast who had lost her to bear. For the present the place dearest to Eedworth of all places on earth was unendurable. Meanwhile the value of railway investments rose in the market, fast as asparagus-heads for cutting: a circum- stance that added stings to reflection. Had he been only a little bolder, a little less the fanatical devotee of his rule of masculine honour, less the slave to the letter of success. . . . But why reflect at all? Here was a goodly income approaching, perhaps a seat in Parliament; a station for the airing of his opinions — ■ and a social status for the wife now denied to him. The wife was denied to him ; he could conceive of no other. The tyrant-ridden, reticent, tenacious creature had thoroughly wedded her in mind; her view of things had a throne beside his own, even in 58 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS their differences. He perceived, agreeing or disagreeing, the motions of her brain, as he did with none other of women; and this it is which stamps character on her, divides her from them, upraises and enspheres. He declined to live with any other of the sex. Before he could hear of the sort of man Mr. Warwick was — a perpetual object of his quest — the bridal bells had rung, and Diana Antonia Merion lost her maiden name. She became the Mrs. Warwick of our footballing world. Why she married, she never told. Possibly, in amaze- ment at herself subsequently, she forgot the specific reason. That which weighs heavily in youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be a trifle under older eyes to blun- ter senses, a more enlightened understanding. Her friend Emma probed for the reason vainly. Jjt was partly revealed to Eedworth, by guess-work and a putting together of pieces, yet quite luminously, as it were by touch of ten- tacle-feelers — one evening that he passed with Sir Lukin Dunstane, when the lachrymose ex-dragoon and son of Idlesse, had rather more than dinedj CHAPTEE VI THE COUPLE Six months a married woman, Diana came to Copsley to introduce her husband. They had run over Italy: "the Italian Peninsula," she quoted him in a letter to Lady Dunstane: and were furnishing their London house. Her first letters from Italy appeared to have a little bloom of sentiment. Augustus was mentioned as liking this and that in the land of beauty. He patronized Art , and it was a pleasure to hear him speak upon pictures and sculptures ; he knew a great deal about them. "He is an authority." Her humour soon began to play round the fortunate man, who did not seem, to the reader's mind, to bear so well a sentimental clothing. His pride was in being very English THE COUPLE 69 on the Continent, and Diana's instances of his lofty appre- ciations of the garden of Art and Nature, and statuesque "walk through it, would have been more amusing if her friend could have harmonized her idea of the couple. A description of " a bit of a wrangle between us " at Lucca, where an Italian post-master on a journey of inspection, claimed a share of their carriage and audaciously attempted entry, was laughable, but jarred. Would she some day lose her relish for ridicule, and see him at a distance? He was generous, Diana said: she saw fine qualities in him. It might be that he was lavish on his bridal tour. She said he was unselfish, kind, affable with his equals; he was cordial to the acquaintances he met. Perhaps his worst fault was an affected superciliousness before the foreigner, not uncommon in those days. "You are to know, dear Emmy, that we English are the aristocracy of Europeans." Lady Dunstane inclined to think we were; nevertheless, in the mouth of a "gentlemanly official" the frigid arrogance added a stroke of caricature to his deport- ment. On the other hand, the reports of him gleaned by Sir Lukin sounded favourable. He was not takea to be preternaturally stiff, nor bright, but a goodish sort of fel- low; good horseman, good shot, good character. In short, the average Englishman, excelling as a cavalier, a slayer, and an orderly subject. That wa,s a somewhat elevated standard to the patriotic Emma. _Only she would never have stipulated for an average to espouse Diana. Would he understand her, and value the best in her? Another and unanswered question was, how could she have conde- scended to wed with an average? There was transparently some secret not confided to her friendj He appeared. Lady Dunstane's first impression of him recurred on his departure. Her unanswered question drummed at her ears, though she remembered that Tony's art in leading him out had moderated her rigidly judicial summary of the union during a greater part of the visit. But his requiring to be led out, was against himr- Con- sidering the subjects, his talk was passable. The subjects treated of politics, pictures, Continental travel, our mauu- factures, our wealth and the reasons for it — excellent reasons well-weighed. He was handsome, as men go; 60 DIANA OP THE CROSSWAXS rather tall, not too stout, precise in the modern fashion of his dress, and the pair of whiskers encasing a colourless depression up to a long, thin, straight nose, and closed lips indicating an aperture. The contraction of his mouth expressed an intelligence in the attitude of the firmly negative. The lips opened to smile, the teeth were fault- less : an effect was produced, if a cold one — the colder for the unparticipating northern eyes ; eyes of that half cloud and blue, which make a kind of hueless grey, and are chiefly striking in an authoritative stare. Without con- tradicting, for he was exactly polite, his look signified a person conscious of being born to command: in fine, an aristocrat among the "aristocracy of Europeans." His differences of opinion were prefaced by a "Pardon me," and pausing smile of the teeth; then a succinctly worded sentence or two, a perfect settlement of the dispute. He disliked argumentation. He said so, and Diana remarked it of him, speaking as a wife who merely noted a character- istic. Inside his boundary, he had neat phrases, opinions in packets. Beyond it, apparently the world was void of any particular interest. Sir Lukin, whose boundary would have shown a narrower limitation had it been defined, stood no chance with him. Tory versus Whig, he tried a wrestle, and was thrown. They agreed on the topic of Wine. Mr. Warwick had a fine taste in wine. Their' after-dinner sittings were devoted to this and the allitera-' tive cognate theme, equally dear to the gallant ex-dragoon, from which it resulted that Lady Dunstane received sat- isfactory information in a man's judgement of him. " Warwick is a clever fellow, and a thorough man of the world, I can tell you, Emmy." Sir Lukin further observed that he was a gentlemanly fellow. " A gentlemanly offi- cial ! " Diana's primary dash of portraiture stuck to him, so true it was ! As for her, she seemed to have forgotten it. Not only did she strive to show him to advantage by leading him out ; she played second to him, subserviently , fondly ; she quite submerged herself, content to be dull if he might shine ; and her talk of her husband in her friend's blue-chamber boudoir of the golden stars, where they had discussed the world and taken counsel in her maiden days, implied admiration of his merits. He rode superbly : he THE COtrPLE 61 knew Law: he was prepared for any position: he could speak really eloquently ; she had heard him at a local meeting. And he loved the old Crossways almost as much as she did. " He has promised me he will never ask me to sell it," she said, with a simpleness that could hardly have been acted. When she was gone, Lady Dunstane thought she had worn a mask, in the natural manner of women trying to make the best of their choice; and she excused her poor Tony for the artful presentation of him at her own cost. But she could not excuse her for having married the man. Her first and her final impression likened him to a house locked up and empty : — a London house conventionally furnished and decorated by the upholsterer, and empty of inhabitants. How a brilliant and beautiful girl could have committed this rashness, was the perplexing riddle : the knottier because the man was idle : and Diana had ambi- tion ; she despised and dreaded idleness in men. — Empty of inhabitants even to the ghost! Both human and spir- itual were wanting. The mind contemplating him became reflectively stagnant. I must not be unjust! Lady Dunstane hastened to ex- claim, at a whisper that he had at least proved his appre- ciation of Tony ; whom he preferred to call Diana, as she gladly remembered : and the two were bound together for a moment warmly by her recollection of her beloved Tony's touching little petition : "You will invite us again?" and then there had flashed in Tony's dear dark eyes the look of their old love drowning. They were not to be thought of separately. {.She admitted that the introduction to a woman of her friend's husband is crucially trying to him : he may well show worse than he is.' Yet his appreciation of Tony in espousing her, was rather marred by Sir Lukiu's report of him as a desperate admirer of beautiful woman. It might be for her beauty only, not for her spiritual quali- ties! fcAt present he did not seem aware of their existence. - But, to be entirely just, she had hardly exhibited them or a sign of them during the first interview: and sitting with his hostess alone, he had seized the occasion to say, that he was the happiest of men. He said it with the nearest approach to fervour she had noticed. Perhaps the very 62 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWATS fact of his not producing a highly favourable impression, should be set to plead on his behalf. Such as he was, he was himself, no simulator. She longed for Mr. Eedworth's report of him. Her compassion for Eedworth's feelings when behold- ing the woman he loved another man's wife, did not soften the urgency of her injunction that he should go speedily, and see as much of them as he could. "Because," she gave her reason, "I wish Diana to know she has not lost a single friend through her marriage, and is only one the richer." Eedworth buckled himself to the task. He belonged to the class of his countrymen who have a dungeon-vault for feelings that should not be suffered to cry abroad, and into this oubliette he cast them, letting them feed as they might, or perish. It was his heart down below, and in no voluntary musings did he listen to it, to sustain the thing. Grimly lord of himself, he stood emotionless before the world. Some worthy fellows resemble him, and they are called deep-hearted."^He was dungeon-deep.»- The prisoner underneath might clamour and leap; none heard him or knew of him; nor did he ever view the day. Diana's frank : " Ah, Mr. Eedworth, how glad I am to see you ! " was met by the calmest formalism of the wish for her happiness. He became a guest at her London house, and his report of the domesticity there, and notably of the lord of the house, pleased Lady Dunstane more than her husband's. He saw the kind of man accurately, as far as men are to be seen on the surface; and she could say assentingly, without anxiety: "Yes, yes," to his remarks upon Mr. Warwick, indicative of a man of capable head in worldly affairs, commonplace beside his wife. The noble gentleman for Diana was yet unborn, they tacitly agreed. Meantime one must not put a mortal husband to the fiery ordeal of his wife's deserts, they agreed likewise. "You may be sure she is a constant friend," Lady Dunstane said for his comfort; and she reminded herself subsequently of a shade of disappointment at his imperturbable rejoinder : "I could calculate on it." Tor though not at all desiring to witness the sentimental fit, she wished to see that he held an image of Diana : — surely a woman to kindle poets THE COUPLE 63 and heroes, the princes of the race; and it was a curious perversity that the two men she had moved were merely- excellent, emotionless, ordinary men, with heads for busi- ness. Elsewhere, out of England, Diana would have been a woman for a place in song, exalted to the skies. Here she had the destiny to inflame Mr. Eedworth and Mr. Warwick, two railway Directors, bent upon scoring the country to the likeness of a child's lines of hop-scotch in a gravel-yard. As with all invalids, the pleasure of living backward was haunted by the tortures it evoked, and two years later she recalled this outcry against the Fates. She would then have prayed for Diana to inflame none but such men as those two. The original error was, of course, that rash and most inexplicable marriage, a step never alluded to by the driven victim of it. Lady Dunstane heard rumours of dissensions. Diana did not mention them. She spoke of her husband as unlucky in railway ventures, and of a household necessity for money, nothing further. One day she wrote of a Government appointment her husband had received, ending the letter: "So there is the end of our troubles." Her friend rejoiced, and afterward looking back at her satisfaction, saw the dire beginning of them. Lord Dannisburgh's name, as one of the admirers of Mrs. Warwick, was dropped once or twice by Sir Lukin. He had dined with the Warwicks, and met the eminent member of the Cabinet at their table. There is no harm in admiration, especially on the part of one of a crowd observing a star. No harm can be imputed when the husband of a beautiful woman accepts an appointment from the potent Minister admiring her. So Lady Dunstane thought, for she was sure of Diana to her inmost soul. But she soon perceived in Sir Lukin that the old Dog- world was preparing to yelp on a scent. He of his nature belonged to the hunting pack, and with a cordial feeling for the quarry, he was quite with his world in expecting to see her run, and readiness to join the chase. No great scandal had occurred for several months. The world was in want of it; and he, too, with a very cordial feeling for the quarry, piously hoping she would escape, already had his nose to ground, collecting testimony in the track of 64 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS her. He said little to his wife, but his -world was getting so noisy that he could not help half pursing his lips, as with the soft whistle of an innuendo at the heels of it. Eedworth was in America, engaged in carving up that hemisphere. She had no source of information but her husband's chance gossip; and London was death to her; and Diana, writing faithfully twice a week, kept silence as to Lord Dannisburgh, except in naming him among her guests. She wrote this, which might have a secret per- sonal signification : " We women are the verbs passive of the alliance, we have to learn, and if we take to activity, with the best intentions, we conjugate a frightful disturb- ance. We are to run on lines, like the steam-trains, or we come to no station, dash to fragments. I have the mis- fortune to know I was born an active. I take my chance." Once she coupled the names of Lord Larrian and Lord Dannisburgh, remarking that she had a fatal attraction for antiques. The death of her husband's uncle and illness of his aunt withdrew her to The Crossways, where she remained nurs- ing for several months, reading diligently, as her letters showed, and watching the approaches of the destroyer. She wrote like her former self, subdued by meditation in the presence of that inevitable. The world ceased bark- ing. Lady Dunstane could suppose Mr. Warwick to have now a reconciling experience of his wife's noble qualities. He probably did value them more. He spoke of her to Sir Lukin in London with commendation. "She is an attentive nurse." He inherited a considerable increase of income when he and his wife were the sole tenants of The Crossways, but disliking the house, for reasons hard to explain by a man previously professing to share her attach- ment to it, he wished to sell or let the place, and his wife would do neither. She proposed to continue living in their small London house rather than be cut oif from The Crossways, which, he said, was ludicrous: people should live up to their position; and he sneered at the place, and slightly wounded her, for she was open to a wound when the cold fire of a renewed attempt at warmth between them was crackling and showing bits of flame, after she had given proof of her power to serve. Service to himself and THE COUPLE 66 his relatives affected him. He deferred to her craze for The Crossways, and they lived in a larger London house, "up to their position," which means ever a trifle beyond it, and gave choice dinner-parties to the most eminent. His jealousy slumbered. Having ideas of a seat in Parlia- ment at this period, and preferment superior to the post he held, Mr. Warwick deemed it sagacious to court the potent patron Lord Dannisburgh could be; and his wife had his interests at heart, the fork-tongued world said. The cry revived. Stories of Lord D. and Mrs. W. whipped the hot pursuit. The moral repute of the great Whig lord ahd the beauty of the lady composed inflammable material. ' "Are you altogether cautious? " Lady Dunstane wrote to Diana; and her friend sent a copious reply : "You have the fullest right to ask your Tony anything, and I will answer as at the Judgement bar. You allude to Lord Dannisburgh. He is near what Dada's age would have been, and is, I think I can affirm, next to my dead father and my Emmy, my dearest friend. I love him. I could say it in the streets without shame ; and you do not imagine me shameless. Whatever his character in his younger days, he can be honestly a woman's friend, believe me. I see straight to his heart; he has no disguise; and unless I am to suppose that marriage is the end of me, I must keep him among my treasures. I see him almost daily; it is not possible to think I can be deceived ; and as long as he does me the honour to esteem my poor portion of brains by coming to me for what he is good enough to call my counsel, I shall let the world wag its tongue. Between ourselves, I trust to be doing some good. I know I am of use in various ways. No doabt there is a danger of a woman's head being turned, when she reflects that a powerful Minister governing a kingdom has not considered her too insignificant to advise him ; and I am sensible of it. I am, I assure you, dearest, on my guard against it. That would not attach me to him, as his homely friendli- ness does. He is the most amiable, cheerful, benignant of men; he has no feeling of an enemy, though naturally his enemies are numerous and venomous. He is full of obser- vation and humour. How he would amuse you ! In many cespects accord with you. And I should not have a spark 5 66 DIAIfA OP THE CEOSSWAYS of jealousy. Some day I shall beg permission to brixig him to Gopsley. At present, during the Session, he is too busy, as you know. Me — his 'crystal spring of wis- dom ' — he can favour with no more than an hour in the afternoon, or a few minutes at night. Or I get a pen- cilled note from the benches of the House, with an anec- dote, or news of a Division. I am sure to be enlivened. /' " So I have written to you fully, simply, frankly. Have perfect faith in your Tony, who would, she vows to heaven, die rather than disturb it and her heart's beloved." The letter terminated with one of Lord Dannisburgh's anecdotes, exciting to merriment in the season of its freshness ; — and a postscript of information : " Augustus expects a mission — about a month; uncertain whether I accompany him." Mr. Warwick departed on his mission. Diana remained in London. Lady Dunstane wrote entreating her to pass the month — her favourite time of the violet yielding to the cowslip — at Gopsley. The invitation could not be accepted, but the next day Diana sent word that she had a surprise for the following Sunday, and would bring a friend to lunch, if Sir Lukin would meet them at the corner of the road in the valley leading up to the heights, at a stated hour. Lady Dunstane gave the listless baronet his directions, observing : " It 's odd, she never will come alone since her marriage." " Queer," said he of the serenest absence of conscience ; and that there must be something not entirely right going on, he strongly inclined to think. ' CHAPTER VII THE CRISIS It was a confirmed suspicion when he beheld Lord Dannisburgh on the box of a four-in-hand, and the peer- less Diana beside him, cockaded lackeys in plain livery and the lady's maid to the rear. But Lord Dannisburgh's THE CEISIS 67 visit was a compliment, and the freak of his driving down under the beams of Aurora on a sober Sunday morning capital fun ; so with a gaiety that was kept alive for the invalid Emma to partake of it, they rattled away to the heights, and climbed them, and Diana rushed to the arms of her friend, whispering and cooing for pardon if she startled her, guilty of a little whiff of blarney : -^ Lord Dannisburgh wanted so much to be introduced to her, and she so much wanted her to know him, and she hoped to be graciously excused for thus bringing them together, "that she might be chorus to them ! " Chorus was a pretty fiction on the part of the thrilling and topping voice. She was the very radiant Diana of her earliest opening day, both in look and speech, a queenly comrade, and a spirit leaping and shining like a mountain water. She did not seduce, she ravished. The judgement was taken captive and flowed with her. As to the prank of the visit, Emma heartily enjoyed it and hugged it for a holiday of her own, and doting on the beautiful, dark-eyed, fresh creature, who bore the name of the divine Huntress, she thought her a true Dian in stature, step, and attributes, the genius of laughter superadded. None else on earth so sweetly laughed, none so spontaneously, victoriously provoked the healthful openness. Her deljcious chatter, and her muse- ful sparkle in listening, equally quickened every sense of life. Adorable as she was to her friend Emma at all times, she that day struck a new fountain in memory. And it was pleasant to see the great lord's admiration of this wonder. One could firmly believe in their friendship, and his winning ideas from the abounding bubbling well. A recurrent smile beamed on his face when hearing and observing her. Certain dishes provided at the table were Diana's favourites, and he relished them, asking for a second help, and remarking that her taste was good in that as in all things. They lunched, eating like boys. They walked over the grounds of Copsley, and into the lanes and across the meadows of the cowslip, rattling, chatting, en- livening the frosty air, happy as children biting to the juices of ripe apples off the tree. But Tony was the tree, the dispenser of the rosy gifts. She had a moment of reflection, only a moment, and Emma felt the pause as 68 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS though a cloud had shadowed them and a spirit had been shut away. Both spoke of their happiness at the kiss of parting. That melancholy note at the top of the wave to human hearts conscious of its enforced decline was repeated by them, and Diana's eyelids blinked to dismiss a tear. " You have no troubles ? " Emma said. " Only the pain of the good-bye to my beloved," said Diana. "I have never been happier — never shall be! Now you know him you think with me ? I knew you would. You have seen him as he always is — except when he is armed for battle. He is the kindest of souls. And soul I say. He is the one man among men who gives me notions of a soul in men." The eulogy was exalted. Lady Dunstane made a little mouth for Oh, in correction of the transcendental touch, though she remembered their foregone conversations upon men — strange beings that they are ! — and understood Diana's meaning. " Eeally ! really ! honour ! " Diana emphasized her ex- travagant praise, to print it fast. "Hear him speak of Ireland." " Would he not speak of Ireland in a tone to catch the Irishwoman ? " " He is past thoughts of catching, dearest. At that age men are pools of fish, or what you will : they are not anglers. Next year, if you invite us, we will come again." " But you will come to stay in the Winter ? " " Certainly. But I am speaking of one of my holidays." They kissed fervently. The lady mounted : the grey and portly lord followed her; Sir Lukin flourished his whip, and Emma was left to brood over her friend's last words : " One of my holidays." Not a hint, to the detriment of her husband had passed. The stray beam balefuUy illumi- nating her marriage slipped from her involuntarily. Sir Lukin was troublesome with his ejaculations that evening, and kept speculating on the time of the arrival of the four-in-hand in London ; upon which he thought a great deal depended. They had driven out of town early, and if they drove back late they would not be seen, as all the cacklers were sure then to be dressing for dinner, and he would not pass the Clubs. "I couldn't not suggest it," THE CRISIS 69 he said. " But Dannisburgh "s an old hand. But they say- he snaps his fingers at tattle, and laughs. Well, it does n't matter for him, perhaps, but a game of two. ... Oh! it '11 be all right. They can't reach London before dusk. And the cat 's away." "It's more than ever incomprehensible to me how she could have married that man," said his wife. " I 've long since given it up," said he. Diana wrote her thanks for the delightful welcome, tell- ing of her drive home to smoke and solitude, with a new host of romantic sensations to keep her company. She wrote thrice in the week, and the same addition of one to the ordinary number next week. Then for three weeks not a line. Sir Lukin brought news from London that Warwick had returned, nothing to explain the silence. A letter addressed to The Crossways was likewise unnoticed. The supposition that they must be visiting on a round, appeared rational; but many weeks elapsed, until Sir Lukin received a printed sheet in the superscription of a former military comrade, who had marked a paragraph. It was one of those journals, now barely credible, dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle, wherein initials raised sewer-lamps, and Asmodeus lifted a roof, leering hideously. - Thousands detested it, and fattened their crops on it. • domesticated beasts of superior habits to the common will Jindulge themselves with a luxurious roll in carrion, for a 4 revival of their original instincts. Society was largely a "purchaser. The ghastly thing was dreaded as a scourge, hailed as a refreshment, nourished as a parasite. It pro- fessed undaunted honesty, and operated in the fashion of the worms bred of decay. Success was its boasted justi- fication. The animal world, when not rigorously watched, will always crown with success the machine supplying its appetites. The old dog-world took signal from it. The one-legged devil-god waved his wooden hoof, and the creatures in view, the hunt was uproarious. Why should we seem better than we are ? — down with hypocrisy, cried the censor morum, spicing the lamentable derelictions of this and that great person, male and female. The plea of corruption of blood in the world, to excuse the public chafing of a grievous itch, is not less old than sin ; and 70 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS it offers a merry day of frisky truant running to the animal made unashamed by another and another stripped, branded, and stretched flat. Sir Lukin read of Mr. and Mrs. W. and a distinguished Peer of the realm. The paragraph was brief; it had a flavour. Promise of more to come, pricked curiosity. He read it enraged, feeling for his wife ; and again indignant, feeling for Diana. His third reading found him out : he felt for both, but as a member of the whispering world, much behind the scenes, he had a longing for the promised insinuations, just to know what they could say, or dared say. The paper was not shown to Lady Dunstane. A run to London put him in the tide of the broken dam of gossip. The names were openly spoken and swept from mouth to mouth of the scandalmongers, gathering matter as they flew. He knocked at Diana's door, where he was informed that the mistress of the house was absent. More than official gravity accompanied the announcement. Her address was unknown. Sir Lukin thought it now time to tell his wife. He began with a hesitating circumlocution, in order to prepare her mind for bad news. She divined imme- diately that it concerned Diana, and forcing him to speak to the point, she had the story jerked out to her in a sentence. It stopped her heart. The chill of death was tasted in that wavering ascent from oblivion to recollection. | Why had not Diana come to her, she asked herself, and asked her husba nd ; who, as usual, was absolutely unable to s?^ I Under compulsory squeezing, he would have S^swered, thai? she did not come because she could not fib so easily to her bosom friend : and this he thought, notwithstanding his personal experience of Diana's generosity. But he had other personal experiences of her sex, and her sex plucked at the bright star and drowned it. The happy day of Lord Dannisburgh's visit settled in Emma's belief as the cause of Mr. Warwick's unpardonable suspicions and cruelty. Arguing from her own sensations of a day that had been like the return of sweet health to her frame, she could see nothing but the loveliest freakish in- nocence in Diana's conduct, and she recalled her looks, her words, every fleeting gesture, even to the ingenuousness of the noble statesman's admiration of her, for the confusion THE CRISIS 71 of her unmanly and unworthy husband. And Emma was nevertheless a thoughtful person ; only her heart was at the head of her thoughts, and led the file, whose reasoning was accurate on erratic traces. All night her heart went at fever pace. She brought the repentant husband to his knees, and then doubted, strongly doubted, whether she would, whether in consideration for her friend she could, intercede with Diana to forgive him. In the morning she slept heavily. Sir Lukin had gone to London early for further tidings. She awoke about midday, and found a letter ou her pillow. It was Diana's. Then while her fingers eagerly tore it open, her heart, the champion rider over-night, sank. It needed support of facts, and feared them : not in distrust of that dear persecuted soul, but because the very bravest of hearts is of its nature a shivering defender, sensitive in the presence of any hostile array, much craving for material support, until the mind and spirit displace it, depute it to second them instead of leading. She read by a dull November fog-light a mixture of the dreadful and the comforting, and dwelt upon the latter in abandonment, hugged it, though conscious of evil and the little that there was to veritably console. The close of the letter struck the blow. After bluntly stating that Mr. Warwick had served her with a process, and that he had no case without suborning witnesses, Diana said : " But I leave the case, and him, to the world. Ireland, or else America, it is a guiltless kind of suicide to bury myself abroad. He has my letters. They are such as I can own to you, and ask you to kiss me — and kiss me when you have heard all the evidence, all that I can add to it, kiss me. You know me too well to think I would ask you to kiss criminal lips. But I cannot face the world. In the dock, yes. Not where I am expected to smile and sparkle, on pain of incurring suspicion if I show a sign of oppression. I cannot do that. I see myself wearing a false grin — your Tony ! No, I do well to go. This is my resolution ; and in consequence, my beloved ! my only truly loved on earth ! I do not come to you, to grieve you, as I surely should. Nor would it soothe me, dearest. This will be to you the best of reasons. It could not soothe me to see myself giving pain to Emma. I am like a pestilence, and let me swing away to 72 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS the desert, for there I do no harm. 1 know I am right. I have questioned myself — it is not cowardice. I do not quail. I abhor the part of actress. I should do it well — too well ; destroy my soul in the performance. Is a good name before such a world as this worth that sacrifice ? A convent and self-quenching ; — cloisters would seem to me like holy dew. But that would be sleep, and I feel the powers of life. Never have I felt them so mightily. If it were not for being called on to act and mew, I would stay, fight, meet a bayonet-hedge of charges and rebut them. I have my natural weapons and my cause. It must be con- fessed that I have also more knowledge of men and the secret contempt — it must be — the best of them entertain for us. Oh ! and we confirm it if we trust them. But they have been at a wicked school. "I will write. Prom whatever place, you shall have letters, and constant. I write no more now. In my present mood I find no alternative between rageing and drivelling. I am henceforth dead to the world. Never dead to Emma till my breath is gone — poor flame ! I blow at a bed-room candle, by which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am — though not even serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of no mortal service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week you shall hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes. You have faith in me, and I fly from you ! — I must be mad. Yet I feel calmly reasonable. I know that this is the thing to do. Some years hence a grey woman may return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her day and disappeared. Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of the woman — I drivel again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture and imprisonment until the day when my name is cited to appear. I have left London. This letter and I quit the scene by different routes — I would they were one. My beloved ! I have an ache — I think I am wronging you. I am not mistress of myself, and do as something within, me, wiser than I, dictates. — You will write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is not compassion I want, I want you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me hear Emma's voice — the true voice. This running away merits your re- THE CRISIS 73 proaches. It will iook like — I have more to confess : the tigress in me -wishes it were! I should then have a reckless passion to fold me about, and the glory — infernal, if you name it so, and so it would be — of suffering for and with some one else. As it is, I am utterly solitary, sus- tained neither from above nor below, except within myself, and that is all fire and smoke, like their new engines. — I kiss this miserable sheet of paper. — Yes, I judge that I have run off a line — and what a line ! — which hardly shows a trace for breathing things to follow until they feel the transgression in wreck. How immensely nature seems to prefer men to women ! — But this paper is happier than the writer. " Your Tony." That was the end. Emma kissed it in tears. They had often talked of the possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a mutual devotedness men choose to doubt of. She caught herself accusing Tony of the lapse from friendship. Hither should the true friend have flown unerringly. The blunt ending of the letter likewise dealt a wound. She reperused it, perused and meditated. The flight of Mrs. Warwick ! She heard that cry — fatal I But she had no means of putting a hand on her. — "Your Tony." The coldness might be set down to exhaustion : it might, yet her not coming to her friend for counsel and love was a positive weight in the indifferent scale. She read the letter back- wards, and by snatches here and there ; many perusals and hours passed before the scattered creature exhibited in its pages came to her out of the flying threads of the web as her living Tony, whom she loved and prized, and was ready to defend against the world. By that time the fog had lifted ; she saw the sky on the borders of milky cloud- folds. Her invalid's chill sensitiveness conceived a sym- pathy in the baring heavens, and lying on her sofa in the drawing-room she gained strength of meditative vision, weak though she was to help, through ceasing to brood on her wound and herself. She cast herself into her dear Tony's feelings ; and thus it came, that she imagined Tony would visit The Crossways, where she kept souvenirs of 74 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS her father, his cane, and his ■writing-desk, and a precious miniature of him hanging above it, before leaving England for ever. The fancy sprang to certainty ; every speculation confirmed it. Had Sir Lukin been at home she would have despatched him to The Crossways at once. The West wind blew, and gave her a view of the Downs beyond the weald from her southern window. She thought it even possible to drive there and reach the place, on the chance of her vivid suggestion, some time after nightfall ; but a walk across the room to try her forces was too convincing of her inability. She walked with an ebony silver-mounted stick, a present from Mr. Eedworth. She was leaning on it when the card of Thomas Eedworth was handed to her. CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN LEAEN TO EESPBCT ONE ANOTHER "You see, you are my crutch," Lady Dunstane said to him, raising the stick in reminder of the present. He offered his arm and hurriedly informed her, to dispose of dull personal matter, that he had just landed. She looked at the clock. "Lukin is in town. You know the song: 'Alas, I scarce can go or creep While Lulcin is away.' I do not doubt you have succeeded in your business over there. Ah ! Now I suppose you have confidence in your success. I should have predicted it, had you come to me." She stood, either musing or in weakness, and said abruptly : " Will you object to lunching at One o'clock ? " " The sooner the better," said Eedworth. She had sighed : her voice betrayed some agitation, strange in so serenely- minded a person. His partial acquaintance with the Herculean Sir Lukin 's reputation in town inspired a fear of his being about to receive admission to the distressful confidences of the wife, and he asked if Mrs. Warwick was well. The answer sounded ominous, with its accompaniment of evident pain : "I think her health is good." A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN 75 Had they quarrelled ? He said he had not heard a word of Mrs. Warwick for several months. " I heard from her this morning," said Lady Dunstane, and motioned him to a chair beside the sofa, where she half reclined, closing her eyes. The sight of tears on the eyelashes frightened him. She roused herself to look at the clock. " Providence or accident, you are here," she said. " I could not have prayed for the coming of a truer man. Mrs. Warwick is in great danger. . . . You know our love. She is the best of me, heart and soul. Her husband has chosen to act on vile suspicions — baseless, I could hold my hand in the fire and swear. She has enemies, or the jealous fury is on the man — I know little of him. He has commenced an action against her. He will rue it. But she . . . you understand this of women at least; — they are not cowards in all things ! — but the horror of facing a public scandal : — my poor girl writes of the hate- fulness of having to act the complacent — put on her accustomed self ! She would have to go about, a mark for the talkers, and behave as if nothing were in the air — full of darts ! Oh, that general whisper ! — it makes a coup de massue — a gale to sink the bravest vessel : — and a woman must preserve her smoothest front : chat, smile — or else ! — Well, she shrinks from it. I should too. She is leaving the country." "Wrong ! " cried Eed worth. " Wrong indeed. She writes, that in two days she will be out of it. Judge her as I do, though you are a man, I pray. You have seen the hunted hare. It is our education — we have something of the hare in us when the hounds are full cry. Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run. ' By this, poor Wat far off upon a hill.' Shakespeare would have the divine comprehension. I have thought all round it and come back to him. She is one of Shakespeare's women : another character, but one of his own : — another Herraione ! I dream of him — seeing her with that eye of steady flame. The bravest and best of us at bay in the world need an eye like his, to read deep and not be baf&ed by inconsistencies." Insensibly Eedworth blinked. His consciousness of an exalted compassion for the lady was h 'ed by these flights 76 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS of advocacy to feel that he was almost seated beside the sovereign, poet thus eulogized, and he was of a modest nature. "But you are practical," pursued Lady Dunstane, ob- serving signs that she took for impatience. "You are thinking of what can be done. If Lukin were here I would send him to The Crossways without a moment's delay, on the chance, the mere chance : — it shines to me ! If i were only a little stronger! I fear I might break down, and it would be unfair to my husband. He has trouble enough with my premature infirmities already. I am certain she will go to The Crossways. Tony is one of the women who burn to give last kisses to things they love. And she has her little treasures hoarded there. She was born there. Her father died there. She is three parts Irish — superstitious in affection. I know her so well. At this moment I see her there. If not, she has grown unlike herself." "Have you a stout horse in the stables?" Eedworth asked. " You remember the mare Bertha ; you have ridden her." "The mare would do, and better than a dozen horses." He consulted his watch. " Let me mount Bertha, I engage to deliver a letter at The Crossways to-night." Lady Dunstane half inclined to act hesitation in accept- ing the aid she sought, but said : " Will you find your way ? " He spoke of three hours of daylight and a moon to rise. "She has often pointed out to me from your ridges where The Crossways lies, about three miles from the Downs, near a village named Sterling, on the road to Brasted. The house has a small plantation of firs behind it, and a bit of river — rare for Sussex — ^to the right. An old straggling red brick house at Crossways, a stone's throw from a fingerpost on a square of green : roads to Brasted, London, Wickford, Riddlehurst. I shall find it. Write what you have to say, my lady, and confide it to me. She shall have it to-night, if she 's where you suppose. I '11 go, with your permission, and take a look at the mare. Sussex roads are heavy in this damp weather, and the frost coming on won't improve them for a tired beast. We haven't our rails laid down there yet." .'A PEACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN 77 - "You make me admit some virtues in the practical," said Lady Dunstane ; and had the poor fellow vollied forth a tale of the everlastinguess of his passion for Diana, it would have touched her far less than his exact' memory of Diana's description of her loved birthplace. She wrote: " I trust my messenger to tell you how T hang on you. I see my ship making for the rocks. You break your Emma's heart. It will be the second wrong step. I shall not survive it. The threat has made me incapable of rushing to you, as I might have had strength to do yester- day. I am shattered, and I wait panting for Mr. Eed- worth's return with you. He has called, by accident, as we say. Trust to him. If ever heaven was active to avert a fatal mischance it is to-day. You will not stand against my supplication. It is my life I cry for. I have no more time. He starts. He leaves me to pray — like the mother seeing her child on the edge of the cliff. Come. This is your breast, my Tony! And your soul warns you it is right to cjme. Do rightly. Scorn other counsel — the coward's. ./Come with our friend — the one man known to me who can be a friend of women./' "Your Emma." Eedworth was in the room. "The mare '11 do it well," he said. " She has had her feed, and in five minutes will be saddled at the door." "But you must eat, dear friend," said the hostess. " I '11 munch at a packet of sandwiches on the way. There seems a chance, and the time for lunching may miss it." " You understand . . . ? " "Everything, I fancy." "If she is there!" "One break in the run will turn her back." The sensitive invalid felt a blow in his following up the simile of the hunted hare for her friend, but it had a promise of hopefulness. And this was all that could be done by earthly agents, under direction of spiritual, as her imagination encouraged her to believe. 78 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS She saw him start, after fortifying him with a tumbler of choice Bordeaux, thinking how Tony would have said she was like a lady arming her knight for battle. On the back of the mare he passed her window, after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her where the letter housed safely. The packet of provision bulged on his hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during the later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and sensations of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone forth riding like a huntsman. His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall, and his travelling-bag was beside it. He had carried it up from the valley, expecting hos- pitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to weather a frosty November night! She called in the groom, whose derision of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Eertha, meaning work for the mare, appeased her remorsefulness. Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long the mare would take to do the distance to Sterling, with a rider like Mr. Eed- worth on her back. By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Eedworth would be knocking at the door of the Three Eavens Inn, at Sterling, when the mare would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Eedworth was not the gentle- man to let her be fed out of his eye. More than that, Brisby had some acquaintance with the people of the inn. He begged to inform her ladyship that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the county; his parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the Downs were his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world was like them, fair weather or foul. Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet deep in the gullies. The grandest air in England, he had heard say. His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption that she must be entertain- ing an anxiety about master's favourite mare. But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate ; had avoided her disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true beauty of masculine character in Mr. Eed- worth, as he showed himself to-day. How could he have A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING "WOMAN 79 doubted succeeding? One grain more of faith in his energy, and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her — an open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was the sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to fatigue her and deaden the medical eflRcacy of him and his like.-'' Stretched on the sofa, she watched the early sinking sun in South-western cloud, and the changes from saffron to intensest crimson, the crown of a November evening, and one of frosty/ Eed- worth struck on a southward line from chalk -ridge to sand, ■where he had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned the ways, along beside a meadow- brook fed by the heights, through pines and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had been with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put an end to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he munched. A favour- able land for rails: and she had looked over it: and he was now becoming a wealthy man : and she was a married woman straining the leash. His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such a desperate long shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked forward. When the burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews behind him, he was far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road. That the people opposing railways were not people of business, was his reflection, and it returned persistently: for practical men, even the most devoted among them, will think for themselves; their army, which is the rational, calls them to its banners, in opposition to the sentimental ; and Eedworth joined it in the abstract, summoning the horrible state of the roads to testify against an enemy wanting almost in common humaneness. A slip of his excellent stepper in one of the half-frozen pits of the highway was the principal cause of his confusion of logic; she was half on her knees. Be- yond the market town the roads were so bad that he quitted them, and with the indifference of an engineer, struck a 80 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS line of his own South-eastward over fields and ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon on his left. So for a couple of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow land to the meadow-flats and a pale shining of freshets ; then hit on a lane skirting the water, and reached an amphibious village; five miles from Sterling, he was informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be mistaken, " if he kept a sharp eye open." The sharpness of his eyes was divided between the sword-belt of the starry Hunter and the shift- ing lanes that zig-zagged his course below. The Downs were softly illumined; still it amazed him to think of a woman like Diana Warwick having an attachment to this district, so hard of yield, mucky, featureless, fit but for the rails she sided with her friend in, detesting. Eeason- able women, too! The moon stood high on her march as he entered Storling. He led his good beast to the stables of The Three Ravens, thanking her and caressing her. The ostler conjectured from the look of the mare that he had been out with the hounds and lost his way. It appeared to Eedworth singularly, that near the ending of a wild goose chase, his plight was pretty well described by the fellow. However, he had to knock at the door of The Crossways now, in the silent night time, a certainly empty house, to his fancy. He fed on a snack of cold meat and tea, standing, and set forth, clearly directed, "if he kept a sharp eye open." Hitherto he had proved his capa- city, and he rather smiled at the repetition of the formula to him, of all men.. A turning to the right was taken, one to the left, and through the churchyard, out of the gate, round to the right, and on. By this route, after an hour, he found himself passing beneath the bare chestnuts of the churchyard wall of Storling, and the sparkle of the edges of the dead chestnut-leaves at his feet reminded him of the very ideas he had entertained when treading them. The loss of an hour strung him to pursue the chase in earnest, and he had a beating of the heart as he thought that it might be serious. He recollected thinking it so at Copsley. The long ride, and nightfall, with nothing in view, had obscured his mind to the possible behind the thick obstruction of the probable ; again the possible waved its marsh-light. To help in saving her from a fatal step, A PEACTICAIi MAN AND A DrVINING WOMAN 81 supposing a dozen combinations of the conditional mood, became his fixed object, since here he was — of that there •was no doubt ; and he was not here to play the fool, though the errand were foolish. He entered the churchyard, crossed the shadow of the tower, and hastened along the path, fancying he beheld a couple of figures vanishing before him. He shouted; he hoped to obtain directions from these natives: the moon was bright, the gravestones legible; but no answer came back, and the place appeared to belong entirely to the dead. "I've frightened them," ho thought. They left a queerish sensation in his frame. A ride down to Sussex to see ghosts would be an odd experience; but an undigested dinner of tea is the very grandmother of ghosts; and he accused it of confusing him, sight and mind. Out of the gate, now for the turn- ing to the right, and on. He turned. He must have previously turned wrongly somewhere — and where? A light in a cottage invited him to apply for the needed directions. The door was opened by a woman, who had never heard tell of The Crossways, nor had her husband, nor any of the children crowding round them. A voice within ejaculated : " Crassways ! " and soon upon the grat- ing of a chair, an old man, whom the woman named her lodger, by way of introduction, presented himself with his hat on, saying: "I knows the spot they calls Crassways," and he led. Eedworth understood the intention that a job was to be made of it, and submitting, said : " To the right, I think." He was bidden to come along, if he wanted "they Crassways," and from the right they turned to the left, and further sharp round, and on to a turn, where the old man, otherwise incommunicative, said : " There, down thik theer road, and a post in the middle." "I want a house, not a post! " roared Eedworth, spying a bare space. The old man despatched a finger travelling to his nob. "Naw, there's ne'er a house. But that's crassways for four roads, if it 's crassways you wants." They journeyed backward. They were in such a maze of lanes that the old man was master, and Eedworth vowed to be rid of him at the first cottage. This, however, they were long in reaching, and the old man was promptly 6 82 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS through, the garden-gate, hailing the people and securing information, before Eedworth could well hear. He smiled at the dogged astuteness of a dense-headed old creature determined to establish a claim to his fee. They struck a lane sharp to the left. "You're Sussex?" Eedworth asked him, and was answered: "Naw; the Sheers." Emerging from deliberation, the old man said : " Ah 'm a Hampshireman." " A capital county ! " " Heigh ! " The old man heaved his chest. " Once ! " "Why, what has happened to it? " " Once it were a capital county, I say. Hah ! you asks me what have happened to it. You take and go and look at it now. And down heer'll be no better soon, I tells 'em. When ah was a boy, old Hampshire was a proud country, wi' the old coaches and the old squires, and Harvest Homes, and Christmas merryings. — Cutting up the land! There 's no pride in livin' theer, nor anywhere, as I sees, now." "You mean the railways." "It 's the Devil come up and abroad ower all England! " exclaimed the melancholy ancient patriot. A little cheering was tried on him, but vainly. He saw with unerring distinctness the triumph of the Foul Poten- tate, nay his personal appearance "in they theer puffin' engines. " The country which had produced Andrew Hedger, as he stated his name to be, would never show the same old cricketing commons it did when he was a boy. Old England, he declared, was done for. When Eedworth applied to his watch under the brilliant moonbeams, he discovered that he had been listening to this natural outcry of a decaying and shunted class full three-quarters of an hour, and The Crossways was not in sight. He remonstrated. The old man plodded along. "We must do as we 're directed," he said. Further walking brought them to a turn. Any turn seemed hopeful. Another turn offered the welcome sight of a blazing doorway on a rise of ground off the road. Approaching it, the old man requested him to "bide a bit," and stalked the ascent at long strides. A vigorous old A PBACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN 83 fellow. Redworth waited below, observing how be joined the group at the lighted door, and, as it was apparent, put his question of the whereabout of The Crossways. Finally, in extreme impatience, he walked up to the group of spec- tators. They were all, and Andrew Hedger among them, the most entranced and profoundly reverent, observing the dissection of a pig. Unable to awaken his hearing, Eedworth jogged his arm, and the shake was ineffective until it grew in force. "I 've no time to lose; have they told you the way? " Andrew Hedger yielded his arm. He slowly withdrew his intent fond gaze from the fair outstretched white car- case, and with drooping eyelids, he said: "Ah could eat hog a solid bower ! " He had forgotten to ask the way, intoxicated by the aspect of the pig; and when he did ask it, he was hard of understanding, given wholly to his last glimpses. Eedworth got the directions. He would have dismissed Mr. Andrew Hedger, but there was no doing so. "I'll show ye on to the Crossways House," the latter said, imply- ing that he had already earned something by showing him the Crossways post. "Hog's my feed," said Andrew Hedger. The gastric springs of eloquence moved him to discourse, and he un- burdened himself between succulent pauses. " They 've killed him early. He 's fat; and he might ha' been fatter. But he 's fat. They 've got their Christmas ready, that they have. Lord! you should see the chitterlings, and the sausages hung up to and along the beams. That 's a crown for any dwellin'! They runs 'em round the top of the room — it 's like a May-day wreath in old times. Home-fed hog ! They 've a treat in store, they have. And snap your fingers at the world for many a long day. And the hams ! They cure their own hams at that house. Old style ! That 's what I say of a hog. He 's good from end to end, and beats a Christian hollow. Everybody knows it and owns it." Redworth was getting tired. In sympathy with current conversation, he said a word for the railways: they would certainly make the flesh of swine cheaper, bring a heap of hams into the market. But Andrew Hedger remarked 84 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS witli contempt that he had not much opinion of foreign hams: nobody knew what they fed on. Hog, he said, would feed on anything, where there was no choice — they had wonderful stomachs for food. Only, when they had a choice, they left the worst for last, and home-fed filled them with stuff to make good meat and fat — "what we calls prime bacon." As it is not right to damp a native enthusiasm, Eedworth let him dilate on his theme, and mused on his boast to eat hog a solid hour, which roused some distant classic recollection : — an odd jumble. They crossed the wooden bridge of a flooded stream. "Now ye have it," said the hog-worshipper; "that may be the house, I reckon." A dark mass of building, with the moon behind it, shining in spires through a mound of firs, met Eedworth's gaze. The windows all were blind, no smoke rose from the chimneys. He noted the dusky square of green, and the finger-post signalling the centre of the four roads. Andrew Hedger repeated that it was the Crossways house, ne'er a doubt. Eedworth paid him his expected fee, where- upon Andrew, shouldering off, wished him a hearty good night, and forthwith departed at high pedestrian pace, manifestly to have a concluding look at the beloved anatomy. There stood the house. Absolutely empty! thought Eedworth. The sound of the gate-bell he rang was like an echo to him. The gate was unlocked. He felt a return of his queer churchyard sensation when walking up the garden-path, in the shadow of the house. Here she was born: here her father died: and this was the station of her dreams, as a girl at school near London and in Paris. Her heart was here. He looked at the windows facing the Downs with dead eyes. The vivid idea of her was a phantom presence, and cold, assuring him that the bodily Diana was absent. Had Lady Dunstane guessed rightly, he might perhaps have been of service ! Anticipating the blank silence, he rang the house-bell. It seemed to set wagging a weariful tongue in a corpse. The bell did its duty to the last note, and one thin revival stroke, for a finish, as in days when it responded livingly to the guest. He pulled, and had the reply, just the A PKACTICAL MAN AKD A DIVINING WOMAN 85 same, with the faint terminal touch, resembling exactly a " There ! " at the close of a voluble delivery in the nega- tive. Absolutely empty. He pulled and pulled. The bell wagged, wagged. This had been a house of a witty host, a merry girl, junketting guests; a house of hilarious thunders, lightnings of fun and fancy. Death never seemed more voiceful than in that Wagging of the bell. For conscience' sake, as became a trusty emissary, he walked round to the back of the house, to verify the total emptiness. His apprehensive despondency had said that it was absolutely empty, but upon consideration he sup- posed the house must have some guardian : likely enough, an old gardener and his wife, lost in deafness double- shotted by sleep ! There was no sign of them. The night air waxed sensibly crisper. He thumped the back-doors. Blank shoUowness retorted on the blow. He banged and kicked. The violent altercation with wood and wall lasted several minutes, ending as it had begun. Flesh may worry, but is sure to be worsted in such an argument. " Well, my dear lady ! " — Eedworth addressed Lady Dunstane aloud, while driving his hands into his pockets for warmth — " we ' ve done what we could. The next best thing is to go to bed and see what morning brings us." The temptation to glance at the wild divinings of dreamy- witted women from the point of view of the practical man, was aided by the intense frigidity of the atmosphere in leading him to criticize a sex not much used to the exer- cise of brains. " And they hate railways ! " He associated them, in the matter of intelligence, with Andrew Hedger and Company. They sank to the level of the temperature in his esteem — as regarded their intellects. He approved their warmth of heart. The nipping of the victim's toes and finger-tips testified powerfully to that. Eound to the front of the house at a trot, he stood in moonlight. Then, for involuntarily he now did every- thing running, with a dash up the steps he seized the sul- len pendant bell -handle, and worked it pumpwise, till he perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he worked piston-wise. Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler created an alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that run or weave in desolate 86 DIAKA OP THE CBOSSWAYS houses, with the good result of a certain degree of heat to his frame. He ceased, panting. No stir within, nor light. That white stare of windows at the moon was undisturbed. The Downs were like a wavy robe of shadowy grey silk. No wonder that she had loved to look on them ! And it was no wonder that Andrew Hedger enjoyed prime bacon. Bacon frizzling, fat rashers of real home- fed on the fire — none of your foreign — suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic elements. Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night — the temperature at least fifteen below zero — an excessive boast for a man to say he could go on eating for a solid hour. These were notions darting through a half nourished gentleman nipped in the frame by a severely frosty night. Truly a most beautiful night ! She would have delighted to see it here. The Downs were like floating islands, like fairy-laden vapours; solid, as Andrew Hedger's hour of eating; visionary, as too often his desire! Eedworth muttered to himself, after taking the picture of the house and surrounding country from the sward, that he thought it about the sharpest night he had ever encoun- tered in England. He was cold, hungry, dispirited, and astoundingly stricken with an incapacity to separate any of his thoughts from old Andrew Hedger. Nature was at her pranks upon him. He left the garden briskly, as to the legs, and reluc- tantly. He would have liked to know whether Diana had recently visited the house, or was expected. It could be learnt in the morning; but his mission was urgent and he on the wings of it. He was vexed and saddened. Scarcely had he closed the garden-gate when the noise of an opening window arrested him, and he called. The answer was in a feminine voice, youngish, not disagreeable, though not Diana's. He heard none of the words, but rejoined in a bawl: " Mrs. Warwick ! — Mr. Eedworth ! " That was loud enough for the deaf or the dead. The window closed. He went to the door and wai^ced. It swung wide to him; and, marvel of a woman's divination of a woman! there stood Dianai A POSITION OP DELICACY 87 CHAPTEE IX SHOWS HOW A POSITION OP DELICACY TOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HUKT TO EITHER Ebdworth's impulse was to laugh for very gladness of heart, as he proffered excuses for his tremendous alarums : and in doing so, the worthy gentleman imagined he must have persisted in. clamouring for admission because he suspected, that if at home, she would require a violent summons to betray herself. It was necessary to him to follow his abashed sagacity up to the mark of his happy animation. "Had I known it was you!" said Diana, bidding him enter the passage. She wore a black silk mantilla and was warmly covered. She called to her maid Danvers, whom Eedworth remem- bered: a firm woman of about forty, wrapped, like her mistress , in head-covering, cloak, scarf, and shawl. Tell- ing her to scour the kitchen for firewood, Diana led into a sitting-room. "I need not ask — .you have come from Lady Dunstane," she said. "Is she well?" "She is deeply anxious." " You are cold. Empty houses are colder than out of doors. You shall soon have a fire." She begged him to be seated. The small glow of candle-light made her dark rich colouring orange in shadow. " Bouse and grounds are open to a tenant," she resumed. "I say good-bye to them to-morrow morning. The old couple who are in charge sleep in the village to-night. T did not want them here. You have quitted the Govern- ment service, I think? " "A year or so since." " When did you return from America? " "Two days back." "And paid your visit to Copsley immediately?" "As early as I could." 88 DIANA OP THK GEOSS-WAYS " That was true friendliness. You have a letter for me? " "I have." He put his hand to his pocket for the letter. "Presently," she said. She divined the contents, and nursed her resolution to withstand them. Danvers had brought firewood and coal. Orders were given to her, and in spite of the opposition of the maid and intervention of the gentleman, Diana knelt at the grate, observing: "Allow me to do this. I can lay and light a fire." He was obliged to look on : she was a woman who spoke her meaning. She knelt, handling paper, firewood and matches, like a housemaid. Danvers proceeded on her mission, and Redworth eyed Diana in the first fire-glow. 1 He could have imagined a Madonna on an old black Spanish . can.vas. HCJie act of service was beautiful in gracefulness, and her simplicity in doing the work touched it spiritually. He thought, as she knelt there, that never had he seen how lovely and how charged with mystery her features were; the dark large eyes full on the brows; the proud line of a straight nose in right measure to the bow of the lips ; reposeful red lips, shut, and their curve of the slum- ber-smile at the corners. Her forehead was broad; the chin of a sufficient firmness to sustain that noble square ; the brows marked by a soft thick brush to the temples; her black hair plainly drawn along her head to the knot, revealed by the mantilla fallen on her nec)^^ Elegant in plainness, the classic poet would have said of her hair and dress. She was of the women whose wits are quick in everything they do. That which was proper to her position, complexion, and the hour, surely marked her appearance. V Unaccountably this night, the fair fleshly presence over-weighted her intellectual distinction, to an observer bent on vindicating her innocence. Or rather, he saw the hidden in the visible. ^ Owner of such a woman, and to lose her! Eedworth pitied the husband. The crackling flames reddened her whole person. Gaz- ing, he remembered Lady Dunstane saying of her once, that in anger she had the nostrils of a war horse. Ths nostrils now were faintly alive under some sensitive im- A POSITION OF DELICACY 89 pression of her musings. The olive cheeks, pale as she stood in the doorway, were flushed by the fire-beams, though no longer with their swarthy central rose, tropic flower of a pure and abounding blood, as it had seemed. She was now beset by battle. His pity for her, and his eager championship, overwhelmed the spirit of compassion for the foolish wretched husband. Dolt, the man must be, Red worth thought; and he asked inwardly, Did the miser- able tyrant suppose of a woman like this, that she would be content to shine as a candle in a grated lanthorn? The generosity of men/speculating upon other men's posses- sions is known. /"Yet the man who loves a woman has to the full the husband's jealousy of her good name. And a lover, that without the claims of the alliance, can be wounded on her behalf, is less distracted in his homage by the personal luminary, to which man's manufacture of balm and incense is mainly drawn when his love is wounded. That contemplation of her incomparable beauty, with the multitude of his ideas fluttering round it, did somewhat shake the personal luminary in Eedworth. He was conscious of pangs. The question bit him : How far had she been indiscreet or wilful? and the bite of it was a keen acid to his nerves,^ A woman doubted by her hus- band, is always, and even to her champions in the first hours of the noxious rumour, until they have solidified in confidence through service, a creature of the wilds, marked for our ancient running. Nay, more than a cynical world, these latter will be sensible of it. The doubt casts her forth, the general yelp drags her down; she runs like the prey of the forest under spotting branches ; clear if we can think so, but it has to be thought in devotedness : her character is abroad. Eedworth bore a strong resemblance to his fellowmen, except for his power of faith in this woman. Nevertheless it required the superbuess of her beauty and the contrasting charm of her humble posture of kneeling by the fire, to set him on his right track of mind. He knew and was sure of her. He dispersed thef unhallowed fry in attendance upon any stirring of the rep-| tile part of us, to look at her with the eyes of a friend. I And if . . . ! — a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the 90 DIAKA OF THE CEOSSWAYS passages, fetching a sweat to his brows. Well, whatsoever the fact, his heart was hers ! He hoped he could be char- itable to women. She rose from her knees and said: "Now, please, give me the letter." He was entreated to excuse her for consigning him to firelight when she left the room. Danvers brought in a dismal tallow candle, remarking that her mistress had not expected visitors : her mistress had nothing but tea and bread and butter to offer him. Danvers uttered no complaint of her sufferings ; happy in being the picture of them, f "I'm not hungry," said he. A plate of Andrew Hedger's own would not have tempted him. The foolish frizzle of bacon sang in his ears as he walked from end to end of the room; an illusion of his fancy pricked by a frost-edged appetite. But. the antici- pated contest with Diana checked and numbed the craving. Was Warwick a man to proceed to extremities on a mad suspicion? — What kind of proof had he? Eedworth summoned the portrait of Mr. Warwick be- fore him, and beheld a sweeping of close eyes in cloud, a long upper lip in cloud; the rest of him was all cloud. As usual with these conjurations of a face, the index of the nature conceived by him displayed itself, and no more ; but he took it for the whole physiognomy, and pronounced of the husband thus delineated, that those close eyes of the long upper lip would both suspect and proceed madly. He was invited by Danvers to enter the dining-room. There Diana joined him. " The best of a dinner on bread and butter is, that one is ready for supper soon after it," she said, swimming to the tea-tray. "You have dined?" "At the inn," he replied. "The Three Ravens! When my father's guests from London flooded The Crossways, The Three Ravens pro- vided the overflow with beds. On nights like this I have got up and scraped the frost from my window-panes to see them step into the old fly, singing some song of his. The inn had a good reputation for hospitality in those days. I hope they treated you well? " A POSITION OF DELICACY 91 " Excellently," said Eedworth, taking an enormous mouth- ful, while his heart sank to see that she who smiled to encourage his eating had been weeping. But she also consumed her bread and butter. " That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things against the grain," she said. "Danvers is a foster-child of luxury. She loves it; great houses, plen- tiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling footmen's calves. Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting to cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul. I have some mysterious attraction for her. She would not let me come alone. I should have had to hire some old Storling grannam, or retain the tattling keepers of the house. She loves her native country too, and disdains the foreigner. My tea you may trust." Eedworth had not a doubt of it. He was becoming a tea-taster. The merit of warmth pertained to the bever- age. "I think you get your tea from Scoppin's, in the City," he said. That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick's tea. They conversed of Teas; the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come, and the defence. Meantime , the cut bread and butter having flown, Eedworth attacked the loaf. He apologized. " Oh ! pay me a practical compliment," Diana said, and looked really happy at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare. She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid's love of native country. But it came too early. "They say that bread and butter is fattening," he remarked, " You preserve the mean," said she. He admitted that his health was good. For some little time, to his vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself. So flowing was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them. He had to describe his ride to her. "Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst," she exclaimed. " Or any point along the ridge. Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted cream from her 92 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, ant- stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs. Then you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights — and meditated railways I " " Just a notion or two." " You have been very successful in America ? " " Successful ; perhaps ; we exclude extremes in our cal- culations of the still problematical." "I am sure," said she, "you always have faith in your calculations." Her innocent archness dealt him a stab sharper than any he had known since the day of his hearing of her engage- ment. He muttered of his calculations being human ; he was as much of a fool as other men — more ! " Oh ! no," said she. " Positively." "I cannot think it." " I know it." " Mr. Eedworth, you will never persuade me to believe it." He knocked a rising groan on the head, and rejoined: " I hope I may not have to say so to-night." Diana felt the edge of the dart. " And meditating rail- ways, you scored our poor land of herds and flocks ; and night fell, and the moon sprang up, and on you came. It was clever of you to find your way by the moonbeams." "^"That's about the one thing I seem fit for ! " — ' " But what delusion is this, in the mind of a man suc- ceeding in everything he does ! " cried Diana, curious despite her wariness. " Is there to be the revelation of a hairshirt ultimately ? — a Journal of Confessions ? You succeeded in everything you aimed at, and broke your heart over one chance miss ? " "My heart is not of the stuff to break," he said, and laughed off her fortuitous thrust straight into it. " Another cup, yes. I came ..." "By night," said she, "and cleverly found your way, and dined at The Three Eavens, and walked to The Crossways, and met no ghosts." " On the contrary — or at least I saw a couple." A POSITION OP DELICACY 93 " Tell me of them ; we breed them here. We sell them periodically to the newspapers." "Well, I started them in their natal locality. I saw them, going down the churchyard, and bellowed after them with all my lungs. I wanted directions to The Crossways ; I had missed my way at some turning. In an instant they were vapour." Diana smiled. " It was indeed a voice to startle delicate apparitions ! So do roar Hyrcanean tigers, Pyramus and Thisbe-slaying lions ! One of your ghosts carried a loaf of bread, and dropped it in fright; one carried a pound of fresh butter for home consumption. They were in the churchyard for one in passing to kneel at her father's grave and kiss his tombstone." She bowed her head, forgetful of her guard. The pause presented an opening. Eedworth left his chair and walked to the mantelpiece. It was easier to him to speak, not facing her. " You have read Lady Dunstane's letter," he began. She nodded. " I have." " Can you resist her appeal to you ? " " I must." "She is not in a condition to bear it well. You will pardon me, Mrs. Warwick . . ." "Fully! Fully!" " I venture to offer merely practical advice. You have thought of it all, but have not felt it. In these cases, the one thing to do is to make a stand. Lady Dunstane has a clear head. She sees what has to be endured by you. Consider: she appeals to me to bring you her letter. Would she have chosen me, or any man, for her messenger, if it had not appeared to her a matter of life and death ? — You count me among your friends." " One of the truest." " Here are two, then, and your own good sense. For I do not believe it to be a question of courage." " He has commenced. Let him carry it out," said Diana. Her desperation could have added the cry — And give me freedom ! That was the secret in her heart. She had struck on the hope for the detested yoke to be broken at any cost. 94 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS "I decline to meet his charges. I despise them. If my friends have faith in me — and they may ! — 1 want nothing more." " Well, I won't talk commonplaces about the world," said Eedworth. "We can none of us afford to have it against us. Consider a moment : to your friends you are the Diana Merion they knew, and they will not suffer an injury to your good name without a struggle. But if you fly ? You leave the dearest you have to the whole brunt of it." " They will, if they love me." " They will. But think of the shock to her. Lady Dunstane reads you . . ." " Not quite. No, not if she even wishes me to stay ! " said Diana. He was too intent on his pleading to perceive a signifi- cation. "She reads you as clearly in the dark as if you were present with her." " Oh ! why am I not ten years older ! " Diana cried, and tried to face round to him, and stopped paralyzed. " Ten years older, I could discuss my situation, as an old woman of the world, and use my wits to defend myself." " And then you would not dream of flight before it ! " " No, she does not read me : no ! She saw that I might come to The Crossways. She — no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding aloof, in contempt of this baseness." "And of allowing her to sink under that which your presence would arrest. Her strength will not support it." " Emma ! Oh, cruel ! " Diana sprang up to give play to her limbs. She dropped on another chair. " Go I must, I cannot turn back. She saw my old attachment to this place. It was not difficult to guess . . . Who but I can see the wisest course for me ! " " It comes to this, that the blow aimed at you in your absence will strike her, and mortally," said Eedworth. "Then I say it is terrible to have a friend," said Diana, with her bosom heaving. ». "Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.^l^ His unstressed observation hit a bell in her head, and set THE CONFLICT OP THE NIGHT 95 it reverberating. She and Emma had spoken, written, the Tery words. She drew forth her Emma's letter from under her left breast, and read some half-blinded lines. Eedworth immediately prepared to leave her to her feelings -^trnstier guides than her judgement in this crisis. " Adieu, for the night, Mrs. Warwick," he said, and was guilty of eulogizing the judgement he thought erratic for the moment. "Night is a calm adviser. Let me presume to come again in the morning. I dare not go back without you." She looked up. As they faced together each saw that the other had passed through a furnace, scorching enough to him, though hers was the delicacy exposed. The reflection had its weight with her during the night. " Danvers is getting ready a bed for you ; she is airing linen," Diana said. But the bed was declined, and the hospitality was not pressed. The offer of it seemed to him significant of an unwary cordiality and thoughtlessness of tattlers that might account possibly for many things — supposing a fool or madman, or malignants, to interpret them. " Then, good night," said she. They joined hands. He exacted no promise that she would be present in the morning to receive him ; and it was a consolation to her desire for freedom, until she reflected on the perfect confidence it implied, and felt as a quivering butterfly impalpably pinned. CHAPTEK X THE CONFLICT Or THE NIGHT Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped. The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred. For look — to fly could not be interpreted as a flight. It was but a stepping aside, a disdain of defend- 96 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS ing herself, and a wrapping herself in her dignity. Women would be with her. She called on the noblest of them to justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur. And O the rich reward. A black archway^aAe -ets^ung open to the glittering fields of freedom. Emma was not of the chorus. Emma meditated as an invalid. How often had Emma bewailed to her that the most grievous burden of her malady was her fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications ! She could not see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably yoked. What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it ! Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do. That man — but pass him! And that other — the dear, the kind, careless, high- hearted old friend. He could honestly protest his guiltless- ness, and would smilingly leave the case to go its ways. Of this she was sure, that her decision and her pleasure would be his. They were tied to the stake. She had already tasted some of the mortal agony. Did it matter whether the flames consumed her ? Reflecting on the interview with Eedworth, though she had performed her part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures if she stayed in England. By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we may preserve our fair fame in it ! Diana cried aloud, " My freedom ! " feeling as a butterfly flown out of a box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken. Here, too, in this very house of her happi- ness with her father, she had bound herself to the man : voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily, as we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women there certainly is. THE CONFLICT OP THE KIGHT 97 The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry and be bound to the end. It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless. But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously. The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just. Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind the mask ; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half- suspected, developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana, deformed by marriage, irritable,, acerb, rebellious, constantly justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her — these were the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the hypocrite world. One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved — whom? An ideal. Had he, the ima- gined but unvisioned, been her yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the yoke ? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress ! The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives : she had barely a sense of softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medi- cal sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could have loved. Good-bye to that ! A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve it ? She listened to the advocate pleading her case ; she primed him to admit the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal 7 98 jiiASA o:p the ckossways prudence, and thereby expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad suspicion proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person ? Oh, no ! She was the Diana of the pride in her power of fenc- ing with evil — by no means of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her guard. Of this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she had been compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman steps out of her domes- tic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at home, a woman ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character. Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she decided not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which was the public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated her. But the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long for friendship, and the overfriendliness of looks, letters, frequency of visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation to a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other than men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under the excuse of tempta- tion, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave her the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the heart to hate her kind, so she resigned herself to par- don, and to the recognition of the state of duel between the sexes — active enough in her sphere of society. The circle hummed with it ; many lived for it. Could she pretend to ignore it ? Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing the popular innocent, who runa about with astonished eyes to find herself in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in un- suspected and unlicenced places. There is perpetually the THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT 99 inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to be the humbly knitting house- wife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord ; for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised ; the world prefers decorum to honesty. " Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom ! " she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman, the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show she parades. Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a sort of mask ; the world demands it of them as the price of their station. That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming the first martyr of the modern woman's cause — a grand position ! and one imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it, and of confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules, accord- ing to her own ideas of her immunities. brave ! But was she holding the position by flight ? It involved the challenge of consequences, not an evasion of them. She moaned ; her mental steam-wheel stopped ; fatigue brought sleep. She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to the Crossways, distilling much poison from thoughts on the way ; and there, for the luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion. 100 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS CHAPTER XI BECOUNTS THE JOTJENET IN A CHABIOT, WITH A CEBTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE BOAD In the morning the fight was over. She looked at the signpost of The Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she took for the Intimations of her reason, protested that they were wrong, that they were judging of her case in the general, and unwisely — disastrously for her. The mistaking of her desires for her reason was peculiar to her situation. " So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again," she said, to conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom. The night's red vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her ; and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley. " If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad," said her maid. " You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers." "Oh, ma'am! they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten me." -s," It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers."— " Nor their baldness, ma'am," said the literal maid ; " I never cared for their heads, or them. ^ I 've been in a Case before." " Indeed ! " exclaimed her mistress ; and she had a chill. Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, " They got nothing out of me." THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT 101 " In my Case you will please to speak the truth," said Diana, and beheld in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a sting. " Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of what you know of me," said Diana ; and the answer was, " No, ma'am." For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress. Eedworth's further difiiculties were confined to the hiring of a conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot, an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint ; the only bottles to be had were Dutch schiedam. His postillion, inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his nose, and he deemed it advisable to ride the mare in accompaniment as far as Eiddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour that he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his country- men, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting a trustier fellow at Eiddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that inflamed trough- snout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought of -Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Eiddlehurst inn taproom, and relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated with a seat on a stool in the chariot, " My triumphal car," said his captive. She was very amusing about her postillion ; Danvers had to beg pardon for laughing. "You are happy," observed her mistress. But Eedworth laughed too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little. She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, " Wherever I go now, in all weathers, I am perfectly naked ! " And temembering her readings of a certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she 102 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS took a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Eedworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously gener- alizing, now dropping bolt upon things of passage — the postillion jogging from rum to gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers. She touched them to the life in similes and phrases ; and next she was aloft, derisively philosophizing, but with a comic affllatus that dispersed the sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, was among the themes she made memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed : their host's ready acquiescence in receiving orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flicker- ing in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments ; the prevalent notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugS,r, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius — these were reviewed in quips of metaphor. "Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me," said Eedworth. " Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them with the magic wand of a postillion? " said she. "It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals enter- taining us." " Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly ' polish- ing off' the individual." "They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort." " I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms — a curfew bell — for every poor little light that we would read by." THE JOUKNEY IN A CHARIOT 103 Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing to mount and failing in his jump, Eed worth was apprehensive, and q^uestioned the fellow concerning potation. "Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bide water, " was the reply , with the assurance that he had not "taken a pailful." Habit enabled him to gain his seat. " It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire; but he may know the proper course," Diana said, convulsing Danvers ; and there was discernibly to Eedworth, under the influence of her phrases, a like- ness of the flaming "half-horse," with the animals all smoking in the frost, to a railway engine. " Your wrinkled centaur," she named the man. Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly ; but he reflected pass- ingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of aliens — wordi- ness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of rumour. It accounted for her having detractors ; a heavy counterpoise to her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's discontent — the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antago- nism. What is the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a diminished man. The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute. Ah, for the choice of places! Eedworth would have yielded her the loquent lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all, except the public scourging of her. The conviction was in his mind that the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her. But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement. Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her "enemies" made him set down her growing crop of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things, great 104 DIANA OF *HB CEOSSWAYS things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party, therefore a power; for they respect a power. Kedworth knew their quaintnesses ; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake. He had to recollect that she was in a sharp- strung mood, bitterly surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable phrases of enthusiasm for England — Shakespeareland, as she would sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet. English fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to laud. Only her enthusiasm re- quired rousing by circumstances ; it was less at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a placable people. He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before him, and he looked at her, smiling. "Why do you smile? " she said. "I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith." "Ah! my dear compatriot ! And think, too, of Lord Larrian." She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit of sadness. It deepened; she neither smiled nor rattled any more. She gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged Copses showing their last leaves in the frost. ' " I remember your words : • Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life ; ' and so I have found it," she said. There was a brightness along her under- eyelids that caused him to look away. / The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of THE JOXJENEY IN A CHAEIOT 105 leg, all boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said, — " That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot." Eedworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no damage, nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him, apart from the comfort- ing it had been designed to give. He jumped out, and held a hand for them to do the same. " I never foresaw an event more positively," said he. " And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way," said Diana. A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Eedworth to right the chariot. The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his ofiSeial seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indiiferent to what happened behind him. Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul. "Lord 1" he cried, "I been pitched a somerset in my time, and taken up for dead, and that did n't beat me! " Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran. But he was painfully disconcerted by Eed worth's determination not to entrust the ladies any farther to his guidance. Danvers had implored for permission to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley. Her mistress rather sided with the postillion, who begged them to spare him the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Eed Lion. " What '11 they say? And they know Arthur Dance well there," he groaned. "What 1 Arthur I chariotin' a box! And me a better man to his work now than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey ! A bit of a shake always braces me up. I could read a newspaper right off, small print and all. Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in." Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Eedworth for refusing. They walked ahead ; the postillion communicated his mix- ture of professional and human feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating on the weak- 106 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being chaffed out of his boots at the Old Eed Lion, where he was to eat, drink, and sleep that night. Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake ; he would not have sup- posed it of a gentleman. He jogged himself into an arith- metic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on the road, in spite of the gentleman. " For some of 'em are sworn enemies of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt." Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty November sunset, with the scent of sand- earth strong in the air. " I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage," said Eedworth, " and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible." She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated. As a certain marriage had been 1 The comparison forced itself on her reflections. "But this is quite an adventure," said she, reanimated by the brisker flow of her blood. " We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when nothing happens." Eedworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances. "Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting, and we object to the process," she said. " Eeal happiness is a state of dulness. When we taste it ] consciously it becomes mortal — a thing of the Seasons. , But I like my walk. }How long these November sunsets burn, and what hues ibhey havejj There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it me. Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in November." She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs. "~" As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness," he remarked. — . "Oh, the looking back ! back! " she cried. "Forward! that is life." "And backward, death, if you will; and still it is hap- piness. Death, and our postillion ! " "Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear," said Eedworth, turning about. BETWEEN EMMA AXD DIANA 107 " It 's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or two, if we go to the inn on foot," said Diana. "We'll let the mancEuvre succeed." Eedworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was ilattered to hear him. So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the town-lights beneath an umber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following. CHAPTER XII BETWEEN EMMA AKD DIANA Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing herself perished. This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to appreciate them. She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a serving- woman's muf9.ed comments on her mistress'^ behaviour. Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Poster the butler, contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they would; and they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the speak- ing. She bowed in acceptance of Foster's offer of a glass of wine after supper, but treated him and the other two immediately as though they had been interrogating bigwigs. "They wormed nothing out of me," she said to her mis- tress at night, undressing her. " But what a set they are ! They 've got such comfortable places, they 've all their days 108 DIAUA OP THE CEOSSWAYS and hours for talk of the doings of their superiors. They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their two and two together of what is happening in and about. And not one of the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the maids object — did one ever hear? — to the three uppers retiring, when they've done dining, to the private room to dessert." "That is the custom?" observed her mistress. "Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. Bridges the biscuits, and Bartlett the plate of fruit, and they march out in order." "The man at the head of the procession, probably." " Oh, yes. And the others, though they have everything except the wine and dessert, don't like it. When I was here last they were new, and had n't a word against it. Now they say it 's invidious ! Lady Dunstane will be left without an under-servant at Copsley soon. I was asked about your boxes, ma'am, and the moment I said they were at Dover, that instant all three peeped. They let out a mouse to me. They do love to talk ! " Her mistress could have added, " And you too, my good Danvers ! " trustworthy though she knew the creature to be in the main. " Now go, and be sure you have bedclothes enough before you drop asleep," she said; and Danvers directed her steps to gossip with Bartlett. Diana wrapped herself in a dressing-gown Lady Dunstane had sent her, and sat by the fire, thinking of the powder of tattle stored in servants' halls to explode beneath her : and but for her choice of roads she might have been among strangers. The liking of strangers best is a curious exem- plification of innocence. "Yes, I was in a muse," she said, raising her head to Emma, whom she expected and sat armed to meet, unac- countably iron-nerved. "I was questioning whether I could be quite as blameless as I fancy, if I sit and shiver to be in England. You will tell me 1 have taken the right road. I doubt it. But the road is taken, and here I am. I But any road that leads me to you is homeward, my darl- ( ing !" She tried to melt, determining to be at least open ' with her. BETWEEN EMJIA AND DIANA lOS "I have not praised you enough for coining," said Emma, 'when they had embraced again. "Praise a little your 'truest friend of women.' Your letter gave the tug. I might have resisted it." " He came straight from heaven ! But, cruel Tony ! where is your love?" "It is unequal to yours, dear, I see. I could have wrestled with anything abstract and distant, from being certain — But here I am." " But, my own dear girl, you never could have allowed this infamous charge to be undefended? " "I think so. I've an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death, when one dreams of flying the soul. What does it matter? I should have left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse. And then — good-bye gentility ! I should have worked for my bread. I had thoughts of America. I fancy I can write; and Americans, one hears, J are gentle to women." ^ "Ah, Tony! there's the looking back. And, of all women, you ! " " Or else, dear — well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air, I might — might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered, as I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor persecuted animal to defend her. Perhaps that was what I was running away for. I fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust." "I saw you at The Crossways." " I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine you would reach me so swiftly. My going there was an instinct, too. I suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels. Porgive me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in the common human sum. ' Pariah ' and ' taboo ' are words we borrow from barbarous tribes ; they stick to me." "My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly." " Call me enigma. I am that to myself, Emmy." " You are not quite yourself to your friend." "Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing 110 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS upright. It came on me suddenly; stunned me. A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say. He spared me a scene. There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or seemed. When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky." Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her friend e,bbed from her. "Has he ... to misleadhim?" she said, colouring at the breach in the question. "Proofs? He has the proofs he supposes." "Not to justify suspicion? " "He broke open my desk and took my letters." "Horrible! But the letters?" Emma shook with a nervous revulsion. "You might read them." " Basest of men ! That is the unpardonable cowardice ! " exclaimed Emma. "The world will read them, dear," said Diana, and struck herself to ice. She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury. " They are letters — none very long — sometimes two short sentences — he wrote at any spare moment. On my honour, as a woman, I feel for him most. The letters — I would bear any accusation rather than that exposure. Letters of a man of his age to a young woman he rates too highly! The world reads them. Do you hear it saying it could have excused her for that fiddle-faddle with a younger — a young lover? And had I thought of a lover! ... I had no thought of loving or being loved. I confess I was flattered. To you, Emma, I will confess. . . . You see the public ridicule ! — and half his age, he and I would have appeared a romantic couple ! Confess, I said. Well, dear, the stake is lighted for a trial of its effect on me. It is this : he was never a dishonourable friend ; but men appear to be capable of friendship with women only for as long as we keep out of pulling distance of that line where friendship ceases. The'i/ may step on it; we must hold back a league. I have learnt it. You will judge whether he disrespects me. As for him, he is a man ; at his worst, not one of the worst; at his best, better than very many. There, now, Emma, you have me stripped and burning; BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA 111 there is my full confession. Except for this — yes, one thing further — that I do rage at the ridicule, and could choose, but for you, to have given the world cause to revile me, or think me romantic. Something or somebody to suffer for would really be agreeable. It is a singular fact, I have not known what this love is, that they talk about. And behold me marched into Smithiield! — society's here- tic, if you please. I must own I think it hard." Emma chafed her cold hand softly. "It is hard; I understand it," she murmured. "And is your Sunday visit to us in the list of offences? " "An item." "You gave me a happy day." "Then it counts for me in heaven," " He set spies on you? " " So we may presume." Emma went through a sphere of tenuious reflections in a flash. "He will rue it. Perhaps now ... he may now be regretting his wretched frenzy. And Tony could pardon ; she has the power of pardoning in her heart." " Oh ! certainly, dear. But tell me why it is you speak to-night rather unlike the sedate, philosophical Emma; in a tone — well, tolerably sentimental ? " "I am unaware of it," said Emma, who could have re- torted with a like reproach. "I am anxious, I will not say at present for your happiness, for your peace; and I have a hope that possibly a timely word from some friend — Lukin or another — might induce him to consider." "To pardon me, do you mean?" cried Diana, flushing sternly. "Not pardon. Suppose a case of faults on both sides." "You address a faulty person, my dear. But do you know that you are hinting at a reconcilement? " "Might it not be?" "Open your eyes to what it involves. I trust I can pardon. Let him go his ways, do his darkest, or repent. But return to the roof of the ' basest of men, ' who was guilty of ' the unpardonable cowardice ' ? You expect me to be superhuman. When I consent to that, I shall be out of my woman's skin, which he has branded. Go back to 112 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS him ! " She was taken with a shudder of head and limbs. "No; I really have the power of pardoning, and I am bound to ; for among my debts to him, this present exemp- tion, that is like liberty dragging a chain, or, say, an escaped felon wearing his manacles, should count. I am sensible of my obligation. The price I pay for it is an immovable patch — attractive to male idiots, I have heard, and a mark of scorn to females. Between the two the remainder of my days will be lively. ' Out, out, damned spot ! ' But it will not. And not on the hand — on the forehead ! We '11 talk of it no longer. I have sent a note, with an enclosure, to my lawyers. I sell The Crossways, if I have the married woman's right to any scrap of prop- erty, for money to scatter fees." "My purse, dear Tony!" exclaimed Emma. "My house! You will stay with me? Why do you shake your head? With me you are safe." She spied at the shadows in her friend's face. "Ever since your marriage, Tony, you have been strange in your trick of refusing to stay with me. And you and I made our friendship the pledge of a belief in eternity ! We vowed it. Come, I do talk sentimentally, but my heart is in it. I beg you — all the reasons are with me — to make my house your home. You will. You know I am rather lonely." \piana struggled to keep her resolution from being broken by tenderness. And doubtless poor Sir Lukin had learnt his lesson; still, her defensive instincts could never quite slumber under his roof; not because of any further fear that they would have to be summoned ; it was chiefly owing to the consequences of his treacherous foolishness. For this half-home with her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector, called husband — rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been her pro- pelling motive ; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the shock precipitating her to an act of insanity^ " I do not forget you were an heiress, Emmy, and I will come to you if I need money to keep my head up. As for staying, two reasons are against it. If I am to fight my battle, I must be seen ; I must go about — wherever I am BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA 113 received. So my field is London. That is obvious. And I shall rest better in a house where my story is not known." Two or three questions ensued. Diana had to fortify her fictitious objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below; and she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions. To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness. She came to a settled resolve in her thoughts, as she said, "They want a change. London is their element." Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of which the scene and the travelling with Eedworth, the talking of her case with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste. They stood up and kissed, parting for the night. An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib' and continue fibbing, she reflected. She did not entirely cheat her clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation ; also that the world of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial. But her mind was in the background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and mused on uttering the word, "Liar!" to the lovely image, her senses were refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sever* eignly defiant of abasement. Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose. Thus, moreover, by closely reading her- self, whom she scourged to excess that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing knowledge of our human constitution, and Stored matter for the brain. 114 DIANA OF THE CBOSSWAYS CHAPTER XIII TOUCHING THE FIEST DAYS OF HBE PROBATION The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up over-night, insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open eyelids, thinking of the iirm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom, and to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward courtesies, nothing other than "the woman Warwick." She pursued the woman Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her decorous and crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind their senior staidness. Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her intelligence in regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained by men of business and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman Warwick down their ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to herself in reality, though identical in situation. That woman, recit- ing her side of the case, gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers ; she spoke primly ; perpetually the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on softening those sugar- loaves, the hard business-men applying to her for facts. Facts were treated as unworthy of her ; mere stuff of the dustheap, mutton-bones, old shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon of her spinning, sylphidine, unseizable; and between perplexing and mollifying the slaves of facts, she saw them at their heels, a tearful fry, abjectly imitative of her melodramatic performances. The spectacle was presented of a band of legal gentlemen vociferating mightily for swords and the onset, like the Austrian empress's Magyars, to vindicate her just and holy cause. Our Law- courts failing, they threatened Parliament, and for a last resort, the country ! We are not going to be the woman Warwick without a stir, my brethren. Emma, an early riser that morning, for the purpose of a private consultation with Mr. Eedworth, found her lying placidly wakeful, to judge by appearances. "You have not slept, my dear child?" THE FIRST DAYS OP HEE PEOBATION 115 "Perfectly," said Diana, giving her hand and offering the lips. " I 'm only having a warm morning bath in bed," she added, in explanation of a chill moisture that the touch of her exposed skin betrayed ; for whatever the fun of the woman Warwick, there had been sympathetic feminine horrors in the frame of the sentient woman. Emma fancied she kissed a quiet sufferer. A few re- marks very soon set her wildly laughing. Both were laughing when Danvers entered the room, rather guilty, being late; and the sight of the prim-visaged maid she had been driving among the lawyers kindled Diana's comic imagination to such a pitch that she ran riot in drolleries, carrying her friend headlong on the tide. -~-"I have not laughed so much since you were married," said Emma. — " Nor I, dear ; — ■ proving that the bar to it was the ceremony," said Diana. She promised to remain at Copsley three days. " Then for the campaign in Mr. Eedworth's metropolis. I won- der whether I may ask him to get me lodgings : a sitting- room and two bedrooms. The Crossways has a board up for letting. I should prefer to be my own tenant; only it would give me a hundred pounds more to get a substitute's money. I should like to be at work writing instantly. Ink is my opium, and the pen my nigger, and he must dig up gold for me. It is written. Danvers, you can make ready to dress me when I ring." Emma helped the beautiful woman to her dressing-gown and the step from her bed. She had her thoughts, and went down to Eedworth at the breakfast-table, marvelling that any husband other than a madman could cast such a jewel away. l^The material loveliness eclipses intellectual qualities in such reflections^ "He must be mad," she said, compelled to disburden herself in a congenial atmosphere; which, however, she infrigidated by her overflow of exclamatory wonderment — a curtain that shook voluminous folds, luring Eedworth to dreams of the treasure forfeited. He became rigidly practical. "Provision will have to be made for her. Lukin must see Mr. Warwick. She will do wisely to stay with friends 116 DIANA OP THE CEOSS-WAyS in town, mix in company. Women are the best allies for such cases. Who are her solicitors?" "They are mine: Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel." " A good firm. She is in safe hands with them. I dare say they may come to an arrangement." "I should wish it. She will never consent." Eedworth shrugged. A womah's " never " fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time, to his mind. Diana saw him drive off to catch the coach in the valley, regulated to meet the train, and much though she liked him, she was not sorry that he had gone. She felt the better clad for it. She would have rejoiced to witness the departure on wings of all her friends, except Emma, to whom her coldness overnight had bound her anew warmly in contrition. And yet her friends were well-beloved by her; but her emotions were distraught. Emma told her that Mr. Eedworth had undertaken -to hire a suite of convenient rooms, and to these she looked forward, the nest among strangers, where she could begin to write, earning bread: an idea that, with the pride of independence, conjured the pleasant morning smell of a bakery about her. She passed three peaceable days at Copsley, at war only with the luxury of the house. On the fourth, a letter to Lady Dunstane from Eedworth gave the address of the best lodgings he could find, and Diana started for London. She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown. Save for the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself a woman who had never submitted to the yoke. What a pleasure it was, after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard Westward, against smoky sun- sets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the crowd I She had an affection for the crowd. They clothed her. She laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils environing ladies in the streets after dark alone. The lights in the streets after dark, and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike sparks of fancy and in- THE PIKST DAYS OP HEE PROBATION 117 spirit the task of composition at night. This new, strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreign- ness, threw her in upon her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her past days, except- ing girlhood, inbo the remote. She lived with her girl- hood as with a simple little sister. They were two in one, and she corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her refreshment. She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet was healthier and pleasanter than London. As to the perils haunting the head of Danvers, her experiences assured he'" of a perfect immunity from them; and the maligned thor- oughfares of a great city, she was ready to aihrm, con- trasted favourably with certain hospitable halls. The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous delusion. Subsequently a sweet sur- prise alleviated the shock she had sustained. Emma Dunstane's carriage was at her door, and Emma entered her sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the neighbourhood, looking on the park. She begged to have her for guest, sorrowfully anticipating the refusal. At least they were to be near one another. " You really like this life in lodgings ? " asked Emma, to whom the stiff furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small hre of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter. "I do," said Diana; "yes," she added with some reserve, and smiled at her damped enthusiasm, "I can eat when I like , walk, work — and I am working ! My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent ! Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing- room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality." They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the husband too, and his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife. "That is his excuse," Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the corners 118 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS oyer thoughts of his grounds for fury. He had them, though none for the incriminating charge. The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at war and at bay must be left unriddled. She and the law differed in their inter- pretation of the dues of wedlock. But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the importance of her storing impressions. Her mind required to hunger for something, and this Eeality which frequently she was forced to loathe, she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness. Her philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she hoped to digest it sleeping like- wise. Her visits of curiosity to the Law Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a great deal of tough substance to digest. There she watched the process of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the ordeal. She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which our fair fleshly is moulded. After all, your Fool's Paradise is not a garden to grow in. Charon's ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms. They do not live in mind or soul. Chiefly women people it : a certain class of limp men ; women for the most part: they are sown there. And put their garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we be- hold? A world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher. Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of her damped enthusiasm. She related an incident or two occurring in her career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasion- ally provoked ; as when she named the intruders and dis- turbers of solitarily-faring ladies, "Cupid's footpads." Her humour was created to swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend to be drowning. "I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy. ' Eich and rare were the gems she wore.' I was ready to vow that one might traverse the larger island similarly respected. I praised their chivalry. I thought it a privilege to live in such a land. I cannot describe to THE PIEST BAYS OP HER PROBATION 119 you how delightful it was to me to walk out and home generally protected. I might have been seriously annoyed but that one of the clerks — 'articled,' he called himself — of our lawyers happened to be by. He offered to guard me, and was amusing with his modest tiptoe air. No, I trust to the English common man more than ever. He is a man of honour. I am convinced he is matchless in any other country, except Ireland. The English gentleman trades on his reputation." He was condemned by an afflicted delicacy, the sharpest of critical tribunals. Emma bade her not to be too sweeping from a bad example. " It is not a single one," said Diana. " What vexes me and frets me is, that I must be a prisoner, or allow Danvers to mount guard. And I can't see the end of it. And Danvers is no magician. She seems to know her country- men, though. She warded one of them off, by saying to me : 'This is the crossing, wj/ lady.' He fled." Lady Danstane affixed the popular title to the latter kind of gentleman. She was irritated on her friend's behalf, and against the worrying of her sisterhood, thinking in her heart, nevertheless, that the passing of a face and figure like Diana's might inspire honourable emotions, pitiable for being hapless. " If you were with me, dear, you would have none of these annoyances," she said, pleading forlornly. Diana smiled to herself. "No ! I should relapse into softness. This life exactly suits my present temper. My landlady is respectful and attentive ; the little housemaid is a willing slave ; Danvers does not despise them pugna- ciously ; they make a home for me, and I am learning daily. Do you know, the less ignorant I become, the more con- siderate I am for the ignorance of others — I love them for it." She squeezed Emma's hand with more meaning than her friend apprehended. "So I win my advantage from the trifles I have to endure. They are really trifles, and I should once have thought them mountains ! " Eor the moment Diana stipulated that she might not have to encounter friends or others at Lady Dunstane's dinner- table, and the season not being favourable to those gatherings planned by Lady Dunstaue in her project of winning sup- 120 DIAJSTA OF THE CKOSSWAYS porters, there was a respite, during which Sir Lukin worked manfully at his three Clubs to vindicate Diana's name from the hummers and hawers, gaining half a dozen hot adherents, and a body of lukewarm, sufficiently stirred to be desirous to see the lady. He worked with true champion zeal, although an interview granted him by the husband settled his opinion as to any possibility of the two ever coming to terms. Also it struck him that if he by misadventure had been a woman and the wife of such a fellow, by Jove ! . . . — his apostrophe to the father of the gods of pagandom signifying the amount of matter Warwick would have had reason to complain of in earnest. By ricochet his military mind rebounded from his knowledge of himself to an ardent faith in Mrs. Warwick's innocence; for, as there was no resemblance between them, there must, he deduced, be a difference in their capacity for enduring the perpetual company of a prig, a stick, a petrified poser. Moreover, the novel act of advoe&cy, and the nature of the advocacy, had effect on him.-'^And then he recalled the scene in the winter beech-woods, and Diana's wild-deer eyes ; her perfect generosity to a traitor and fool. How could he have doubted her? Glimpses of the corrupting cause for it partly penetrated his density : a conqueror of ladies, in mid career, doubts them all. Of course he had meant no harm, nothing worse than some pretty philandering with the love- liest woman of her time. And, by Jove ! it was worth the rebuff to behold the Beauty in her wrath/ The reflections of Lothario, however much tending tardily to do justice to a particular lady, cannot terminate whole- somely. But he became a gallant partisan. His portrayal of Mr. Warwick to his wife and his friends was fine cari- cature. " The fellow had his hand up at my first word — stood like a sentinel under inspection. ' Understand, Sir Lukin, that I receive you simply as an acquaintance. As an intermediary, permit me to state that you are taking superfluous trouble. The case must proceed. It is final. She is at liberty, in the meantime, to draw on my bankers for the provision she may need, at the rate of five hundred pounds per annum.' He spoke of ' the lady now bearing my name.' He was within an inch of saying ' dishonouring.' I swear I heard the ' dis,' and he caught himself up. He ' again THE FIRST DAYS OP HER PROBATION 121 declined any attempt towards reconciliation,' It could ' only be founded on evasion of the truth to be made patent on the day of trial.' Half his talk was lawyers' lingo. The fellow's teeth looked like frost. If Lot's wife had a brother, his name's Warwick. How Diana Merion, who could have had the pick of the best of us, ever came to marry a fellow like that, passes my comprehension, queer creatures as women are ! He can ride ; that 's about all he can do. I told him Mrs. Warwick had no thought of recon- ciliation. 'Then, Sir Lukin, you will perceive that we have no standpoint for a discussion.' I told him the point was, for a man of honour not to drag his wife before the public, as he had no case -to stand on — less than nothing. You should have seen the fellow's face. He shot a sneer tip to his eyelids, and flung his head back. So I said, * Good day.' He marches me to the door, ' with his compli- ments to Lady Dunstane.' I could have floored him for that. Bless my soul, what fellows the world is made of, when here 's a man, calling himself a gentleman, who, just because he gets in a rage with his wife for one thing or another — and past all competition the handsomest woman of her day, and the cleverest, the nicest, the best of the whole boiling — has her out for a public horsewhipping, and sets all the idiots of the kingdom against her ! I tried to reason with him. He made as if he were going to sleep standing." Sir Lukin gratified Lady Dunstane by his honest cham- pionship of Diana. And now, in his altered mood (the thrice indebted rogue was just cloudily conscious of a desire to propitiate his dear wife by serving her friend), he began a crusade against the scandal-newspapers, going with an Irish military comrade straight to the editorial offices, and leaving his card and a warning that the chastisement for print of the name of the lady in their columns would be personal and condign. Captain Carew Mahony, albeit un- acquainted with Mrs. War^vick, had espoused her cause. She was a woman, she was ah Irishwoman, she was a beauti- ful woman. She had, therefore, three positive claims on him as a soldier and a man. Other Irish gentlemen, ani- mated by the same swelling degrees, were awaking to the intimation that they might be wanted. Some words were 122 DIANA OF THE CEOSS'WAYS dropped here and there by General Lord Larrian : he re- gretted his age and infirmities. A goodly regiment for a bodyguard might have been selected to protect her steps in the public streets, when it was bruited that the General had sent her a present of his great Newfoundland dog, Leander, to attend on her and impose a required respect. But as it chanced that her address was unknown to the volunteer constabulary, they had to assuage their ardour by thinking the dog luckier than they. The report of the dog was a fact. He arrived one morn- ing at Diana's lodgings, with a soldier to lead him, and a card to introduce : the Hercules of dogs, a very ideal of the species, toweringly big, benevolent, reputed a rescuer of lives, disdainful of dog-fighting, devoted to his guardian's ofB.ce, with a majestic paw to give and the noblest satisfac^ tion in receiving caresses ever expressed by mortal male enfolded about the head, kissed, patted, hugged, snuggled, informed that he was his new mistress's one love and darling. She despatched a thrilling note of thanks to Lord Larrian, sure of her touch upon an Irish heart. The dog Leander soon responded to the attachment of a mistress enamoured of him. " He is my husband," she said to Emma, and started a tear in the eyes of her smiling friend ; " he promises to trust me, and never to have the law of me, and to love my friends as his own ; so we are certain to agree." In rain, snow, sunshine, through the parks and the streets, he was the shadow of Diana, com- manding, on the whole, apart from some desperate attempts to make him serve as introducer, a civilized behaviour in the legions of Cupid's footpads. But he helped, innocently enough, to create an enemy. DIANA BEFORE THE WORLD 123 CHAPTER XIV ei-WING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDEK HEK CLOUD BEFOEE THE 'WOELD AND OP HEK PUETHEK APPEENTICESHIP ks the day of her trial became more closely calculable, 0*ana's anticipated alarms receded with the deadening of ^,"r heart to meet the shock. She fancied she had put on P''ooi-armour, unconscious that it was the turning of the inward flutterer to steel which supplied her cuirass and shield. The necessity to brave society, in the character of honest Defendant, caused but a momentary twitch of the nerves. Her heart beat regularly, like a serviceable clock ; none of her faculties abandoned her save songfulness, and none belied her, excepting a disposition to tartness almost venomous in the sarcastic shafts she let fly at friends inter- ceding with Mr. Warwick to spare his wife, when she had determined to be tried. A strange fit of childishness over- same her powers of thinking, and was betrayed in her manner of speaking, though to herself her dwindled humour allowed her to appear the towering Britomart. She pouted contemptuously on hearing that a Mr. Sullivan Smith (a remotely recollected figure) had besought Mr. Warwick for an interview, and gained it, by stratagem, " to bring the man to his senses : " but an ultra-Irishman did not com- promise her battle-front, as the busybody supplications of a personal friend like Mr. Eedworth did ; and that the latter, without consulting her, should be "one of the plaintive crew whining about the heels of the Plaintiff for a mercy she dis- dained and rejected " was bitter to her taste. " He does not see that unless I go through the fire there is no justification for this wretched character of mine ! " she exclaimed. Truce, treaty, withdrawal, signified pub- licly pardon, not exoneration by any means ; and now that she was in armour she had no dread of the public. So she said. Redworth's being then engaged upon the canvass of a borough, added to the absurdity of his meddling with the dilemmas of a woman. " Dear me, Emma ! think of step- ping aside from the parliamentary road to entreat a husband 124 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS to relent, and arrange the domestic alliance of a contrary couple ! Quixotry is agreeable reading, a silly perform- anci^" Lady Dunstane pleaded his friendship. She had to quit the field where such darts were showering. The first dinner-party was aristocratic, easy to encounter. Lord and Lady Crane, Lady Pennon, Lord and Lady Esquart, Lord Larrian, Mr. and Mrs. Montvert of Halford Manor, Lady Singleby, Sir Walter Capperston: friends, admirers of Diana ; patrons, in the phrase of the time, of her father, were the guests. Lady Pennon expected to be amused, and was gratified, for Diana had only to open her mouth to set the great lady laughing. She petitioned to have Mrs. Warwick at her table that day week, because the marquis was dying to make her acquaintance, and begged to have all her sayings repeated to him ; vowed she must be salt in the desert. " And remember, I back you through thick and thin," said Lady Peniion. To which Diana replied: "If I am salt in the desert, you are the spring;" and the old lady protested she must put that down for her book. The witty Mrs. Warwick, of whom wit was expected, had many incitements to be guilty of cheap wit ; and the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, being able to pass anything she uttered, gave good and bad alike, under the impulsion to give out something, that the stripped and shivering Mrs. Warwick might find a cover in applause. She discovered the social uses of cheap wit ; she laid ambushes for anecdotes, a telling form of it among a people of no conversational interlocution, especially in the circles depending for dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal ; which have plentiful crops, yet not sufficient. The old dinner and supper tables at The Crpssways furnished her with an abundant store ; and recollection failing, she invented. Irish anecdotes are always popular in England, as promoting, besides the wholesome shake of the sides, a kindly sense of superiority. (Anecdotes also are portable, unlike the lightning flash, which will not go into the pocket; they can be carried home, they are dis- bursable at other tables , t These were Diana's weapons. She was perforce the actress of her part. In happier times, when light of heart and natural, her vogue had not been so enrapturing. Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian DIANA BEFORE THE WOELD 125 uniforin would hardly have won such plaudits as her stress of barbaric Oriental splendours evoked for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge — not from posterity at least. It is a terrible decree, that all must act who would prevail ; and the more extended the audience, the greater need for the mask and buskin. From Lady Pennon's table Diana passed to Lady Crane's, Lady Esquart's, Lady Singleby's, the Duchess of Eaby's, warmly clad in the admiration she excited. She appeared at Princess Ther^se Paryli's first ball of the season, and had her circle, not of worshippers only. She did not dance. The princess, a fair Austrian, benevolent to her sisterhood, an admirer of Diana's contrasting complexion, would have had her dance once in a quadrille of her forming, but yielded to the mute expression of the refusal. (Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charming were addressed to the women. Men may be counted on for falling bowled over by a handsome face and pointed tongue ; women require some wooing from their ensphered and charioted sister, particularly if she is clouded ; and old women — excellent buttresses — must be suavely courtedJ[ Now, to woo the swimming matron and court the settlea dowager, she had to win forgiveness for her beauty ; and this was done, easily done, by forbearing to angle with it in the press of nibblers. They ranged about her, individually unnoticed. Seeming unaware of its effect where it kindled, she smote a number of musical female chords, compassion among them. A general grave affability of her eyes and smiles was taken for quiet pleasure in the scene. Her fitful intentness of look when conversing with the older ladies told of the mind within at work upon what they said, and she was careful that plain dialogue should make her compre- hensible to them. Nature taught her these arts, through which her wit became extolled entirely on the strength of her reputation, and her beauty did her service by never taking aim abroad. They are the woman's arts of selt defence, as legitimately and honourably hers as the manful use of the fists with a coarser sex. If it had not been nature that taught her the practice of them in extremity, the sagacious dowagers would have seen brazenness rather than innocence — or au excusable indiscretion — in the part 126 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS she was performing. They are not lightly duped by one of their sex. Few tasks are more difficult than for a young woman under a cloud to hoodwink old women of the world. They are the prey of financiers ; but Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to scan their sex in. At Princess Paryli's Ball two young men of singular elegance were observed by Diana, little though she con- centered her attention on any figures of the groups. She had the woman's faculty (transiently bestowed by perfervid jealousy upon men) of distinguishing minutely in the calm- est of indifferent glances. She could see without looking ; and when her eyes were wide they had not to dwell to be detective. It did not escape her that the Englishman of the two hurried for the chance of an introduction, nor that he suddenly, after putting a question to a man beside him, retired. She spoke of them to Emma as they drove home. " The princess's partner in the first quadrille . . . Hungarian, I suppose ? He was like a Tartar modelled by a Greek : supple as the Scythian's bow, braced as the string ! He has the air of a born horseman, and valses per- fectly. I won't say he was handsomer than a young Englishman there, but he had the advantage of soldierly training. How different is that quick springy figure from our young men's lounging style ! It comes of military exercise and discipline." " That was Count Jochany, a cousin of the princess, and a cavalry ofiicer," said Emma. " You don't know the other ? I am sure the one you mean must be Percy Dacier." His retiring was explained : the Hon. Percy Dacier was the nephew of Lord Dannisburgh, often extolled to her as the promising youngster of his day, with the reserve that he wasted his youth : for the young gentleman was decorous and studious ; ambitious, according to report ; a politician taking to politics much too seriously and exclusively to suit his uncle's pattern for the early period of life. Uncle and nephew went their separate ways, rarely meeting, though their exchange of esteem was cordial. Thinking over his abrupt retirement from the crowded semicircle, Diana felt her position pinch her, she knew not why. Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night DIANA BEFOEE THE "WORLD 127 in the business of acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service, instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined herself to have lost for ever. The word was passed, and invita- tions poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon concerts, all the humming season's assemblies. Mr. Warwick's treatment of his wife was taken by implica- tion for lunatic ; wherever she was heard or seen, he had no case ; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to be sworn, pronounced against him. Only the personal enemies of the lord in the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a minority. But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not commanding it. Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the country. : At present a relaxed austerity is represented ; and still the bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of their pretensions. They were then, while more sharply divided from the titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful to brand a woman's char- acter, whatever her rank might be ; having innumerable agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing of the printing-press. Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the cause of her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, with whom she was distantly connected ; the wife of a potent serjeant-at-law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood ; the centre of a circle, and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts and graces, for she had wealth and a cook, a hus- band proud of his wine-cellar, and the ambition to rule ; all the rewards, together with the expectations, of the vir- tuous. She was a lady of incisive features bound in stale parchment. I Complexion she had none, but she had spot- lessness of skin, and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions of a precious quarto of a per- ished type. You discerned the imitation of the type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor. Mr. Cramborne Wathin was by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of horror) from tradesmen. The 128 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS r Bench was in designation for him to wash ont the stain, i but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs, i excess of bone, prominences misplaced. Their mother 'inspired them carefully with the religion she opposed to the pretensions of a nobler blood, while instilling into them 'that the blood they drew from her was territorial, far above Jthe vulgar. Her appearance and her principles fitted herl 'to stand for -the Puritan rich of the period, emerging by| ithe aid of an extending wealth into luxurious worldliness,! j and retaining the maxims of their forefathers for the dis-l cipliue of the poor and erring. Lady Dunstane called on her, ostensibly to let her know she had taken a house in town for the season, and in the course of the chat Mrs. Cramborne Wathin was invited to dinner. " You will meet my dear friend, Mrs. Warwick," she said, and the reply was : " Oh, I have heard of her." The formal consultation with Mr. Cramborne Wathin ended in an agreement to accept Lady Dunstane's kind invitation. Considering her husband's plenitude of old legal anec- dotes, and her own diligent perusal of the funny publica- tions of the day, that she might be on the level of the wits and celebrities she entertained, Mrs. Cramborne Wathin had a right to expect the leading share in the conversation to which she was accustomed. Every honour was paid to them ; they met aristocracy in the persons of Lord Larrian, of Lady Eockden, Colonel Purlby, the Pettigrews, but neither of them held the table for a moment ; the topics flew, and were no sooner up than down ; they were unable to get a shot. They had to eat in silence, occasionally grinning, because a woman labouring under a stigma would rattle-rattle, as if the laughter of the company were her due, and decency beneath her notice. Some one alluded to a dog of Mrs. Warwick's, whereupon she trips out a story of her dog's amazing intelligence. "And pray," said Mrs. Cramborne Wathin across the table, merely to slip in a word, " what is the name of this wonderful dog ? " " His name is Leander," said Diana. " Oh, Leander. I don't think I hear myself calling to a dog in a name of three syllables. Two at the most." DIANA BEFOKE THE WOEUD 129 " No, SO I call Hero ! if I want him to come immediately," said Diana, and the gentlemen, to Mrs. Cramborne Wathin's astonishment, acclaimed it. Mr. Eedworth, at her elbow, sxplained the point, to her disgust. That was Diana's oft'ence. If it should seem a small one, let it be remembered that [1 snub was intended, and was foiled ; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough to exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering stroke. A woman under a cloud, she talked, pushed to shine ; she would be heard, would be applauded. Her chronicler must likewise admit the error of her giving way to a petty senti- ment of antagonism on first beholding Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, before whom she at once resolved to be herself, for a holiday, instead of acting demurely to conciliate. Probably it was an antagonism of race, the shrinking of the skin from the burr. But when Tremendous Powers are invoked, we should treat any simple revulsion of our blood as a vice. The Gods of this world's contests demand it of us, in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at work. Otherwise the course of a prudent policy is never to invoke them, but avoid. The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, her charm, and her elsewhere offending wit, however the case might go. It is chivalrous, but not, alas, inflammable in support of innocence. The class below it is governed in estimates of character by accepted patterns of conduct ; yet where innocence under persecution is believed to exist, the mem- bers animated by that belief can be enthusiastic. Enthu- siasm is a heaven-sent steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers; it is more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to communicate its ardour. Two letters from stranger ladies reached Diana, through her lawyers and Lady Dunstane. Anonymous letters, not so welcome, being male effusions, arrived at her lodgings, one of them comical almost over the verge to pathos in its termination : " To me you will ever be the Goddess Diana — my faith in woman! " He was unacquainted with her ! She had not the heart to think the writers donkeys. How they obtained her address was a puzzle; they stole 9 130 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS in to comfort her slightly. They attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would have been the idea of her character if she had flown — a re- flection emanating from inexperience of the resources of sentimentalists. If she had flown ! She was borne along by the tide like a butterfly that a fish may gobble unless a friendly hand shall intervene. And could it in nature ? She was past expectation of release. The attempt to imagine living with any warmth of blood in her vindicated character, for the sake of zealous friends, consigned her to a cold and empty house upon a foreign earth. She had to set her mind upon the mysterious enshrouded Twelve, with whom the verdict would soon be hanging, that she might prompt her human combativeness to desire the vindication at such a price as she would have to pay for it. When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big word. The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education, habits, enlightenment, to pro- nounce decisively upon the case in dispute, the case being plainly stated. They replied, that the long habit of deal- ing with scales enabled them to weigh the value of evidence the most delicate. Moreover, they were Englishmen, and anything short of downright bullet facts went to favour the woman. Eor thus we right the balance of legal in- justice toward the sex : we conveniently wink, ma'am. A rough, old-fashioned way for us! Is it a Breach of Prom- ise ? — She may reckon on her damages : we have daughters of our own. Is it a suit for Divorce ? — Well, we have wives of our own, and we can lash, or we can spare ; that's as it may be ; but we '11 keep the couple tied, let 'em hate as they like, if they can't furnish porkbutchers' reasons for sundering; because the man makes the money in this country. — My goodness ! what a funny people, sir ! — It 's our way of holding the balance, ma'am. — But would it not be better to rectify the law and the social system, dear sir ? DIANA BEFORE THE WORLD 131 ■ — Why, ma'am, we find it comfortabler to take cases as they come, in the style of our fathers. — But don't you see, my good man, that you are offering scapegoats for the comfort of the majority ? — Well, ma'am, there always were scape- goats, and always will be ; we find it comes round pretty square in the end. " And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy ! It is perfectly possible. The grocer, the porkbutcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera — they sit on me. I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr. Braddock tells me of their composition. And he admits that they do justice roughly — a rough and tumble country ! to quote him — though he says they are honest in intention." " More shame to the man who drags you before them — if he persists !" Emma rejoined. " He will. I know him. I would not have him draw back now," said Diana, catching her breath. " And, dear- est, do not abuse him ; for if you do, you set me imagining guiltiness. Oh, heaven ! — suppose me publicly pardoned ! No, I have kinder feelings when we stand opposed. It is odd, and rather frets my conscience, to think of the little resentment I feel. Hardly any ! He has not cause to like his wife. I can own it, and I am sorry for him, heartily. No two have ever come together so naturally antagonistic as we two. We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and hit upon crossways. From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him. By resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel. And he was the maddest of tyrants — a weak one. My dear, he was also a double-dealer. Or, no, perhaps not in design. He was moved at one time by his interests ; at another by his idea of his honour. He took what I could get for him, and then turned and drubbed me for getting it." "This is the creature you try to excuse!" exclaimed indignant Emma. " Yes, because — but fancy all the smart things I said being called my ' sallies ! ' — can a woman live with it ? — because I behaved ... I despised him too much, and I showed it. He is not a contemptible man before the world ; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection. I could not — or did not — conceal my feeling. I showed it 132 DIANA OF THK CBOSSWAYS not only to him, to my friend. Husband grew to mean to me stifler, lung-contractor, iron mask, inquisitor, everything anti-natural. He suffered under my ' sallies ' : and it was the worse for him when he did not perceive their drift. He is an upright man ; I have not seen marked meanness. One might build up a respectable figure in negatives. I could add a row of noughts to the single number he cherishes, enough to make a millionnaire of him ; but strike away the first, the rest are wind. Which signifies, that if you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his negative virtues. He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently, selfish ; not rancorous, not obtrusive — ta-ta-ta-ta. But dull ! — dull as a woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth. Oh ! an executioner's black cap to me. Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his honour. I ' rendered ' him ridiculous ■ — I had caught a trick of ' using men's phrases.' Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh — you have never questioned me, and it was like you to spare me pain — but now I can speak of him and myself." Diana dropped her voice. Here was another confession. The proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded recol- lection of incidents. It may be that partly the shame of alluding to them had blocked her woman's memory. For one curious operation of the charge of guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the whiteness being acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and press upon their consciences. She resumed, in a rapid undertone : " You know that a certain degree of independ- ence had been, if not granted by him, conquered by me. I had the habit of it. Obedience with him is imprisonment — he is a blind wall. He received a commission, greatly to his advantage, and was absent. He seems to have received information of some sort. He returned unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at once, middling violent. My friend — and that he is ! — was coming from the House for a ten minutes' talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him after the long sitting and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure. Now let me confess : I grew frightened ; Mr. Warwick was 'oif his head,' as they say — crazy, and I could not bear the thought of those two meeting. While he DIANA BEPOEE THE WORLD 183 raged I threw open tlie window and put the lamp near it, to expose the whole interior — cunning as a veteran intriguer : horrible, but it had to be done to keep them apart. He asked me what madness possessed me, to sit by an open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a damp wind blowing. I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead. I heard the steps on the pavement ; I stung him to retort loudly, and I was relieved ; the steps passed on. So the trick succeeded — the trick ! It was the worst I was guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me trickster. It teaches me to see myself with an abyss in my nature full of infernal possibilities. I think I am hewn in black rock. A woman who can do as I did by instinct, needs to have an angel always near her, if she has not a husband she reveres." " We are none of us better than you, dear Tony ; only some are more fortunate, and many are cowards," Emma said. " You acted prudently in a wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the circumstances. But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan. That marriage was to blame ! The English notion of women seems to be that we are bopn white sheep or black : circum- stances have nothing to do with our colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly is beyond them. Whether the fiction, that their homes are purer than elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know : there is a class that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a liking for purity ; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on women has the dangers of things artificial. They narrow their understanding of human nature, and that is not the way to improve the breed." " I suppose we women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator; human nature's fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the texture," said Diana; "the pretty ornamentation. However, I fancy I perceive some tolerance growing in the minds of the dominant sex. Our old lawyer, Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their independence. That is the secret of the opinion of us at present — our dependency. Give us the 134 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS means of independence, and we will gain it, and have a turn at judging you, my lords ! You shall behold a world reversed. Whenever I am distracted by existing circum- stances, I lay my finger on the material conditions, and I touch the secret. Individually, it may be moral with us ; collectively, it is material — gross wrongs, gross hungers. I am a married rebel, and thereof comes the social rebel. I was once a dancing and singing girl. You remember the night of the Dublin Ball. A Channel sea in uproar, stirred by witches, flows between." "You are as lovely as you were then — I could say, lovelier," said Emma. " I have unconquerable health, and I wish I could give you the half of it, dear. I work late into the night, and I wake early and fresh in the morning. I do not sing, that is all. A few days more, and my character will be up before the Bull's Head to face him in the arena. The worst of a position like mine is, that it causes me inces- santly to think and talk of myself. I believe I think less than I talk, but the subject is growing stale ; as those who are long dying feel, I dare say — if they do not take it as the compensation for their departure." The Bull's Head, or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced during the latter half of a week of good news. First, Mr. Thomas Eed worth was returned to Parliament by a stout majority for the Borough of Orry- bridge : the Hon. Percy Dacier delivered a brilliant speech in the House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle r Lord Larrian obtained the command of the Eock: the house of The Crossways was let to a tenant approved by Mr. Braddock : Diana received the opening proof-sheets of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest honorarium: and finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged to have not proved his charge. She heard of it without a change of countenance. She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated. But she was not free ; far from that ; and she revenged herself on the friends who made much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of satisfaction. There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences of the verdict — or blunt acquiescence of the DIANA BEFORE THE WOELD 135 Law in the conditions possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving phial ; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight, somewhat as Eedworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways to Copsley. This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and the inner, would have been in- dulged to the extent of permanent injury to her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid. Lady Dunstane chanted victory, and at night collapsed. By the advice of her physician she was removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing restored her through love to a saner spirit. The hopefulness of life must bloom again in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer than its own to be preserved. A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin also refreshed her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls he named as his wife. His piteous groans of self-accusation during the crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment to her still young understanding. Save for the knot of her sensations (hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage, she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compas- sionated him. It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart, for a voyage in the Mediterranean : and (behind her hand) that the reason was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her husband. 136 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS CHAPTEE XV INTRODUCES THE UON. PERCY DACIEB The Gods of this world's contests, against whom onr poor stripped individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are reapers ; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us : they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made present- able while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of course less than magnanimity ; they are not proposed to you for your worship ; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in them, which is, the divine jnsistancy upon there being two sides to a case — to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished according to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished. Diana's battle was fought shadow ily behind her for the space of a week or so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man ; then it became a recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow, nor anything to match her. She, however, once out of the public flames, had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself. Under a defeat, she would have been angrily self- vindicated. The victory of the ashen laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion for its pair of victims. Quite earnestly by such means, yet always bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of personal blame. Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults. But were they not natural faults ? It was her marriage ; it was marriage in the abstract : her own mistake and the world's clumsy machinery of civilization : these were the capital offenders : not the wife who would laugh ringingly, and would have INTEODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIEK 137 friends of the other sex, and shot her epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times — yes, vixenish ; a nature driven to it, but that was the word. She was too generous to recount her charges against the vanquished. If his wretched jealousy had ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the embracing, pronounced him just pardonable. She distinguished that he could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division. To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her night of debate at The Crossways. The next moment she was off: in vapour, meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions. Love ! she did not know it ; she was not acquainted with either the crim- inal or the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could be. She was a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship ; she could be the friend of men. There was another who .could be the friend of women. Her heart leapt to Redworth. Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their grasp of hands when parting, she thought of her vis- ions of her future about the period of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the erratic step to wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a friend. His face, figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all were loyal signs of a man of honour, cold as she ; he was the man to whom she could have opened her heart for inspection. Rejoicing in her independence of an emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a regret that at their parting she had not broken down conventional barriers and given her cheek to his lips in the anti-insular fashion with a brotherly friend. And why not when both were cold ? Spirit to spirit, she did, delightfully refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb. He had held her hand and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear comrade ; as little arous- ing her instincts of defensiveness as the clearing heavens ; and sisterly love for it was his due, a sister's kiss. He needed a sister, and should ha-^e one in her. Emma's rec- ollected talk of " Tom Eedworth " painted him from head to foot, brought the living man over the wat^ to the deck 138 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS of the yacht. [A stout champion in the person of Tom Eedworth was/ left ou British land; but for some reason past analysis, intermixed, that is, among a swarm of sensa- tions, Diana named her champion to herself with the formal prefix : perhaps because she knew a man's Christian name to be dangerous handliug.J They differed besides frequently in opinion, when the habit of thinking of him as Mr. Eed- worth would be best. Women are bound to such small observances, and especially the beautiful of the sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they carry explosives and must particularly guard against the ignition of petty sparks. She was less indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts, as is the way with the reflective daughter of impulse ; though she had fine mental distinctions : what she could offer to do " spirit to spirit," for instance, held nothing to her mind of the intimacy of calling the gentleman plain Tom in mere contemplation of him. Her friend and champion was a volunteer, far from a mercenary, and he deserved the re- ward, if she could bestow it unalarmed. They were to meet in Egypt. Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile forces ready to shock, had she been a visible planet, and ready to secrete a virus of her past history, had she been making new. She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the invalid : her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties ; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people — priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple south- erners — flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed ; telling, without al- lusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion. Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of writing. Only one cry : " Italy, Eden of exiles ! " betrayed the seeming of a moan. She wrote of her poet and others immediately. Thither had they fled, with adieu to England 1 INTEODtrCBS THE HON. PERCY DACIEE 139 How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England protecting them, England clothing them, in the honours they wear. Only the posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out the pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at heart in earnest. The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel their debt. Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country. In England she was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition. Abroad, gazing along the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, read- ing of the struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of generosity made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain. It is at a distance that striving coun- tries should be seen if we would have them in the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of public speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England long before her term of holiday exile had ended. She had been flattered by her friend, her "wedded martyr at the stake," as she named him, to believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics — could think, even speak acutely, on public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her political notions were sovereignly above a sex devoted to trifles, and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire. She fancied it confidently, notwithstand- ing a peculiar intuition that the plunge into the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a wo- man with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: " Mr. Eedworth's great success in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present questions ; and I do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a man of such power in striking at unjust laws, which keep the really numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery. If he had been a lawyer ! It must be a lawyer's initiative — a lawyer's Bill. Mr. Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his uncle's compli- ment to him was merited. Should you meet him sound him. He has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Eed- 140 DIANA OP THE CEdSSWAYS worfli. The very young men and the old are our hope. The middle-aged are hard and fast for existing facts. We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and decline of the mountain — not on the upper table-land midway, where all appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure; which induces one to protest that the middle- age of men is their time of delusion. It is no paradox. They may be publicly useful in a small way, I do not deny it at all. They must be near the gates of life — the open- ing or the closing — for their minds to be accessible to the urgency of the greater questions. Otherwise the world pre- sents itself to them under too settled an aspect — unless, of ' course, Vesuvian Revolution shakes the land. And that touches only their nerves. I dream of some old Judge ! There is one — if having caught we could keep him. But I dread so tricksy a pilot. You have guessed him — the ancient Puck ! We have laughed all day over the paper telling us of his worrying the Lords. Lady Esquart con- gratulates her husband in being out of it. Puck Men ride and bewigged might perhaps — except that at the critical moment he would be sure to plead allegiance to Oberon. However, the work will be performed by some one : I am prophetic : — when maidens are grandmothers ! — when your Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the unhusbaiided regions where there is no institution of the wedding-tie." For the reason that she was not to participate in the re- sult of the old Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her sepa;rateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, sim- ply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy — the belief in her pos- session of a disengaged intellect. The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her corre- spondent, was maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated from the Pireeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the yacht,- and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond of calling " home." Politics, and gentle allusions to XNTEODTJCES THE HON. PEEOY DACIEE 141 the curious exhibition of " love in marriage " shown by her amiable host and hostess : — ■ "these dear Bsquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection and a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness : " — filled the paragraphs. Reviews of her first literary venture ■were mentioned once : " I was well advised by Mr. Eed- worth in putting Antonia for authoress. She is a buff jerkin to the stripes, and I suspect that the signature of D. A. M., written in full, would have cawed woefully to hear that her style is affected, her characters nullities, her clever- ness forced, &c., &c. As it is I have much the same con- tempt for poor Antonia's performance. Cease penning, little fool ! She writes, ' with some comprehension of the passion of love.' I know her to be a stranger to the earliest cry. j So you see, dear, that utter ignorance is the mother of the Art. [ Dialogues 'occasionally pointed.' She has a sister who rhay do better. — But why was I not appren- ticed to a serviceable profession or a trade ? I perceive now that a hanger-on of the market had no right to expect a happier fate than mine has been." On the Nile, in the winter of the year, Diana met thel Hon. Percy Dacier. He was introduced to her at Cairo by Eedworth. The two gentlemen had struck up a House of Commons acquaintanceship, and finding themselves bound for the same destination, had grown friendly. Red worth's arrival had been pleasantly expected. She remarked on Dacier's presence to Emma, without sketch or note of him as other than much esteemed by Lord and Lady Esquart. These, with Diana, Redworth, Dacier, the German Eastern traveller Schweizerbarth, and the French Consul and Egyp- tologist Duriette, composed a voyaging party up' the river, of which expedition Redworth was Lady Dunstane's chief writer of the records. His novel perceptiveness and shrewd- ness of touch made them amusing ; and his tenderness to the Beauty's coquetry between the two foreign rivals, moved a deeper feeling. The German had a guitar, the Frenchman a voice ; Diana joined them in harmony. They complained apart severally of the accompaniment and the singer. Our English criticized them apart ; and that is at any rate to occupy a post, though it contributes nothing to entertain- 142 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS ment. At home the Esquarts had sung duets ; Diana had assisted Eedworth's manly chest-notes at the piano. Each of them declined to be vocal. Diana sang alone for the credit of the country, Italian and French songs, Irish also. She was in her mood of Planxty Kelly and Garryowen all the way. " Madame est Irlandaise ? " Redworth heard the Frenchman say, and he owned to what was implied in the answering tone of the question. " We should be dull dogs without the Irish leaven !" So Tony in exile still managed to do something for her darling Erin. The solitary woman on her heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of, " Oh ! that those two had been or could be united ! " She was conscious of a mystic symbolism in the prayer. She was not apprehensive of any ominous intervention of another. Writing from Venice, Diana mentioned Mr. Percy Dacier as being engaged to an heiress ; " A Miss Asper, niece of a mighty shipowner, Mr. Quintin Manx, Lady Esquart tells me : money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son devoured with ambition. I.'he elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere. Mr. Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry." No more of him. A new work by Antonia was progressing. The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal proces- sion before young eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work, living the double life of the author. At Bellagio one afternoon Mr. Percy Dacier appeared. She remembered subsequently a disap- pointment she felt in not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him. If engaged to a lady, he wns not an ardent suitor ; nor was he a pointedly compliment- ary acquaintance. His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian scenery. She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming of her imagination, if that is in store for her ; and she now fell to work resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be shaped again. " But women never can know young men," she wrote to Emma, after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood. "He drops pretty sentences INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIEB 143 now and then : no compliments ; milky nuts. Of course he has a head, or he would not be where he is — and that seems always to me the most enviable place a young man can occupy." She observed in him a singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders before youth had quitted its pastures. His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred English ; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions ; and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend. The head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest, told of weights working. She recollected his open look, larger than inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered anything specially taking. What it meant was past a guess, though compar- ing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two opinions. Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she could have said that a dubi- ous consort might spoil a promising career. It flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes illumined. He repeated sentences she had spoken. — "I shall be better able to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a stroke here and there completes the painting. Set descriptions are good for puppets. Living men and women are too various in the mixture fashioning them — even the ' external present- ment ' — to be livingly rendered in a formal sketch. I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts, and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll. Such literary craft is of the nursery. So with landscapes. The art of the pen (we write on dask- ness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring vsrith a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures. The Shake- 144 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS spearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most. He lends an attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaim; pucker of the eyebrows dissenting inwardly. He lacks mental liveliness — cheerfulness, I should say, and is thankful to have it imparted.! One suspects he would be a dull domestic companion J He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the worl^ and no spiritual distillery of his own. He leans to depression. Why! The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo, all of her manu- facture — she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young man — a sapling oak — inclined to droop. His na;ture has a,n air of imploring me que je Varrose! I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on purpose to brighten him — the mind, the views. He is not altogether deficient in conversa- tional gaiety, and he shines in exercise. But the world is a poor old ball bounding down a hill — to an Irish melody in the evening generally, by request. So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I have some hopes — distant, perhaps delusive — that he may be of use to our cause. He listens. It is an auspicious commencement." Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and every height about it may be scaled with ease. The heights have their nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with celestial Monta Eosa, in prospect. It was there that Diana re- awakened, after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her share in it. She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss ; happily not to kisses ; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward. The change befell her without a warning. After writing delib- erately to her friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind, quickening her soul:' — and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of air. She could have imagined a seraphic pres- ence in the room, that bade her arise and live ; take the cup of the -wells of youth arrested at her lips by her mar- riage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space, the quick of simple being. And the strange pure ecstasy was not a transient electrification; it came in "Waves on a continuous tide ; looking was living ; walking flying. She INTEODUCES THE HON. PEECY DACIEE 145 hardly knew that she slept. The heights she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn. Sleep was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily chirruping over her posses- sions. The threading of the town among the dear common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure: and pleasant her solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock, only she astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the first closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with her ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little loaf of bread. A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet. The feet were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when the blood leaps to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a source at the wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every energy as a spirit. To be a girl again was magical. She could fancy her hav- ing risen from the dead. And to be a girl, with a woman's broader vision and receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to ethereal happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers. She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and grandeur. Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid ; she was illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in the morning's; and she had not a spot of secrecy; all her nature flew and bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering sensibility unweighted, unshrouded. Desires and hopes would surely have weighted and shrouded her. She had none, save for the upper air, the eyes of the mountain. Which was the dream — her past life or this ethereal existence? But this ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated — her vivaciousness on the Nile- boat, for a Jecent example. She had not a doubt that her past life was the dream, or deception : and for the reason that now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her. Let them but leave her free, they were for- given, even to prayers for their wellbeing ! The plural 10 146 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS number in the case was an involuntary multiplying of the single, coming of her incapacity during this elevation and rapture of the senses to think distinctly of that One who had discoloured her opening life. Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb, grow with the grasses, fiiy with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be an unclaimed self, dispersed upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener transfigured self in that radiation — she craved no more. Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white simplicity in fervour: was there e'ver so perilous a woman for the most guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a mountain side? CHAPTEE XVI XEEATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE 01" EAELY MOENING On a round of the mountains rising from Osteno, South- eastward of Lugano, the Esquart party rose from the natural grotto and headed their carriages up and down the defiles, halting for a night at Eovio, a little village below the Generoso, lively with waterfalls and watercourses ; and they fell so in love with the place, that after roaming along the flowery borderways by moonlight, they resolved to rest there two or three days and try some easy ascents. In the diurnal course of nature, being pleasantly tired, they had the avowed intention of sleeping there ; so they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished one another good- night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere one of the warlike arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last when utterly beaten. Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the pit; in daylight rather a meiry comrade. But at night, when the children of nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask. As soon as they had fairly nestled, he smote their A MIDNIGHT BELL AND EARLY MOENINQ 147 pillows a shattering blow, loud for the retold preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten. Then he waited for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slum- ber's votaries in turn; whereupon, under pretence of exces- sive conscientiousness, or else oblivious of his antecedent damnable misconduct, or perhaps in actual league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts beneath us, he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitula- tion of the number; all the others likewise. It was an alarum fit to warn of Attila or Alaric; and not simply the maniacal noise invaded the fruitful provinces of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational repetition ploughed the minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable question to Providence, Why ! — Why twice? Designing slumberers are such infants. When they have undressed and stretched themselves flat, it seems that they have really gone back to their mothers' breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack of nature, or custom. The cause of a repetition so senseless in its vio- lence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the inevitable quarters recommenced. Then arose an insurgent rabble in their bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary arithmetic a second time ; for they were unaware of his religious obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the tardy hour of Eome. They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to bear the first crash callously. His performance was the same. And now they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole neighbourhood. Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him, and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids, breathing with a dreadful regularity. Alas! it came to their knowledge that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers. Every resonant quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous 148 CIAJifA 01" THE CE0SSWAY3 abruptness ; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the reiterated quarters, four and twenty ring- ing hammer-strokes, with the aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a sleepless night. Prom that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged. They swam on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her will upon themselves. Of her originally sprang the inspired teach- ing of the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness. She is the fountain of the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite for change. Dacier was never the best of sleepers. He had taken to exercise his brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than com- monly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissi- pated, with the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may re'^ cover under favouring conditions, which is a point of van- tage denied to them.-' Physically he had stout reserves, for he had not disgraced the temple.. His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise and lead: a precocious ambition. This apparently modest young man started with an aim — and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his aim — at Government. He had hung on the fringe of an Administration. His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power. Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at present one sufficiently magniijed and voracious to swallow the remainder. He added force to the inter- rogation as to why that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why he was there to hear it ! A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield A MIDOTGHT BELL AND EAELY MOENXNG 149 to the peculiar kind of sorcery issuing from that sex. He rather despised the power of women over men: and never- theless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the ■ latter were urgent. He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on his present expedition. The noisy alarum told him he floundered in quags, like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp. But was it so? Was it not, on the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret of a woman's character? — Oh, a woman and her character ! Ordinary women and their characters might set to work to get what relationship and likeness they could. They had no secret to allure. This one had : she had the secret of lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness. He could not think of her without shooting at nature, and nature's very sweetest and subtlest, for comparisons. As to her sex, his active man's contempt of the petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made him believe that in her he hunted the mind and the spirit: perchance a double mind, a twilighted spirit; but not a mere woman. She bore no resemblance to the bundle of women. Well, she was worth studying ; she had ideas, and could give ear to ideas. Furthermore, a couple of the members of his family inclined to do her injustice. At least, they judged her harshly, owing, he thought, to an inveterate opinion they held regarding Lord Dannisburgh's obliquity in relation to women. He shared it, and did not concur in their verdict upon the woman implicated. That is to say, knowing something of her now, he could see the possibility of her innocence in the special charm that her mere sparkle of features and speech, and her freshness would have for a man like his uncle. The possibility pleaded strongly on her behalf, while the darker possi- bility weighted by his uncle's reputation plucked at him from below. She was delightful to hear, delightful to see; and her friends loved her and had faith in her. So clever a woman might be too clever for her friends ! . . . The circle he moved in hummed of women, prompting novices as well as veterans to suspect that the multitude of them, and notably the fairest, yet more the cleverest, concealed the serpent somewhere. 150 DIANA OP THE CROSSWAYS She certainly had not directed any of her arts upon him. Besides he was half engaged. And that was a burning perplexity; not because of abstract scruples touching the necessity for love in marriage. The young lady, great heiress though she was, and willing, as she allowed him to assume; graceful too, reputed a beauty; struck him cold. He fancied her transparent, only Arctic. Her transparency displayed to him all the common virtues, and a serene possession of the inestimable and eminent one outweighing all; but charm, wit, ardour, intercom- municative quickness, and kindling beauty, airy grace, were qualities that a man, it seemed, had to look for in women spotted by a doubt of their having the chief and priceless. However, he was not absolutely plighted. Nor did it matter to him whether this or that woman concealed the tail of the serpent and trail, excepting the singular interest this woman managed to excite, and so deeply as set him wondering how that Eesurrection Bell might be affecting her ability to sleep. Was she sleeping? — or waking? His nervous imagination was a torch that alternately lighted her lying asleep with the innocent, like a babe, and toss- ing beneath the overilow of her dark hair, hounded by haggard memories. She fluttered before him in either aspect; and another perplexity now was to distinguish within himself which was the aspect he preferred. Great Nature brought him thus to drink of her beauty, under the delusion that the act was a speculation on her character. The Bell, with its clash, throb and long swoon of sound, reminded him of her name: Diana — An attribute? or a derision? It really mattered nothing to him, save for her being maligned; and if most unfairly, then that face of the vary- ing expressions, and the rich voice, and the remembered gentle and taking words coming from her, appealed to him with a supplicating vividness that pricked his heart to leap. He was dozing when the Bell burst through the thin division between slumber and wakefulness, recounting what seemed innumerable peals, hard on his cranium. Gray daylight blanched the window and the bed : his watch said A MIDNIGHT BELL AND EARLY MOENING 151 five of the morning. He thought of the pleasure of a bath beneath some dashing sprayshowers, and jumped up to dress, feeling a queer sensation of skin in his clothes, the " sign of a feverish nightj and yawning he went into the air. Leftward the narrow village- street led to the footway along which he could make for the mountain-wall. He cast one look at the head of the campanile, silly as an owlish roysterer's glazed stare at the young Aurora, and hurried his feet to check the yawns coming alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas. His elevation above the valley was about the kneecap of the Generoso. Waters of past rain-clouds poured down the mountain-sides like veins of metal, here and there flinging off a shower on the busy descent; only dubiously animate in the lack lustre of the huge bulk piled against a yellow East that wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets over- head. He mounted his path to a level with inviting grass- mounds where water circled, running from scoops and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his fancy calling to him to hear them. To dip in them was his desire. To roll and shiver braced by the icy flow was the spell to break that baleful incant:ition of the intolerable night; so he struck across a ridge of boulders, wreck of a landslip from the height he had hugged, to the open space of shadowed undulations, and soon had his feet on turf. Heights to right and to left, and between them, aloft, a sky the rosy wheelcours ! of the chariot of morn, and below, among the knolls, choice of sheltered nooks, where waters whispered of secrecy to satisfy Diana herself. They have that whisper and waving of secrecy in secret scenery ; they beckon to the bath ; and they conjure classic visions of the pudfenoy of the Goddess irate or unsighted. The semi-mythological state of mind, built of old images and favouring haunts, was known to Dacier. The name of Diana, playing vaguely on his consciousness, helped to it. He had no definite thought of the mortal woman when the highest grass-roll near the rock gave him view of a bowered source and of a pool under a chain of cascades, bounded by polished shelves and slabs. The very spot for him, he decided at the first peep; and at the second, with fingers instinctively loosening his waistcoat-buttons for a com- 152 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS mencement, he shouldered round and strolled away, though not at a rapid pace, nor far before he halted. That it could be no other than she, the figure he had seen standing beside the pool, he was sure. Why had he turned? Thoughts thick and swift as a blush in the cheeks of seventeen overcame him; and queen of all, the thought bringing the picture of this mountain-solitude to vindicate a woman shamefully assailed. — She who found her pleas- ure in these haunts of nymph and Goddess, at the fresh cold bosom of nature, must be clear as day. She trusted herself to the loneliness here, and to the honour of men, from a like irreflective sincereness. She was unable to imagine danger where her own impelling thirst was pure. . . . The thoughts, it will be discerned, were but flashes of a momentary vivid sensibility. Where a woman's charm has won half the battle, her character is an advancing standard and sings victory, let her do no more than take a quiet morning walk before breakfast. But why had he turned his back on her? There was nothing in his presence to alarm, nothing in her appear- ance to forbid. The motive and the movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting him- self out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the sup- position that she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet now he was debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to bathe her feet. Her name was Diana. . . . Yes, and a married woman ; and a proclaimed one ! And notwithstanding those brassy facts, he was ready to side with the evidence declaring her free from stain; and further, to swear that her blood was Diana's! Nor had Daeier ever been particularly poetical about women. The present Diana had wakened his curiosity, had stirred his interest in her, pricked his admiration, but gradually, until a sleepless night with its flock of raven- fancies under that dominant Bell, ended by colouring her, the moment she stood in his eyes, as freshly as the morn- ing heavens. We are much influenced in youth by sleep- less nights: they disarm, they predispose us to submit to soft occasion ; and in our youth occasion is always coming. A MIDNIGHT BELL AND EARLY MOKNING 153 He heard her voice. She had risen up the grass-mound, and he hung brooding half-way down. She was dressed in some texture of the hue of lavender. A violet scarf loosely knotted over the bosom opened on her throat. The loop of her black hair curved under a hat of grey beaver. Memorably radiant was her face. They met, exchanged greetings, praised the beauty of the morning, and struck together on the Bell. She laughed : " I heard it at ten ; I slept till four. I never wake later. I was out in the air by half -past. Were you disturbed? " He alluded to his troubles with the Bell. "It sounded like a felon's heart in skeleton ribs," he said. " Or a proser's tongue in a hollow skull," said she. He bowed to her conversible readiness, and at once fell into the background, as he did only with her, to per- form accordant bass in their dialogue; for when a woman lightly caps our strained remarks, we gallantly surren- der the leadership, lest she should too cuttingly assert her claim. Some sweet wild cyclamen flowers were at her breast. She held in her left hand a bunch of buds and blown cups of the pale purple meadow-crocus. He admired them. She told him to look round. He confessed to not having noticed them in the grass: what was the name? Colchi- cum, in Botany, she said. "These are plucked to be sent to a friend; otherwise I'm reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim. Wild flowers, I mean. I am not sentimental about garden flowers: they are cultivated for decoration, grown for clipping." "I suppose they don't carry the same signification," said Dacier, in the tone of a pupil to such themes. "They carry no feeling," said she. "And that is my excuse for plucking these, where they seem to spring like our town-dream of happiness. I believe they are sensible of it too; but these must do service to my invalid friend, who cannot travel. Are you ever as much interested in the woes of great ladies as of country damsels? I am not — not unless they have natural distinction. You have met Lady Dunstane?" 154 DIANA OF XHE CKOSSWAYS The question sounded artless. Dacier answered that he thought he had seen her somewhere once, and Diana shut her lips on a rising under-smile. " She is the coeur d'or of our time : the one soul I would sacrifice these flowers to." "A bit of a blue-stocking, I think I have heard said." " She might have been admitted to the Hotel Rambouillet, without being anything of a Pr^cieuse. She is the woman of the largest heart now beating." "Mr. Redworth talked of her." "As she deserved, I am sure." "Very warmly." "He would I" "He told me you were the Damon and Pythias of women." " Her one fault is an extreme humility that makes her always play second to me ; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in comparison. I can rever- ence my superiors even when tried by intimacy with them. She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know. Court her, if ever you come across her. Or have you a man's horror of women with brains?" "Am I expressing it?" said he. f "Do not breathe London or Paris here on me." She fanned the crocuses under her chin. " The early morning always has this — I wish I had a word ! — touch . . . whisper . . . gleam . . . beat of wings — I envy poets now more than ever ! — of Eden, I was going to say. Prose can paint evening and moonlight, but poets are needed to sing the dawn. That is because prose is equal to melan- choly stuff. Gladness requires the finer language. Other- wise we have it coarse — anything but a reproduction. You politicians despise the little distinctions ' twixt tweedledum and tweedledee,' I fancy." Of the poetic sort, Dacier's uncle certainly did. For himself he confessed to not having thought much on them. "But how divine is utterance!" she said. "As we to the brutes, poets are to us." He listened somewhat with the head of the hanged. A beautiful woman choosing to rhapsodize has her way, and is not subjected to the critical commentary within us. He A MIDNIGIIT BELL AST) EARLY MOENINO 155 wondered whether she had discoursed in such a fashion to his uncle. "I can read good poetry," said he. " If you would have this valley — or mountain-cleft, one should call it — described, only verse could do it for you," Diana pursued, and stopped, glanced at his face and smiled. She had spied the end of a towel peeping out of one of his pockets. " You came out for a bath ! Go back, by all means, and mount that rise of grass where you first saw me ; and down on the other side, a little to the right, you will find the very place for a bath, at a corner of, the rock — a natural fountain ; a bubbling pool in a ring of brushwood, with falling water, so tempting that I could have pardoned a push : about five feet deep. Lose no time." He begged to assure her that he would rather stroll witli her : it had been only a notion of bathing by chance when he pocketed the towel. "Dear me," she cried, "if I had been a man I should have scurried off at a signal of release, quick as a hare I once woke up in a field with my foot on its back." Dacier's eyebrows knotted a trifle over her eagerness to dismiss him : he was not used to it, but rather to be courted by women, and to condescend. " I shall not long, I 'm afraid, have the pleasure of walk- ing beside you and hearing you. I had letters at Lugano. My uncle is unwell, I hear." "Lord Dannisburgh?" The name sprang from her lips unhesitatingly. His nodded affirmative altered her face and her voice. "It is not a grave illness?" "They rather fear it." "You had the news at Lugano? " He answered the implied reproach: "I can be of no service." "But surely!" " It 's even doubtful that he would be bothered to receive me. We hold no views in common — excepting one." "Could I?" she exclaimed. "0 that I might! If he is really ill! But if it is actually serious he would per- haps have a wish ... I can nurse. I know I have the power to cheer him. You ought indeed to be in England." 156 ~ DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS Dacier said he had thought it better to wait for later reports. "I shall drive to Lugano this afternoon, and act on the information I get there. Probably it ends my holiday." " Will you do me the favour to write me word? — and especially -tell me if you think he would like to have me near him," said Diana. "And let him know that if he wants nursing or cheerful companionship, I am at any moment ready to come." The flattery of a beautiful young woman to wait on him would be very agreeable to Lord Dannisburgh, Dacier conceived. Her offer to go was possibly purely.charitable. But the prudence of her occupation of the post obscured whatever appeared admirable in her devotedness. Her choice of a man like Lord Dannisburgh for the friend to whom she could sacrifice her good name less falteringly than she gathered those field-flowers was inexplicable; and she herself a darker riddle at each step of his reading. He promised curtly to write. " I will do my best to hit a flying address." "Your Club enables me to hit a permanent one that will establish the communication," said Diana. " We shall not sleep another night at Eovio. Lady Esquart is the lightest of sleepers, and if you had a restless time, she and her husband must have been in purgatory. Besides, permit me to say, you should be with your party. The times ar^ troublous — not for holidays ! Your holiday has had a haunted look, creditably to your conscience as a politician. These Corn Law agitations ! " " Ah, but no politics here ! " said Dacier. " Politics everywhere ! — in the Courts of Faery ! They are not discord to me." " But not the last day — the last hour ! " he pleaded. "Well! only do not forget your assurance to me that you would give some thoughts to Ireland — and the cause of women. Has it slipped from your memory? " " If I see the chance of serving you, you may trust to me." She sent up an interjection on the misfortune of her not having been born a man. A MIDNIGHT BELL AND EARLY MORNING 157 It was to tim the one smart of sourness in her charm as a woman. Among the boulder-stones of the ascent to the path, he ventured to propose a little masculine assistance in a hand stretched mutely. Although there was no great need for help, her natural kindliness checked the inclination to refuse it. When their hands disjoined she found herself reddening. She cast it on the exertion. Her heart was throbbing. It might be the exertion likewise. He walked and talked much more airily along the descending pathway, as if he had suddenly become more intimately acquainted with her. She listened, trying to think of the manner in which he might be taught to serve that cause she had at heart ; and the colour deepened on her cheeks till it set fire to her underlying consciousness: blood to spirit. A tremor of alarm ran through her. His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning was refused. " They are sacred ; they were all devoted to my friend when I plucked them." He pointed to a half -open one, with the petals in dis- parting pointing to junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of the time. "I do not see it, because I will not see it," she said, and she found a personal cooling and consolemeut in the phrase. — We have this power of resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have ! — Her alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy. She fancied (for the aforesaid reason — because she chose) that it was on account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing. At any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so she told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed. He seemed somehow to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had become again. The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids 158 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS to the woman ; and which of them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was honestly not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves, with one half pitying the other, one rebuking: and all because of the incongruous comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer! Absurd indeed. We human creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly. Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did not escape him as they' walked back to the inn down the narrow street of black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler threaded on his doorstep. His novel excitement supplied the deficiency, sweeping him past minor reflections. He was, however, surprised to hear her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the breakfast-table, that he had the intention of starting for England; and further surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady's moaning over her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could not attempt to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her resolve to stay there one day longer with her maid, and explore the neighbourhood for the wild flowers in which it abounded. Lord and Lady Esquart agreed to anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves for the necessitated flight, piteously relating the story of their sufferings. My lord could have slept, but he had remained awake to comfort my lady. " True knightliness ! " Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers ; and she asked them what they had talked of during the night. " You, my dear, partly," said Lady Esquart. " For an opiate ? " "An invocation of the morning," said Dacier. Lady Esquart looked at Diana and at him. She thought it was well that her fair friend should stay. It was then settled for Diana to rejoin them the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the Maggiore. " I fear it is good-bye for me," Dacier said to her, as he was about to step into the carriage with the Esquarts. " If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be," she replied, and gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes from Lady Esquart to grace the A MIDNIGHT BELL AND EABLY MORNING 159 temporary gift with a look. The last of her he saw was a waving of her arm and a finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell in the tower. It said, to an understanding un- practised in the feminine mysteries : " I can sleep through anything." What that revealed of her state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely optical figure blocked his guessing. He was witli her friends, wlao liked her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of the perplexing woman. I " She is a riddle to the world," Lady Esquart said, " but i I know that she is good. It is the best of signs when ' women take to her and are proud to be her friend." My lord echoed his wife. She talked in this homely manner to stop any notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana's beauty and delicate situation might make her seem. " She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which is uncommon," said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics. Miss Asper incidentally among them. He denied Lady Esquart's charge of an engage- ment; the matter hung. His letters at Lugano summoned him to England in- stantly. "I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera," he said ; " and by the way, as my uncle's illness appears to be serious, the longer she is absent the better, perhaps." " It would never do," said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift immediatelj'. " We winter in Eome. She will not abandon us — I have her word for it. Next Easter we are in Paris ; and so home, I suppose. There will be no hurry before we are due at Cowes. We seem to have become con- firmed wanderers ; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last great tour." Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to Mrs. Warwick of his uncle's condition, and the several appointed halting-places of the Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named to him. Thus all things were openly treated ; all had an air of being on the surface ; the communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and 160 DIAS^A OP THE CEOSSWAYS the Hon. Percy Dacier might have been perused by all the world. None but that portion of it, sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such communications under any circum- stances, could have detected in their correspondence a spark of coming fire or that there was common warmth. She did not feel it, nor did he. The position of the two interdicted it to a couple honourably sensible of social decencies ; and who were, be it added, kept apart. The blood is the treacherous element in the story of the nobly civilized, of which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a blooming woman imagining herself restored to tran- scendent maiden ecstasies — the highest youthful poetic — had received some faint intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer. She had no wish to meet him again. Without .,telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting. ,'T3isturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided./ She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio. CHAPTER XVII "the peincess egeeia" LoNDOK, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob : over the steadiest of furnaces too. And the oceans and the continents, as you know, are per- petual and copious contributors, either to the heating apparatus or to the contents of the pot. Let grander similes be sought. This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward substance inces- santly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it off. A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling. )Weak "THE PEINCESS EGEEIA " 161 ) as we may be in our domestic cookery^' our political has beea sagaciously adjusted as yet to catcli the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their volcanic activities. That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have proof in occasional outcries over the absence of these or those par- ticular persons famous for inspiriting. It sticks and clogs. The improvizing songster is missed, the convivial essayist, the humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered rep- artees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables de- scending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monoto- nous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the ribs. Dan Merion, to give an example. That was Dan Merlon's joke with the watch- man : and he said that other thing to the Marquis of Kings- bury, when the latter asked him if he had ever won a donkey-race. And old Dan is dead, and we are the duller for it ! which leads to the question : Is genius hereditary ? And the affirmative and negative are respectively main- tained, rather against the Yes in the dispute, until a mem- ber of the audience speaks of Dan Merlon's having left a daughter reputed for a sparkling wit not much below the level of his own. Why, are you unaware that the Mrs. "Warwick of that scandal case of Warwick versus Dannis- burgh was old Dan Merlon's girl and his only child ? It is true ; for a friend had it from a man who had it straight from Mr. Braddock, of the firm of Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel, her solicitors in the action, who told him he could sit listening to her for hours, and that she was as innocent as day.; a wonderful combination of a good woman and a clever woman and a real beauty/ Only her misfortune was to have a furiously jealous husoand, and they say he went mad after hearing the verdict. Diana was talked of in the London circles. A witty woman is such salt that where she has once been tasted she must perforce be missed more than any of the absent, the dowering heavens not having yet showered her like very 11 162 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS plentifully upon us. Then it was first heard that Percy Dacier had been travelling with her. Miss Asper heard of it. Her uncle, Mr. Quintiu Manx, the millionnaire, was an acquaintance of the new Judge and titled dignitary, Sir Cramborne Wathin, and she visited Lady Wathin, at whose table the report in the journals of the Nile-boat party was mentioned. Lady Wathin's table could dispense with witty! women, and, for that matter, witty men. The intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped would have clashed. , She preferred, as hostess, the old legal anecdotes sure of their laugh, and the citations from the manufactories of fun in the Press, which were current and instantly intel- ligible to all her guests. She smiled suavely on an im- promptu pun, because her experience of the humorous appreciation of it by her guests bade her welcome the up- start. ISTothing else impromptu was acceptable. Mrs. Warwick therefore was not missed by Lady Wathin. " I have met her," she said. " I confess I am not one of the fanatics about Mrs. Warwick. She has a sort of skill in getting men to clamour. If you stoop to tickle them, they will applaud. It is a way of winning a reputation." When the ladies were separated from the gentlemen by the stream of Claret, Miss Asper heard Lady Wathin speak of Mrs. Warwick again. An illusion to Lord Dannisburgh's fit of illness in the House of Lords led to her saying that there was no doubt he had been fascinated, and that, in her opinion, Mrs. Warwick was a dangerous woman. Sir Cramborne knew something of Mr. Warwick: "Poor man ! " she added. A lady present put a question concern- ing Mrs. Warwick's beauty. "Yes," Lady Wathin said, " she has good looks to aid her. Judging from what I hear and have seen, her thirst is for notoriety. Sooner or later we shall have her making a noise, you may be certain. Yes, she has the secret of dressing well — in the French style." A simple newspaper report of the expedition of a Nile- boat party could stir the Powers to take her up and turn her on their' wheel in this manner. ,/But others of the sons and daughters of London were regretting her prolonged absence. The great and exclusive Whitmonby, who had dined once at Lady Wathin's table. "THE PRINCESS EGEEIA " 163 and vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience, lamented bitterly to Henry Wilmers that the sole woman worthy of sitting at a little Sunday evening dinner with the cream of the choicest men of the time was away wast- ing herself in that insane modern chase of the picturesque ! Pie called her a perverted C^lim^ne,,-- •' Eedworth had less to regret than the rest of her male friends, as he was receiving at intervals pleasant descrip- tive letters, besides manuscript sheets of Antonia's new piece of composition, to correct the proofs for the press, and he read them critically, he thought. He read them with a watchful eye to guard them from the critics. An- TONiA, whatever her faults as a writer, was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste. She did at least draw her inspiration from herself, and there was much to be feared in her work, if a sale was the object. Otherwise Eedworth's highly critical perusal led him flatly to admire. This was like her, and that was like her, and here and there a phrase gave him the very play of her mouth, the flash of her eyes. Could he possibly wish, or bear, to have anything altered? But she had reason to desire an ex- tended' sale of the work. Her aim, in the teeth of her in- dependent style, was at the means of independence — a feminine method of attempting to conciliate contraries ; and after despatching the last sheets to the printer, he meditated upon the several ways which might serve to as- sist her ; the main way running thus in his mind : — We have a work of genius. Genius is good for the public. What is good for the public should be recommended by the critics. It should be. How then to come at them to get it done ? As he was not a member of the honourable literary craft, and regarded its arcana altogether externally, it may be confessed of him that he deemed the Incorruptible cor- ruptible ; — not, of course, with filthy coin slid into sticky palms. Critics are human, and exceedingly, beyond the common lot, when touched ; and they are excited by mys- terious hints of loftiness in authorship ; by rumours of veiled loveliness ; whispers of a general anticipation ; and also Editors can jog them. Eedworth was rising to be a Railway King of a period soon to glitter with rails, iron in the concrete, golden in the visionary. He had already his 164 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS Court, much against his will. The powerful magnetic at- tractions of those who can help the world to fortune, was exercised by him in spite of his disgust of sycophants. He dropped words to right and left of a coming work by An- TOBTiA. And who was Antonia ? — Ah ! there hung the riddle. — An exalted personage ? — So much so that he dared not name her even in confidence to ladies ; he named the publishers. To men he said he was at liberty to speak of her only as the most beautiful woman of her time. His courtiers of both sexes were recommended to read the new story, The Princess Egbkia. Oddly, one great lady of his Court had heard a forthcom- ing work of this title spoken of by Percy Dacier, not a man to read silly fiction, unless there was meaning behind the lines : that is, rich scandal of the aristocracy, diversified by stinging epigrams to the address of discernible personages. She talked of The Pbinoess Egeria : nay, laid her finger on the identical Princess. Others followed her. Dozens were soon flying with the torch : a new work immediately to be published from the pen of the Duchess of Stars ! — And the Princess who lends her title to the book is a living portrait of the Princess of Highest Eminence, the Hope of all Civilization. — Orders for copies of The Pbincess Egekia reached the astonished publishers before the book was advertized. Speaking to editors, Eedworth complimented them with friendly intimations of the real authorship of the remark- able work appearing. He used a certain penetrative mild- ness of tone in saying that "he hoped the book would succeed : " it deserved to; it was original; but the original- ity might tell against it. All would depend upon a favour- able launching of such a book. "Mrs. Warwick? Mrs. Warwick ? " said the most influential of editors, Mr. Marcus Tonans ; " what ! that singularly handsome woman ? . . . The Dannisburgh affair ? . . . She 's Whitmonby's hero- ine. If she writes as cleverly as she talks, her work is worth trumpeting." He promised to see that it went into good hands for the review, and a prompt review — an es- sential point ; none of your long digestions of the contents. Diana's indefatigable friend had fair assurances that her book would be noticed before it dropped dead to the public "THE PRIKCESS EGEEIA" 165 appetite for novelty. He was anxious next, notwithstand- ing his admiration of the originality of the conception and the cleverness of the writing, lest the Literary Eeviews should fail "to do it justice:" he used the term; for if they wounded her, they would take the pleasure out of suc- cess ; and he had always present to him that picture of the beloved woman kneeling at the fire-grate at The Cross ways, which made, the thought of her suffering any wound lais personal anguish, so crucially sweet and saintly had her image then been stamped on him. He bethought him, in consequence, while sitting in the House of Commons, en- gaged upon the affairs of the nation, and honestly engaged, for he was a vigilant worker — that the Irish Secretary, , Charles Kainer, with whom he stood in amicable relations, had an interest, to the extent of reputed ownership, in the chief of the Literary Reviews. He saw Eainer on the benches, and marked him to speak to him. Looking for him shortly afterward, the man was gone. "Off to the Opera, if he 's not too late for the drop," a neighbour said, smiling queerly, as though he ought to know; and then Redworth recollected current stories of Eainer's fantastical devotion to the popular prima donna of the angelical voice. He hurried to the Opera and met the vomit, and heard in the crush-room how divine she had been that night. A fellow member of the House, tolerably intimate with Eainer, informed him, between frightful stomachic roulades of her final aria, of the likeliest place where Eainer might be found when the Opera was over : not at his Club, nor at his chambers: on one of the bridges — Westminster, he fancied. There was no need for Redworth to run hunting the man at so late an hour, but he was drawn on by the similarity in dissimilarity of this devotee of a woman, who could wor- ship her at a distance, and talk of her to everybody. ISTot till he beheld Eainer's tall figure cutting the bridge-parapet, with a star over his shoulder, did he reflect on the views the other might entertain of the nocturnal solicitation to see " justice done " to a lady's new book in a particular Ee- view, and the absurd outside of the request was immedi- ately smothered by the natural simplicity and pressing necessity of its inside. 166 DIAJfIA OF THE CEOSSWAYS He crossed the road and said, " Ah ? " in recognition. "Were you at the Opera this evening?" "Oh, just at the end," said Eainer, pacing forward, " It 's a fine night. Did you hear her ? " "No; too late." Eainer pressed ahead, to meditate by himself, as was his wont. Finding Eedworth beside him, he monologuized in his depths : " They '11 kill her. She puts her soul into it, gives her blood. There 's no failing of the voice. You see how it wears her. She 's doomed. Half a year's rest on Como . . . somewhere . . . she might be saved ! She won't refuse to work." " Have you spoken to her ? " said Eedworth. "Aud next to Berlin ! Vienna! A horse would be I ? I don't know her," Eainer replied. " Some of their women stand it. She 's delicately built. You can't treat a lute like a drum without destroying the instrument. We look on at a murder ! " The haggard prospect from that step of the climax checked his delivery. Eedworth knew him to be a sober man in office, a man with a head for statecraft : he had made a weighty speech in the House a couple of hours back. This Opera cantatrice, no beauty, though gentle, thrilling, winning, was his corner of romance. " Do you come here often ? " he asked. " Yes, I can't sleep." " London at night, from the bridge, looks fine. By the way ..." " It 's lonely here, that 's the advantage," said Eainer ; " I keep silver in my pocket for poor girls going to their homes, and I 'm left in peace. An hour later there 's the dawn down yonder." " By the way," Eedworth interposed, and was told that after these nights of her singing she never slept till morning. He swallowed the fact, sympathized, and resumed : "I want a small favour." " No business here, please t " " Not a bit of it. You know Mrs. Warwick. . . . You know of her. She's publishing a book. I want you to use your influence to get it noticed quickly, if you can." "THE PRINCESS EGEEIA" 167 " Warwick ? Oh, yes, a handsome woman. Ah, yes ; ,the Dannisburgh affair, yes. What did I hear! — They say she 's thick with Percy Dacier at present. Who was talking of her! Yes, old Lady Dacier. So she 's a friend of yours ? " " She 's an old friend," said Redworth, composing himself ; for the dose he had taken was not of the sweetest, and no protestations could be uttered by a man of the world to repel a charge of tattlers. " The truth is, her book is clever. I have read the proofs. She must have an income, and she won't apply to her husband, and literature should help her, if she 's fairly treated. She 's Irish by descent ; Merlon's daughter, witty as her father. It 's odd you have n't met her. The mere writing of the book is extraordinarily good. If it 's put into capable hands for review ! that 's all it requires. And full of life . . . bright dialogue . . . capital sketches. The book's a piece of literature. Only it must have competent critics ! " So he talked while Eainer ejaculated : " Warwick ? Warwick ? " in the irritating tone of dozens of others. " What did I hear of her husband ? He has a post. . . . Yes, yes. Some one said the verdict in that case knocked him over — heart disease, or something." He glanced at the dark Thames water. " Take my word for it, the groves of Academe won't compare with one of our bridges at night, if you seek philosophy. You see the London above and the London below : round us the sleepy city, and the stars in the water looking like souls of suicides. I caught a girl with a bad fit on her once. I had to lecture her ! It 's when we become parsons we find out our cousin- ship with these poor peripatetics, whose ' last philosophy ' is a jump across the parapet. The bridge at night is a bath for a public man. But choose another ; leave me mine." Eedworth took the hint. He stated the title of Mrs. Warwick's book, and imagined from the thoughtful cast of Eainer's head, that he was impressing The Peincess Egeeia on his memory. Eainer burst out, with clenched fists : " He beats her ! The fellow lives on her and beats her; strikes that woman! He drags her about to every Capital in Europe to make money for him, and the scoundrel pays her with blows." 168 DIAKA OP THE CEOSSWAYS In the course of a heavy tirade against the scoundrel, Eedworth apprehended that it was the cantatrice's hus- band. He expressed his horror and regret ; paused, and named The Princess Egeeia and a certain Critical Ee- view. Another outburst seemed to be in preparation. Nothing further was to be done for the book at that hour. So, with a blunt " Good night," he left Charles Eainer pacing, and thought on his walk home of the strange effects wrought by women unwittingly upon men (Englishmen) ; those women, or some of them, as little knowing it as the moon her traditional influence upon the tides. He thought of Percy Dacier too. In his bed he could have wished himself peregrinating a bridge. The Pkincess Egeeia appeared, with the reviews at her heels, a pack of clappers, causing her to fly over editions clean as a doe the gates and hedges — to quote Mr. Sullivan Smith, who knew not a sentence of the work save what he gathered of it from Redworth, at their chance meeting on Piccadilly pavement, and then immediately he knew enough to blow his huntsman's horn in honour of the sale. His hallali rang high. " Here 's another Irish girl to win their laurels ! 'T is one of the blazing successes. A most en- thralling work, beautifully composed. And where is she now, Mr. Eedworth, since she broke away from that hus- band of hers, that wears the clothes of the worst tailor ever begotten by a thread on a needle, as I tell every soul of 'em in my part of the country ? " " You have seen him ? " said Eedworth. " Why, sir, was n't he on show at the Court he applied to for relief and damages ? as we heard when we were watch- ing the case daily, scarce drawing our breath for fear the innocent — and one of our own blood, would be crushed. Sure, there he stood ; ay, and looking the very donkey for a woman to flip off her fingers, like the dust from my great uncle's prise of snuff ! She 's a glory to the old country. And better you than another, I 'd say, since it was n't an Irishman to have her : but what induced the dear lady to take him, is the question we 're all of us asking ! And it 's mournful to think that somehow you contrive to get the pick of us in the girls ! If ever we 're united, 't will be by a trick of circumvention of that sort, pretty sure. There's "THE PEINCESS EGERIA" 169 a turn in the market when they shut their eyes and drop to the handiest : and London 's a vortex that poor dear dull old Dublin can't compete with. I'll beg you for the ad- dress of the lady her friend, Lady Dunstane." Mr. Sullivan Smith walked with Eedworth through the park to the House of Commons, discoursing of Rails and his excellent old friend's rise to the top rung of the ladder and Beanstalk land, so elevated that one had to look up at him with watery eyes, as if one had flung a ball at the meridian sun. Arrived at famed St. Stephen's, he sent in his compliments to the noble patriot and accepted an invitation to dinner. "And mind you read The Princess Egeeia," said Eedworth. "Again and again, my friend. The book is bought." Sullivan Smith slapped his breastpocket. "There 's a bit of Erin in it." " It sprouts from Erin." "Trumpet it." "Loud as cavalry to the charge ! " Once with the title stamped on his memory, the zealous Irishman might be trusted to become an ambulant adver- tizer. Others, personal friends, adherents, courtiers of Ked- worth's, were active. Lady Pennon and Henry Wilmers, in the upper circle ; Whitmonby and Westlake, in the literary, — spread the fever for this new book. The chief interpreter of public opinion caught the way of the wind and headed the gale. Editions of the book did really run like fires in summer furze; and to such an extent that a simple literary per- formance grew to be respected in Great Britain, as repre- senting Money. 170 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS CHAPTER XVIII THE AUTHORESS The effect of a great success upon Diana, at her second literary venture, was shown in the transparent sedateness of a letter she wrote to Emma Dunstane, as much as in her immediate and complacent acceptance of the magical change of her fortunes. She spoke one thing and acted another, but did both with a lofty calm that deceived the admiring friend who clearly saw the authoress behind her mask, and feared lest she should be too confidently trusting to the powers of her pen to support an establishment. " If the public were a perfect instrument to strike on, I should be tempted to take the -wonderful success of my Pkincess at her first appearance for a proof of natural aptitude in composition, and might think myself the genius. I know it to be as little a Stradivarius as I am a Paganini. It is an eccentric machine, in tune with me for the moment, because I happen to have hit it in the ringing spot. The book is a new face appealing to a mirror of the common surface emotions ; and the kitchen rather than the dairy offers an analogy for the real value of that ' top-skim.' I have not seen what I consider good in the book once mentioned among the laudatory notices — except by your dear hand, my Emmy. Be sure I will stand on guard against the ' vapor- ous generalizations,' and other ' tricks ' you fear. Now that you are studying Latin for an occupation — how good and wise it was of Mr. Eedworth to propose it ! — 1 look upon you with awe as a classic authority and critic. I wish I had leisure to study with you. What I do is nothing iike so solid and durable. " The Princess Egeeia originally (I must have written word of it to you — I remember the evening off Palermo !) was conceived as a sketch ; by gradations she grew into a sort of semi-Scudery romance, and swelled to her present portliness. That was done by a great deal of piecing, not to say pufBng, of her frame. She would be healthier and have a chance of living longer if she were reduced by a THE AtJTHOEESS 171 reversal of the processes. But how would the judicious clippings and prickings affect our ' pensive public ' ? Now that I have furnished a house and have a fixed address, under tlie paws of creditors, I feel I am in the wizard- circle of my popularity and subscribe to its laws or waken to incubus and the desert. Have I been rash ? You do not pronounce. If I have bound myself to pipe as others please, it need not be entirely ; and I can promise you it shall not be ; but still I am sensible when I lift my ' little quill' of having forced the note of a woodland wren into the popular nightingale's — which may end in the daw's, from straining ; or worse, a toy-whistle. ".That is, in the field of literature. Otherwise, within me deep, I am not aware of any transmutation of the celes- tial into coined gold. I sound myself, and ring clear. In- cessant writing is my refuge, my solace — escape out of the personal net. I delight in it, as in my early morning walks at Lugano, when I went threading the streets and by the lake away to ' the heavenly mount,' like a dim idea worming upward in a sleepy head to bright wakefulness. " My anonymous critic, of whom I told you, is intoxi- cating with eulogy. The signature ' Apollonius ' appears to be of literary-middle indication. He marks passages ap- proved by you. I have also had a complimentary letter from Mr. Dacier. " For an instance of this delight I have in writing, so strong is it that I can read pages I have written, and tear the stuff to strips (I did yesterday), and resume, as if nothing had happened. The waves within are ready for any displacement. Tliat must be a good sign. I do not doubt of excelling ray Peincess ; and if she received compli- ments, the next may hope for more. Consider, too, the novel pleasure of earning money by the. labour we delight in. It is an answer to your question whether I am happy. Yes, as the savage islander before the ship entered the bay with the fire-water. My blood is wine, and I have the slumbers of an infant. I dream, wake, forget my dream, barely dress before the pen is galloping ; barely breakfast ; no toilette till noon. A savage in good sooth 1 You see, my Emmy, I could not house with the ' companionable person ' you hint at. The poles can never come together till the 172 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS earth is crushed. She would find my habits intolerable, and I hers contemptible, though we might both be compan- ionable persons. My dear, I could not even live with my- self. My blessed little quill, which helps me divinely to live out of myself, is and must continue to be my one com- panion. It is my mountain height, morning light, wings, cup from the springs, my horse, my goal, my lancet and replenisher, my key of communication with the highest, grandest, holiest between earth and heaven — the vital air connecting them. " In justice let me add that I have not been troubled by hearing of any of the mysterious legal claims, et caetera. I am sorry to hear bad reports of health, I wish him en- tire felicity — no step taken to bridge division ! The thought of it makes me tigrish. "A new pianist playing his own pieces (at Lady Sin- gleby's concert) has given me exquisite pleasure and set me composing songs — not to his music, which could be rendered only by sylphs moving to ' soft recorders ' in the humour of wildness, languor, bewitching caprices, giving a new sense to melody. How I wish you had been with me to hear him ! It was the most .ffiolian thing ever caught from a night-breeze by the soul of a poet. " But do not suppose me having headlong tendencies to the melting mood. (The above, by the way, is a Pole set- tled in Paris, and he is to be introduced to me at Lady Pennon's.) — What do you say to my being invited by Mr. Whitmonby to aid him in writing leading articles for the paper he is going to conduct ! ' write as you talk and it will do,' he says. I am choosing my themes. To write — of politics — as I talk, seems to me like an effort to jump away from my shadow. The black dog of consciousness declines to be shaken off. If some one commanded me to talk as I write I I suspect it would be a way of winding me up to a sharp critical pitch rapidly. " Not good news of Lord D. I have had messages. Mr. Dacier conceals his alarm. The Princess gave great grati- fication. She did me her best service there. Is it not cruel that the interdict of the censor should force me to depend for information upon such scraps as I get from a gentleman passing my habitation on his way to the House ? And he THE AUTHORESS 173 is not, he never has been, sympathetic in that direction. He sees my grief, and assumes an undertakerly air, with some notion of acting in concert, one supposes — little imagining how I revolt from that crape-hatband formalism of sorrow ! '-^ " One word of her we call our inner I. I am not drawing upon her resources for my daily needs ; not wasting her at all, I trust; certainly not walling her up, to deafen her voice. It would be to fall away from you. She bids me sign myself, my beloved, ever, ever your Tony.'V' The letter had every outward show of sinceTeness in ex- pression, and was endowed to wear that appearance by the writer's impulse to protest with so resolute a vigour as to delude herself. Lady Dunstane heard of Mr. Dacier's novel attendance at concerts. The world made a note of it; for the gentleman was notoriously without ear for music. Diana's comparison of her hours of incessant writing to her walks under the dawn at Lugano, her boast of the simi- larity of her delight in both, deluded her uncorrupted con- science to believe that she was now spiritually as free as in that fair season of the new spring in her veins. She was not an investigating physician, nor was Lady Dunstane, otherwise they would have examined the material points of her conduct — indicators of the spiritual secret always. What are the patient's acts ? The patient's mind was pro- jected too far beyond them to see the forefinger they stretched at her; and the friend's was not that of a prying doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms. Lady Dun- stane did ask herself why Tony should have incurred the burden of a costly household — a very costly: Sir Lukin had been at one of Tony's little dinners : — but her wish to meet the world on equal terms, after a long dependency, accounted for it in seeming to excuse. The guests on the occasion were Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Mr. Whit- monby, Mr. Percy Dacier, Mr. Tonans ; — " Some other woman," Sir Lukin said, and himself. He reported the cookery as matching the conversation, and that was princely ; the wines not less : an extraordinary fact to note of a woman. But to hear Whitmonby and Diana Warwick ! How he told a story, neat as a postman's knock, and she tipped it with a remark and ran to a second, drawing in 174 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWATS Lady Pennon, and then Dacier, " and me ! " cried Sir Lukin ; " she made us all toss the ball from hand to hand, and all talk up to the mark ; and none of us noticed that we all went together to tlie drawing-room, where we talked for another hour, and broke up fresher than we began," " That break between the men and the women after din- ner was Tony's aversion, and I am glad she has instituted a change," said Lady Dunstane. She heard also from Eedworth of the unexampled con- cert of the guests at Mrs. Warwick's dinner parties. He had met on one occasion the Esquarts, the Pettigrews, Mr. Percy Dacier, and a Miss Paynham. Eedworth had not a word to say of the expensive household. Whatever Mrs. Warwick did was evidently good to him. On another evening the party was composed of Lady Pennon, Lord Larrian, Miss Paynham, a clever Mrs. Wollasley, Mr. Henry Wilmers, and again Mr. Percy Dacier. When Diana came to Copsley, Lady Dunstane remarked on the recurrence of the name of Miss Paynham in the list of her guests. "And Mr. Percy Dacier's too," said Diana, smiling. "They are invited each for specific reasons. It pleases Lord Dannisburgh to hear that a way has been found to en- liven his nephew; and my little dinners are effective, I think. He wakes. Yesterday evening he capped flying jests with Mr. Sullivan Smith. But you speak of Miss Paynham." Diana lowered her voice on half a dozen sylla- bles, till the half-tones dropped into her steady look. " You approve, Emmy ? " The answer was : "I do — true or not." "Between us two, dear, I fear I ... In either case, she has been badly used. Society is big engine enough to pro- tect itself. I incline with British juries to do rough justice to the victims. She has neither father nor brother. I have had no confidences ; but it wears the look of a cowardly busi- ness. With two words in his ear, I could arm an Irishman to do some work of chastisement : — he would select the rascal's necktie for a cause of quarrel : and lords have to stand their ground as well as commoners. They measure the same number of feet when stretched their length. However, vengeance with the heavens ! though they seem THE AUTHOEESS 175 tardy. Lady Pennon has been very kind about it ; and the Esquarts invite her to Lockton. Shoulder to shoulder, the tide may be stemmed." " She would have gone under, but for you, dear Tony ! " said Emma, folding arms round her darling's neck and kissing her. "Bring her here some day." — Diana did not promise it. She had her vision of Sir Lukin in his fit of lunacy.-^ " I am too weak for London now," Emma resumed. " I should like to be useful. Is she pleasant ? " " Sprightly by nature. She has worn herself with fretting." " Then bring her to stay with me, if I cannot keep you. She will talk of you to me." " I will bring her for a couple of days," Diana said. " I am too busy to remain longer. She paints portraits to amuse herself. She ought to be pushed, wherever she is received about London, while the season is warm. One season will sufBce to establish her. She is pretty, near upon six and twenty : foolish, of course : she pays for having had a romantic head. Heavy payment, Emmy ! I drive at laws, but hers is an instance of the creatures wanting simple human kindness." "The good law v/ill come with a better civilization; but before society can be civilized it has to be debarbarized," Emma remarked, and Diana sighed over the task and the truism. - " I should have said in younger days, because it will not look plainly on our nature and try to reconcile it with our conditions. But now I see that the sin is cowardice. The more I know of the world the more clearly I perceive that its top and bottom sin is cowardice, physically and morally alike.* Lord Larrian owns to there being few heroes in an army. We roust fawn in society. What is the meaning of that dread of one example of tolerance ? my dear ! let us give it the right name. Society is the best thing we have, but it is a crazy vessel worked by a crew that formerly practised piracy, and now, in expiation, professes piety, fearful of a discovered Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves and captain. Their old habits are not quite abandoned, and their new one is used as a lash to whip the 176 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS exposed of us for a propitiation of the capricious potentate whom they worship in the place of the true God." Lady Dunstane sniffed. " I smell the leading article." Diana joined with her smile, "No, the style is rather diiferent." " Have you not got into a trick of composing in speaking, at times?" Diana confessed, " I think I have at times. Perhaps the daily writing of all kinds and the nightly talking ... I may be getting strained." "No, Tony; but longer visits in the country to me would refresh you. I miss your lighter touches. London is a school, but, you know it, not a school for comedy nor for philosophy; that is gathered on my hills, with London distantly in view, and then occasional descents on it well digested." " I wonder whether it is affecting me ! " said Diana, musing. " A metropolitan hack 1 and while thinking my- self free, thrice harnessed ; and all my fun gone. Am I really as dull as a tract, my dear ? I must be, or I should be proving the contrary instead of asking. My pitfall is to fancy I have powers equal to the first look-out of the eyes of the morning. Enough of me. We talked of Mary Paynham. If only some right good man would marry her ! " Lady Dunstane guessed at the right good man in Diana's mind. " Do you bring them together ? " Diana nodded, and then shook doleful negatives to signify no hope. "None whatever — if we mean the same person," said Lady Dunstane, bethinking her, in the spirt of wrath she felt at such a scheme being planned by Diana to snare the right good man, that instead of her own true lover Eed- worth, it might be only Percy Dacier. So filmy of mere sensations are these little ideas as they flit in converse, that she did not reflect on her friend's ignorance of Eedworth's love of her, or on the unlikely choice of one in Dacier's high station to reinstate a damsel. They did not name the person. " Passing the instance, which is cruel, I will be just to society thus far," said Diana. " I was in a boat at Eich- THE AUTHOEESS 177 mond last week, and Leander was revelling along the mud-banks, and took it into his head to swim out to me, and I was moved to take him on board. The ladies in the boat objected, for he was not only wet but very muddy. I was forced to own that their objections were reasonable. My sentimental humaneness had no argument against muslin dresses, though my dear dog's eyes appealed pathetically, and he would keep swimming after us. The analogy excuses the world for protecting itself in extreme cases ; nothing, nothing excuses its insensibility to cases which may be pleaded. You see the pirate crew turned pious — ferocious in sanctity." She added, half laughing : " I am reminded by the boat, I have unveiled my anonymous critic, and had a woeful disappointment. He wrote like a veteran ; he is not much more than a boy. I received a volume of verse, and a few lines begging my acceptance. I fancied I knew the writing, and wrote asking him whether I had not to thank him, and inviting him to call. He seems a nice lad of about two and twenty, mad for literature ; and he must have talent. Arthur Rhodes by name. I may have a chance of helping him. He was an articled clerk of Mr. Braddock's, the same who valiantly came to my rescue once. He was with us in the boat." " Bring him to me some day," said Lady Dunstane. Miss Paynham's visit to Copsley was arranged, and it turned out a failure. The poor young lady came in a flutter, thinking that the friend of Mrs. Warwick would expect her to discourse cleverly. She attempted it, to Diana's amazement. Lady Dunstane's opposingly corre- sponding stillness provoked Miss Paynham to expatiate, for she had sprightliness and some mental reserves of the common order. Clearly, Lady Dunstane mused while listening amiably, Tony never could have designed this gabbler for the mate of Thomas Eedworth ! Percy Dacier seemed to her the more likely one, in that light, and she thought so still, after Sir Lukin had intro- duced him at Copsley for a couple of days of the hunting season. Tony's manner with him suggested it ; she had a dash of leadership. They were not intimate in look or tongue. But Percy Dacier also was too good for Miss Paynham, 12 178 DIAITA OF THE CKOSSWAYS if that was Tony's plan for him, Lady Dunstane thought, with the relentlessness of an invalid and recluse's distaste. An aspect of penitence she had not demanded, but the silly gabbler under a stigma she could not pardon. ^ Her opinion of Miss Paynham was diffused in her silence. -~ Speaking of Mr. Dacier, she remarked, " As you say of him, Tony, he can brighten, and when you give him a chance he is entertaining. He has fine gifts. If I were a member of his family I should beat about for a match for him. He strikes me as one of the young men who would do better married." " He is doing very well, but the wonder is that he does n't marry," said Diana. "He ought to be engaged. Lady Esquart told me that he was. A Miss Asper — great heiress; and the Daciers want money. However, there it is." Not many weeks later Diana could not have spoken of Mr. Percy Dacier with this air of indifference without corruption of her inward guide. CHAPTER XIX A DEIVE IK" SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT The fatal time to come for her was in the Summer of that year. Emma had written her a letter of unwonted bright spirits, contrasting strangely with an inexplicable oppres- sion of her own that led her to imagine her recent placid life the pause before thunder, and to share the mood of her solitary friend she flew to Copsley, finding Sir Lukiu absent, as usual. They drove out immediately after break- fast, on one of those high mornings of the bared bosom of June when distances are given to our eyes, and a soft air fondles leaf and grassblade, and beauty and peace are over- head, reflected, if we will. Eain had fallen in the night. Here and there hung a milkwbite cloud with folded sail. SXJNLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT DEIVES 179 The South-west left it in its bay of blue, and breathed below. At moments the fresh scent of herb and mould swung richly in warmth. The young beech-leaves glittered, pools of rain-water made the roadways laugh, the grass- banks under hedges rolled their interwoven weeds in cascades of many-shaded green to right and left of the pair of dappled ponies, and a squirrel crossed ahead, a lark went up a little way to ease his heart, closing his wings when the burst was over, startled black-birds, darting with a clamour like a broken cockcrow, looped the wayside woods from hazel to oak-scrub ; short flights, quick spirts every- where, steady sunshine above. Diana held the reins. The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers to the general officer. Lady Dun- fltane's ponies were a present from Eedworth, who always chose the pick of the land for his gifts. They joyed in their trot, and were the very love-birds of the breed for their pleasure of going together, so like that Diana called them the Dromios. Through an old gravel-cutting a gate- way led to the turf of the down, springy turf bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the South-west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds, promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer be- yond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of the service-tree or the white-beam spotted the semicircle of swelling green Down black and silver. The sun in the valley sharpened his beams on squares of buttercups, and made a pond a diamond. " You see, Tony," Emma said, for a comment on the scene, " I could envy Italy for having you, more than you for being in Italy." " Feature and colour ! " said Diana. " You have them here, and on a scale that one can embrace. I should like to build a hut on this point, and wait for such a day to return. It brings me to life." She lifted her eyelids on her friend's worn sweet face, and knowing her this friend •up to death, past it in her hopes, she said bravely, " It is 180 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS the Emma of days and scenes to me ! It helps me to for- get myself, as I do when I think of you, dearest ; but the subject has latterly been haunting me, I don't know why, and ominously, as if my nature were about to horrify my souj. But I am not sentimentalizing, you are really this da;y and scene in my heart." , Emma smiled Confidingly. She spoke her reflection : " The heart must be troubled a little to have the thought. The flower I gather here tells me that we may be hagpy iji privation and su^ering if simply" we can ac(^pt tegaity. I won't say expel the passions, but* ke'ep passion sober, a trotter in harness.''/' Diana caressed uie ponies' heads with the droop of her whip : " I don't think I know him ! " she said. Between sincerity and a suspicion so cloaked and dull that she did not feel it to be the opposite of candour, she fancied she was passionless because she could accept the visible beauty, which was Emma's prescription and test ; and she forced herself to make much of it, cling to it, devour it ; with envy of Emma's contemplative happiness, through whose grave mind she tried to get to the peace in it, imagining that she succeeded. The cloaked and dull suspicion weighed within her nevertheless. She took it for a mania to speculate on herself. There are states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of confounding it by the look direct and the downright word. Yet her nature compelled her inwardly to phrase the sentence : " Emma is a wife ! " The character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the exclamation pursued. They drove through the gorse into wild land of heath and flowering hawthorn, and along by tracts of yew and juniper to another point, jutting on a furzy sand-mound, rich with the mild splendour of English scenery, which Emma stamped on her friend's mind by saying : "A cripple has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at her doors." They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they had enjoyed ; and just then, as the head in the wood wound under great beeches, they beheld a SUNLIGHT ANB MOONLIGHT DBIVES 181 London hat. The hat was plucked from its head. A clear- faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana. " Mr. Rhodes ! " she said, not discouragingly. She was petitioned to excuse him ; he thought she would wish to hear the news in town last night as early as pos- sible ; he hesitated and murmured it. Diana turned to Emma : " Lord Dannisburgh ! " — her paleness told the rest. Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the dis- tance from town, and had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow the pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a tea-breakfast, as he preferred walking on tea, he said. " I took the liberty to call at Mrs. Warwick's house," he informed her ; " the footman said she was at Copsley. I found it on the map — I knew the direction — and started about two in the morning. I wanted a walk." It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched whom beautiful women are constantly enlisting. There was no concealment of it, though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by descanting on the raptures of a walk out of London in the jonngesja light of day, and on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the woods, more sustain- ing, closer with nature than her compulsory feeding on the cream of things. " You are not fatigued ? " she inquired, hoping for that confession at least ; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back without any fatigue at all. He had a sweeter reward for his pains ; and if the busi- ness of the chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the honour to con- duct Mrs. Warwick to town. No imagined happiness, even in the heart of a young man of two and twenty, could have matched it. He was by her side, hearing and seeing her, not less than four hours. To add to his happiness. Lady Dunstane said she would be glad to welcome him again. She thought him a pleasant specimen of the self-vowed squire. 182 filANA 01" THE OEOSSWATS Diana was sure tliat there would be a communication for her of some sort at her house in London ; perhaps a mes- sage of farewell from the dying lord, now dead. Mr. Ehodes had only the news of the evening journals,, to the effect that Lord Dannisburgh had expired at his residence, the Priory, Hallowmere, in Hampshire. A message of fare- well from him, she hoped for : knowing him as she did, it seemed a certainty ; and she hungered for that last gleam of life in her friend. She had no anticipation of the burden of the message awaiting her. A consultation as to the despatching of the message, had takeU place among the members of Lord Dannisburgh's family present at his death. Percy Dacier was one of them, and he settled the disputed point, after some time had been spent in persuading his father to take the plain view of obligation in the matter, and in opposing the dowager countess, his grandmother, by stating that he had already sent a special messenger to London. Lord Dannisburgh on his death-bed had expressed a, wish that Mrs. Warwick Would sit with him for an hour one night before the nails were knocked in his coffin. He spoke of it twice, putting it the second time to Percy as a formal request to be made to her, and Percy had promised him that Mrs. Warwick should have the message. He had done his best to keep his pledge, aware of the disrelish of the whole family for the lady's name, to say nothing of her presence. " She won't come," said the e;irl. " She '11 come," said old Lady Dacier. *' If the woman respects herself she '11 hold off it," the earl insisted because of his desire that way. He signified in mutterings that the thing was improper and absurd, a piece of sentiment, sickly senility, unlike Lord Dannisburgh. Also that Percy had been guilty of excessive folly. To which Lady Dacier nodded her assent, remarking: " The woman is on her mettle. Prom what I 've heard of her, she 's not a woman to stick at trifles. She '11 take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she '11 come." They joined in abusing Percy, who had driven away to another part of the country. Lord Creedmore, the heir of the house, was absent, hunting in America, or he might temporarily have been taken into favour by contrast. SUNLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT DRIVES 183 Ultimately they agreed that the woman must be allowed to enter the house, but could not be received. The earl was a widower ; his mother managed the family, and being hard to convince, she customarily carried her point, save when it involved Percy's freedom of action.' She/ was one of the veterans of her sex that age to toughness,; and the "hyster- ical fuss " she apprehended in the visit of this woman to Lord Dannisburgh's death-bed and body, did not alarm her. For the sake of the household she determined to remain, shut up in her room. Before night the house was empty of any members of the family excepting old Lady Dacier and the outstretched figure on the bed. Dacier fled to escape the hearing of the numberless ejaculations re-awakened in the family by his uncle's extra- ordinary dying request. They were an outrage to the lady, of whom he could now speak as a privileged champion ; and , the request itself had an air of proving her stainless, a white soul and efficacious advocate at the celestial gates (reading the mind of the dying man). So he thought at one moment : he had thought so when charged with the message to her; had even thought it a natural wish that she should look once on the face she would see no more, and say farewell to it, considering that in life it could not be requested. But the susceptibility to sentimental emotion beside a death-bed, with a dying man's voice in the ear, requires fortification if it is to be maintained ; and the review of his uncle's character did not tend to make this very singular request a proof that the lady's innocence was honoured in it. Hi.s epicurean uncle had no profound esteem for the kind of innocence. He had always talked of Mrs. Warwick with warm respect for her : Dacier knew that he had bequeathed her a sum of money. The inferences were either way. Lord Dannisburgh never spoke evilly of any woman, and he was perhaps bound to indemnify her materially as well as he. could for what she had suffered. — On the other hand, how easy it was to be the dupe of a woman so handsome and clever. — Unlikely too that his uncle would consent to sit at the Platonic banquet with her. — Judging by himself, Dacier deemed it possible for man. He was not quick to kindle, and had lately seen much of her, had found her a Lady Egeria, helpful in counsel, prompting, inspiriting, 184 DIANA 0¥ THE CEOSSWATS reviving as well-waters, and as temperately cool: not one sign of native slipperiness. Nor did she stir the mud in him upon which proud man is built. The shadow of the scandal had checked a few shifty sensations rising now and then of their own accord, and had laid them, with the lady's benign connivance. This was good proof in her favour, seeing that she must have perceived of late the besetting thirst he had for her company ; and alone or in the medley equally. To see her, hear, exchange ideas with her ; and to talk of new books, try to listen to music at the opera and at concerts, and admire her playing of hostess, were novel pleasures, giving him fresh notions of life, and strengthen- ing rather than disturbing the course of his life's business. At any rate, she was capable of friendship. Why not resolutely believe that she had been his uncle's true and simple friend! He adopted the resolution, thanking her for one recognized fact : — he hated marriage, and would by this time have been in the yoke, but for the agreeable deviation of his path to her society. Since his visit to Copsley, moreover. Lady Dunstane's idolizing of her friend had influenced him. Reflecting on it, he recovered from the shock which his uncle's request had caused. Certain positive calculations were running side by side with the speculations in vapour. His messenger would reach her house at about four of the afternoon. If then at home, would she decide to start immediately ? — Would she come ? That was a question he did not delay to answer. Would she defer the visit ? Death replied to that. She would not delay it. She would be sure to come at once. And what of the welcome she would meet ? Leaving the station in London at six in the evening, she might arrive at the Priory, all impediments counted, between ten and eleven at night. Thence, coldly greeted, or not greeted, to the chamber of death. A pitiable and cruel reception for a woman upon such a mission ! His mingled calculations and meditations reached that exclamatory terminus in feeling, and settled on the picture of Diana, about as clear as light to blinking eyes, but enough for him to realize her being there and alone, woefully alone. SUNLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT DRIVES 185 The supposition of an absolute loneliness was most possible. He bad intended to drive back the next day, when the do- mestic storm would be over, and take the chances of her coming. It seemed now a piece of duty to return at night, a traverse of twenty rough up and down miles from Itchen- ford to the heathland rolling on the chalk wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of his bost were stopped. Dacier sat in an open carriage, facing a slip of bright moon. Poetical impressions, emotions, any stirrings of his mind by the sensational stamp on it, were new to him, and while he swam in them, both lulled and pricked by his novel accessi- bility to nature's lyrical touch, he asked himself whether, if he were near the throes of death, the thought of having Diana Warwick to sit beside his vacant semblance for an hour at night would be comforting. And why had his uncle specified an hour of the night ? It was a sentiment, like the request : curious in a man so little sentimental. Yonder crescent running the shadowy round of the hoop roused comparisons. Would one really wish to have her beside one in death ? In life — ah ! But suppose her denied to us in life. Then the desire for her companionship appears pass- ingly comprehensible. Enter into the sentiment, you see that the hour of darkness is naturally chosen. And would even a grand old Pagan crave the presence beside his dead body for an hour of the night of a woman he did not esteem ? Dacier answered no. The negative was not echoed in his mind. He repeated it, and to the same deadness. He became aware that he had spoken for himself, and he had a fit of sourness. Por who can say he is not a fool before he has been tried by a woman ! Dacier's wretched tendency under vexation to conceive grotesque analogies, anti-poetic, not to say cockney similes, which had slightly chilled Diana at Eovio, set him looking at yonder crescent with the hoop, as at the shape of a white cat climbing a wheel. Men of the northern blood will sometimes lend their assent to poetical images, even to those that do not stun the mind like blud- geons and imperatively, by much repetition, command their assent ; and it is for a solid exchange and interest in usury with soft poetical creatures when they are so condescending ; but they are seized by the grotesque. In spite of efforts to 186 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWATS efface or supplant it, he saw the white cat, nothing else, even, to thinking that she had jumped cleverly to catch the wheel. He was a true descendant of practical hard-grained fighting ^Northerners, of gnarled dwarf imaginations, chivalrous though they were, and heroes to have serviceable and valiant gentlemen for issue. Without at all tracing back to its origin his detestable image of the white cat on the dead circle, he kicked at the links between his uncle and Diana Warwick, whatever they had been ; particularly at the present revival of them. Old Lady Dacier's blunt speech, and his father's fixed opinion, hissed in his head. They were ignorant of his autumnal visit to the Italian Lakes, after the winter's Nile-boat expedition ; and also of the degree of his recent intimacy with Mrs. Warwick ; or else, as he knew, he would have heard more hissing things. Her patronage of Miss Paynliam exposed her to attacks where she was deemed vulnerable ; Lady Daeier muttered old saws as to the flocking of birds ; he did not accurately ■ understand it, thought it indiscreet, at best. But in re- gard to his experience, he could tell himself that a woman more guileless of luring never drew breath. On the con- trary, candour said it had always been he who had schemed and pressed for the meeting. He was at liberty to do it, not being bound in honour elsewhere. Besides, despite his acknowledgment of her beauty, Mrs. Warwick was not quite his ideal of the perfectly beautiful woman. Constance Asper came nearer to it. He had the English taste for red and white, and for, cold outlines: he secretly admired a statuesque demeanour with a statue's eyes. The national ! approbation of a reserved haughtiness in woman, a tempered ! disdain in her slightly lifted small upperlip and drooped eye- lids, was shared by him ; and Constance Asper, if not exactly aristocratic by birth, stood well for that aristocratic insular ' type, which seems to promise the husband of it a casket of { all the trusty virtues, as well as the security of frigidity in * the casket. Such was Dacier's native taste ; consequently the attractions of Diana Warwick for him were, he thought, chiefly mental, those of a Lady Egeria. She might or might not be good, in the vulgar sense. She was an agreeable woman, an amusing companion, very suggestive, inciting, animating ; and her past history must be left as her own- DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH 187 Did it matter to him ? What he saw was bright, a silver crescent on the side of the shadowy ring. Were it a question of marrying her ! — That was out of the possibili- ties. He remembered, moreover, having heard from a man, who professed to know, that Mrs. Warwick had started in married life by treating her husband cavalierly to an intoler- able degree; "Such as no Englishman could stand," the portly old informant thundered, describing it and her in racy vernacular. She might be a devil of a wife. She was a pleasant friend; just the soft bit sweeter than male friends which gave the flavour of sex without the artful seductions. He required them strong to move him. He looked at last on the green walls of the Priory, scarcely supposing a fair watcher to be within ; for the con- trasting pale colours of dawn had ceased to quicken the brilliancy of the crescent, and summer daylight drowned it to fainter than a silver coin in water. It lay dispieced like a pulled rag. Eastward, over Surrey, stood the full rose of morning. The Priory clock struck four. When the summons of the bell had gained him admittance, and he heard that Mrs. Warwick had come in the night, he looked back through the doorway at the rosy colour, and congratulated himself to think that her hour of watching was at an end. A sleepy footman was his informant. Women were in my lord's dressing-room, he said. Up- stairs, at the death-chamber, Dacier paused. No sound came to him. He hurried to his own room, paced about, and returned. Expecting to see no one but the dead, he turned the handle, and the two circles of a shaded lamp, on ceiling and on table, met his gaze. CHAPTER XX Diana's night-watch in the chambbk of death He stepped into the room, and thrilled to hear the quiet voice beside the bed : " Who is it ? " Apologies and excuses were on his tongue. The vibration of those grave tones checked them. 188 DIASTA OP THE CEOSSWAYS " It is you," she said. She sat in shadow, her hands joined on her lap. An unopened book was under the lamp. He spoke in an underbreath : " I have just come. I was not sure I should find you here. Pardon." " There is a chair." He murmured thanks and entered into the stillness, observing her. " You have been watching. , . . You must be tired." "No." " An hour was asked, only one." " I could not leave him." " Watchers are at hand to relieve you." " It is better for him to have me." The chord of her voice told him of the gulfs she had sunk in during the night. The thought of her endurance became a burden. He let fall his breath for patience, and tapped the floor with his foot. He feared to discompose her by speaking. The silence grew more fearful, as the very speech of Death between them. " You came. I thought it right to let you know instantly. I hoped you would come to-morrow." "I could not delay." " You have been sitting alone here since eleven ! " " I have not found it long." " You must want some refreshment . . . tea ? " " I need nothing." " It can be made ready in a few minutes." " I could not eat or drink." He tried to brush away the impression of the tomb in the heavily-curtained chamber by thinking of the summer-morn outside ; he spoke of it, the rosy sky, the dewy grass, the pip- ing birds. She listened, as one hearing of a quitted sphere. Their breathing in common was just heard if either drew a deeper breath. At moments his eyes wandered and shut. Alternately in his mind Death had vaster meanings and doubtfuUer; Life cowered under the shadow or outshone it. He glanced from her to the figure in the bed. and >ib» seemed swallowed. DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH 189 He said : " It is time for you to have rest. You know your room. I will stay till the servants are up." She replied : " No, let this night with him be mine." " I am not intruding ?" . . . " If you wish to remain "... No traces of weeping were on her face. The lamp-shade revealed it colourless, and lustreless her eyes. She was robed in black. She held her hands clasped. " You have not suffered ? " " Oh, no." She said it without sighing : nor was her speech mournful, only brief. " You have seen death before ? " " I sat by my father four nights. I was a girl then. I cried till I had no more tears." He felt a burning pressure behind his eyeballs. "Death is natural," he said. " It is natural to the aged. When they die honoured . . ." She looked where the dead man lay. " To sit beside the young, cut off from their dear opening life ! . . ." A little shudder swept over her. " Oh ! that ! " " You were very good to come. We must all thank you for fulfilling his wish." " He knew it would be my wish." Her hands pressed together. " He lies peacefully ! " "1 have raised the lamp on him, and wondered each time. So changeless he lies. But so like a sleep that will wake. We never see peace but in the features of the dead. Will you look ? They are beautiful. They have a heavenly sweetness." The desire to look was evidently recurrent with her. Dacier rose. Their eyes fell together on the dead man, as thoughtfully as Death allows to the creatures of sensation. " And after ? " he said in low tones. "I trust to my Maker," she replied. "Do you see a change since he breathed his last ? " " Not any." " You were with him ? " " Not in the room. Two minutes later." 190 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAY8 " Who ? . . ." "My father. His niece, Lady Cathairn." " If our lives are lengthened we outlive most of those we would have to close our eyes. He had a dear sister." " She died some years back." " I helped to comfort him for that loss." " He told me you did." The lamp was replaced on the table. " For a moment, when I withdraw the light from him, I feel sadness. As if the light we lend to anything were of value to him now ! " She bowed her head deeply. Dacier left her meditation undisturbed. The birds on the walls outside were audible, , tweeting, chirping. He went to the window-curtains and tried the shutter- bars. It seemed to him that daylight would be cheerfuUer for her. He had a thirst to behold her standing bathed in daylight. " Shall I open them ? " he asked her. " I would rather the lamp," she said. They sat silently until she drew her watch from her girdle. " My train starts at half-past six. It is a walk of thirty-five minutes to the station. I did it last night in that time." " You walked here in the dark alone ? " " There was no fly to be had. The station-master sent one of his porters with me. We had a talk on the road. I like those men." Dacier read the hour by the mantelpiece clock. ' they cover our pitfalls. I am open to be carried on a tide of unreasonableness when the coward cries out. But I can say, dear, that after one rescue, a similar temptation is unlikely to master me. I do not subscribe to the world's decrees for love of the monster, though I am beginning to understand the dues of alle- giance. We have ceased to write letters. You may have faith in me." -^ " I have, with my whole soul," said Emma. — So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions. The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them. They were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of women to scorn for ven- turing on them, and they were not a little hostile in con- sequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener that appeared to score the giant bxilk of their intolerant enemy, who holds the day, but not the morrow. Us too he holds for the day, to punish us if we have tem- poral cravings. He scatters his gifts to the abject; toss- ing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit. But the life of the spirit is beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave nought of him. Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each the rebel of their earlier and less experienced years, each a member of the malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relish- ing it determinedly, not without gratification. Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland. They summoned young Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new scenes. Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment; and Eed- worth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently bought, rather MATTER POK STTBSEQTJENT EXPLOSION 261 vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid was transmitting. The pair of rebels, vexed by his treat- ment of the respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked and worried the man aston- ishingly. He submitted to it like the placable giant. Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in the stability of which he trusted. Why not'/ We must accept the world as it is, try to improve it by degrees. — Not so : humanity will not wait for you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enor- mous edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures. "But you may really say that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency," avowed Diana. "It's the tangle we are in." "It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being comfortable? " "I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours." "Money is of course a rough test of virtue," said Ked- worth. "We have no other general test." Money! The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on sunny sea, with an especial disdain. And name us your sort of virtue. There is more virtue in poverty. He denied that. Inflexibly British, he de- clared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary virtues, deserving of their reward. The reward a superior wealth and its fruits? Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness envy both! He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante insur- gency fostering it. However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his view of the Law's persecution of women ; their pertinacious harpings on the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact, as they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to silence them, and forgave him. Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana. She had a household to support in London, and she was not working; she could not touch The Cantateicb while Emma was near. Possibly, she again ejaculated, the Eedworths of the world were right: the 262' DIANA or THE CROSSWAYS fruitful labours were with the mattock and hoe, or the mind directing them.. It was a crushing invasion of mate- rialism, so she proposed a sail to the coast of Prance, and thither they flew, touching Cherbourg, Alderney, Sark, Guernsey', and sighting the low Brittany rocks. Memo- rable days to Arthur Ehodes. He saw perpetually the one golden centre in new scenes. He heard her voice, he treasured her sayings ; her gestures, her play of lip and eyelid, her lift of head, lightest movements, were imprinted oh him, surely as the heavens are mirrored in the quiet seas,' firmly and richly as earth answers to the sprinkled grain. For he was blissfully athirst, untroubled by a hope. She gave him more than she knew of: a present that kept its beating heart into the future; a height of sky, a beliet in nobility, permanent through manhood down to age. She was his foam-born Goddess of those leaping waters; difEerently hued, crescented, a different influence. He- had a happy week, and it charmed Diana to hear him tell her so. In spite of Eedworth, she had faith in the fruit-bearing powers of a time of simple hap- piness, and shared the youth's in reflecting it. Only the hajpiness must be simple, that of the glass to the lovely face : no straining of arms to retain , no heaving of the bosom in vacancy. His poverty and capacity for pure enjoyment led her to think of him almost clingingly when hard news reached her from the quaint old City of London, which despises poverty and authorcraft and all mean adventurers, and bows to the lordly merchant, the mighty financier, Eed- worth's incarnation of the virtues. Happy days on board the yacht Clarissa 1 Diana had to recall them with effort. They who sow their money for a promising high percentage have built their habitations on the sides of the most erup- tive mountain in Europe. iEtna supplies more certain harvests, wrecks • fewer vineyards and peaceful dwellings. The greed of gain is our volcano. Her wonder leapt up at the slight indueenient she had received to embark her money in thiS' Company: a South-American mine, collapsed almost within hearing of the trumpets of prospectus, after two punctual payments of the half-yearly interest. A Mrs. "Ferdinand Cherson, an elder sister of the pretty Mrs. MATTEE FOK SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION 263 Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of the cost of things one afternoon at Lady Singleby's garden-party, and spoken of the City as the place to help to swell an income, if only you have an acquaintance with some of the chief City men. The great mine was named, and the rush for allot- ments. She knew a couple of the Directors. They yowed to her that ten per cent, was a trifle; the fortune to be expected out of the mine was already clearly estimable at forties and fifties. For their part they anticipated cent, per cent. Mrs. Cherson said she wanted money, and had therefore invested in the mine. It seemed so consequent, the cost of things being enormous ! She and her sister Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned husbands who did their bid- ding, because of their having the brains, it might be under- stood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic ; and taking the City's contempt for authorcraft and the intan- gible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase. She remembered her satisfaction at the allot- ment; the golden castle shot up from this fountain mine. She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some English with smaller sums. "I am now a miner," she had ex- claimed, between dismay at her audacity and the pride of it. Why had she not consi^lted Redworth? He would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its first intoxi- cating effervescence. She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women who have plunged upon the cost of things, wanted money. She naturally went to the mine. Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she could not; shame was a barrier. Could she tell him that the prattle of a woman, spendthrift as Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money? Latterly the reports of Mrs. Fryar- Gunnett were not of the flavour to make association of their names agreeable to his hearing. She had to sit flown in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of her pen. Material 264 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from spec- ulative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and silence. Diana's perusal of the incomplete Cantatkicb was done ■with the cold critical eye interpreting for the public. She was forced to write on nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter. It propelled her. No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best, convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it should be at least a victory in style. A fit of angry cyni- cism now and then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote, condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work. Her mood was bad. In addition, she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long. How could she expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the topics? He made no other allu- sion. They were soon on amicable terms, at the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised. But Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine bosom. He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest of survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world. He was wounded ; he said as much. It came to this : admit- ting that he had no claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred. The happier was un- mentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him. He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others ; her preference of one was past his toler- ance. She told him that since leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him. He smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except the formal one of invitation. "Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?" cried Diana. "Here is a friend who has a crav- ing for you, and I talk sense to him. I have written to none of my set since I last left London." She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue. She liked him, abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling sentences ran until Westlake be- MATTER POK SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION 265 trayed an inflammable composition, and had to be put out, and smoked sullenly. Her resources were tried in restor- ing him to reason. The months of absence from London appeared to have transformed her world. Tonans was moderate. The great editor rebuked her for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it discrowned her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her service less to him. Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him stale. " How do you get to the secrets ? " she asked. "By sticking to the centre of them," he said. " But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet? " " Because I will have them at any price, and that is known." She hinted at the peccant City Company. "I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway," said he; "and so far it was a public service. There 's no checking of maniacs." She took her whipping within and without. " On an- other occasion I shall apply to you, Mr. Tonans." " Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me," he rejoined ; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days. In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself, with Kedworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit : devoting herself, as Arthur Ehodes did, purely to literature. It became almost a decision. Percy she had still neither written, to nor heard from, and she dared not hope to meet him. 1 She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it would be peace, if in desolation. { Now that she had confessed and given her pledge toTEmma, she had so far broken with him as to render the holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational acceptance of the end between them. She thanked him for it; an act whereby she was instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him haunted her. Coward, take up your burden for armour! 266 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS she called to her poor dungeoned gelf wailing to have com- mon nourishment. She knew how prodigiously it waxed on crumbs ; nay, on the imagination of small morsels. By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth de- prived of air and light. That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper than any imposed by pres- ent conditions. She was then a revolutionary to reach to the breath of day. She had now to be only not a coward, and she could breathe as others did. " Women who sap the moral laws pull down the pillars of the temple on their sex," Emma had said. Diana perceived something of her personal debt to civilization. Her struggles passed into the doomed Cantateiob occupying days and nights under pressure for immediate payment ; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground that he was he solely by virtue of being she. He had got a trick of singing operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality. Exquisitely trilled, after Tellio's manner, " The tradesmen all beseech ye, The landlord, cook and maid, Complete The Cantatrice, That they may soon be paid," provoked her to laughter in pathos. He approached, pos- turing himself operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to Madame Sybille, the cook. Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers' private concerts, Diana's lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar had assumed. She had to compose her countenance to talk to him ; but the moment of song was the trial.-' Lady Singleby sat beside her, and remarked : " You have always fun going on in you ! " She partook of the general impres- sion that Diana Wpwick was too humorous to nurse a downright passion. •' Before leaving, ^e engaged Diana to her annual garden- party of the closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not unobserved. Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them would have been gathered. MATTEE I'OE SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION 267 He walked in full view across the lawn to her, and they presented mask to mask. , . "The beauty of the day tempts you at 'last, MrS; War- wick." . , , " I have been finishing a piece of work^" ■ . Lovely weather, beautiful dresses : agreed. Diana wore a yellow robe with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues ; for the first time, he noticed her dress ! Lovely women ? Dacier hesitated. One he saw. But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett ? And who steps beside her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays within her bonnet ? Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane ? and beholding none but his charmer ! Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to woo Diana to a stroll. She could not restrain her feet ; she was out of the ring of her courtiers for the moment. He had seized his opportunity. " It is nearly a year ! " he said. "I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best." "Unaltered?" " A year must leave its marks." « Tony ! » ' • ' " " You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven Inonths dead. Let her rest. Those are the conditions." " Accepted, if I may see her." " Honestly accepted ? " " Imposed fatally, I have to own. I have felt with you : you are the wiser. But, admitting that, surely we can meet. I may see you ? " " My house has not been shut." " I respected the house. I distrusted myself." " What restores your confidence ? " " The strength I draw from you." One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as had passed in quietness. Diana was met and captured. But those last words of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm faith in her- self. Xoblest of lovers ! she thought, and brooded on the little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect truthfulness. 268 DIAKA OP THE CKOSSWATS The world had watched them. It pronounced tliem dis- creet if culpable; probably cold to the passion both. Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt, and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech. She was given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers. He in the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his ambition ; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty. An astute world; right in the main, owing to per- ceptions based upon brute nature; utterly astray in par- ticulars, for the reason that it takes no count of the soul of man or woman. Hence its glee at a catastrophe ; its poor stock of mercy. And when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the honour of the profession, must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet revealed of a serpent sex. Save for a word or two, the watchman might have over- heard and trumpeted his report of their interview at Diana's house. After the first pained breathing, when they found themselves alone in that room where they had plighted their fortunes, they talked allusively to define the terms imposed on them by Eeason. The thwarted step was un- mentioned; it was a past madness. But Wisdom being recognized, they could meet. It would be hard if that were denied! They talked very little of their position; both understood the mutual acceptance of it ; and now that he had seen her and was again under the spell, Dacier's rational mind, together with his delight in her presence, compelled him honourably to bow to the terms. Only, as these were severe upon lovers, the innocence of their meetings de- manded indemnification in frequency. " Come whenever you think I can be useful," said Diana. They pressed hands at parting, firmly and briefly, not for the ordinary dactylology of lovers, but in sign of the treaty of amity. She soon learnt that she had tied herself to her costly household. THE SUBJECT OF A POETBAIT 269 CHAPTEE XXVIII DIALOGUE BOUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OF THE TASK FOR DIANA An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor a goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the woman's faculties past natural- ness. She must never expose her feelings to her lover; she must make her counsel weighty ; otherwise she is little his nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will say. She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal of artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring. But feelings that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting the fine jet of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through his ears to think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by a creature super-feminine. She must make her counsel so weighty in poignant praises as to repress impulses that would rouse her own ; and her betray- ing impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after she had given Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house. Only as his true Egeria could she receive him. She was therefore grateful, she thanked and venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the word of love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen his moral energies and inspirit him. His chivalrous accept- ance of the conditions of their renewed intimacy was a radi- ant knightliness to Diana, elevating her with a living image for worship : — he so near once to being the absolute lord of her destinies ! How to reward him, was her sole danger- ous thought. She prayed and strove that she might give hira of her best, to practically help him ; and she had reason to suppose she could do it, from the visible effect of her phrases. He glistened in repeating them ; he had fallen into the habit; before witnesses too; in the presence of Miss Paynham, who had taken earnestly to the art of paint- ing, and obtained her dear Mrs. Warwick's promise of a few sittings for the sketch of a portrait, near the close of 270 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS the season. " A very daring thing to attempt," Miss Payn- ham said, when he was comparing her first outlines and the beautiful breathing features. " Even if one gets the face, the lips will seem speechless, to those who know her." " If they have no recollection," said Dacier. " I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of speaking." " Put it into the eyes." He looked at the eyes. She looked at the mouth. " But it is the mouth, more than the eyes." He looked at the face. " Where there is character, yoij have only to study it to be sure of a likeness." "That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr, Dacier." "Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art." " Still I feel it could be done. See — now — that I " Diana's lips had opened to say : " Confess me a model model : I am dissected while I sit for portrayal. I must be for a moment like the frog of the two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth for both of them. I am not quite inanimate." " Irish countrymen," said Dacier. "The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as you please." Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate purpose. Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them together. She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them, having forgotten this or that. They were conversing of general matters with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or discreetness ; though she was con- vinced of their inclinations, and expected love some day to be leaping up. Diana noticed that she had no reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Eedworth present. These two had become very friendly, according to her hopes ; and Miss Paynham was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Eedworth and win his approval. THE SUBJECT OF A POETEAIT 271 " Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Eedworth?" He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was difficult to catch. He did not gaze intently. Mr. Eedworth was the genius of friendship, " the friend of women," Mrs. Warwick had said of him. Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself. The portrait was his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famovis Beauty. So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an amar teurish hand. Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers, Arthur Ehodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful sitter re- quired beguiling, and there was a certainty of finding her at home. On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group. Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics, as nowhere else in Britain ; all vowed it subsequently ; for to the remembrance it seemed magical. Not a breath of scandal, and yet the liveliest flow. Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn, a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances, before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour. Mr. Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow ; and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish : " Oh, my dear, what a trial for you ! " " Brittle is foredoomed," said Diana, unruffled. She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers. "Then the Turk is a sapient custodian ! " said Westlake, vexed with her flush at the entrance of the Scot. Diana sedately took his challenge. " We, Mr. Westlake, have the philosophy of ownership." Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake murmured over his head: " As long as it is we who are the cracked." 272 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS " Did we not start from China ?" " "We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul." " You try to elude the lesson." " I remember my first psedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on my cranium." " The mark of the book is not a disfigurement." It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it. The mark of the book, if not a disfigurement, was a character- istic of Westlake's fashion of speech. Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a woman. She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her contracted circle ; politeness guarding her from a riposte. Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair. Diana smiled and said : " Incidents in a drawing- room are prize-shots at Dulness." " And in a dining-room too," added Sullivan Smith. " I was one day at a dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all sprang up merry as crickets. It led to a pretty encounter and a real prize-shot." " Does that signify a duel ? " asked Lady Pennon. " 'T would be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the populace, my lady." " Rank me one of the populace then ! I hate duelling and rejoice that it is discountenanced." " The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means," Diana said. " The citizen is generally right in morals. My father also was against the practice, when it raged at its ' prettiest.' I have heard him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, ' It 's all nonsense ! ' and walking to the measured length, ' It 's all nonsense, you know ! ' and when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, * I told you it was all nonsense ! ' " Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations, and whispered: "A lady's way of telling the story ! — and excuseable to her : — she had to THE SUBJECT OF A POKTEAIT 273 e/bwaA the adjective. What the poor fellow said -was " . . . he murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to rightly emphasize his noun. Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of masculine veracity in narration. " A story fbr its native sauce piquante," he said. " Nothing without it ! " They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sulli- van Smith would have let the expletive rest. Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he approved of it ; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion : " It keeps men braced to civil conduct." " I would not differ with the dear old lord ; but no ! the pistol is the sceptre of the bully," said Diana. Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes On her in perpetu- ity, warmly agreed ; and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action. " Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by prohibiting it," said Lady Singleby. " And how," Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, " how, I 'd ask, are ladies to be protected from the bully ? " He was beset : " So it was all for us ? all in consideration for our benefit ? " He mournfully exclaimed : " Why, surely ! " " That is the funeral apology of the Eod, at the close of every barbarous chapter," said Diana. " Too fine in mind, too fat in body ; that is a consequence with men, dear madam. The conqueror stands to his weap- ons, or he loses his possessions." " Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon. It is the trick men charge to women, show- ing that they can resemble us." 274 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS Lady Pennon thumped her knee. " Not a bit. There 's no resemblance, and they know nothing of us." "Women are a blank to them, I believe," said Whit- monby, treacherously bowiiig; and Westlake said : "Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in close proximity to the fire." • " Once, on the top of a coach," Whitmonby resumed, "I heard a comely dame of the period when summers are ceas- ing threatened by her husband with a divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She made him the inscrutable answer : ' Ah, poor man ! you will go down ignorant to your grave ! ' We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why." " That laugh was from a basket lacking provision ; — and I think we could trace our separation to it," Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied : " They expose themselves ; they get no nearer to the riddle." Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs. Warwick, remarked : " On the stage, we have each our parts equally." "And speaking parts ; not personse mutse." "The stage has advanced in verisimilitude," Henry Wil- mers added slyly ; and Diana rejoined : " You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when it is in advance of reality. Platter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a likeness to be seen. Probably there are still Old Conservatives who would prefer the personation of us by boys." " I don't know," Westlake affected dubiousness. " I have heard that a step to the riddle is gained by a serious con- templation of boys." " Serious ? " "That is the doubt." " The doubt throws its light on the step ! " " I advise them not to take any leap from their step," said Lady Pennon. "It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires ; but perhaps too painful a way," Whitmonby observed. "Poor Mountford Wilts boasted of knowing women; and he married. To jump into the mouth of the enigma, is not to read it." "You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby." THE SUBJECT OF A POKTKAIT 275 "An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement." " The leisure of the »humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the preteuce that it sleeps ! " Diana said. " The sacrilegious hand to strip jou of your mystery is withered as it stretches," exclaimed Westlake. " The sage and the devout are in accord for once." " And whichever of the two I may be, I 'm one of them, happy to do my homage blindfold ! " Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it. Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier. " That rosy mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect." An instant she saddened, foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for a modern cry from him, the silent. She quitted her woman's fit of earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him. "Aslauga's knight, at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours long! Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at midnight, hears that the chS,telaine is away dancing, and remains with all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back ! Adorable ! We had a flag flying in those days. Since men began to fret the riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast. Soon we shall behold a bare pole and hats on around it. That is their solution." A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say : " Well ! I am all for our own times, however literal the men." " We are two different species ! " thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the theme. "I am sure, I read what they write of women ! And their heroines ! " Lady Esquart acquiesced : " We are utter fools or horrid knaves." " Nature's original hieroglyphs — which have that appear- ance to the peruser," Westlake assented. "And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our 'arts,' the literary pirouette they perform is memorable." Diana looked invitingly at Dacier. "But I for one discern a possible relationship and a likeness." 276 DIAKA OF THE CEOSSWAYS " I think it exists — behind a curtain," Dacier replied. " Before the era of the Kursery. Liberty to grow ; independence is the key of the secret." " And what comes after the independence ? " he inquired. Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him : " The two different species then break their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty. So I am against independence." "Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!" Diana said. " So the eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they are for civilization. Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the women of the future — don't be afraid ! — the far future. What a different earth you will see ! " And very different creatures ! the gentlemen unanimously surmised. Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker ; frightful hosts. Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to paint it. "You would be offered up to the English national hang- man, Jehoiachim Sneer," interposed Arthur Ehodes, evi- dently firing a gun too big for him, of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that he rushed to support her. She covered him by saying : " If he has to be encountered, he kills none but the cripple,'' wherewith the dead pause ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged, though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly : "Jehoiachim," and had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal his want of comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's gatherings. "They know nothing of us whatever!" Lady Pennon harped on her dictum. " They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature," said Diana : " but would any mare understand this ? . . ." She dropped her voice and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart and Miss Courtney : " Eeal woman's nature speaks. A maid of mine THE SUBJECT OP A PORTRAIT 277 had a 'follower.' She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her if she could trust him. ' Oh, yes, ma'am,' she replied, ' I can ; he 's quite like a female.' I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had received the highest of eulogies." The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the understandings of men. Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to herself her inability to repeat such a tale : an act that she deemed not "quite like a lady." She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs. Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate sentiment -mowing perhaps to her coldness of temperament. - Like Dacier also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes : it led to suppositions ; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all ; but a young poet, rather good-look- ing and well built, is not the same kind of wing-chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney — Mrs. Warwick's latest shieldling : he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encourage- ment of her follower. Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom : a damsel castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every act of every person surrounding her ; deductively therefore that a cer- tain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious, or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human couples up to decrepitude. And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt her gift of reading into them. Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of young Mr. Rhodes ; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehe- ment admirer. But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Red worth as well, mentally tore his mask of friend- ship to shreds. He was kind indeed in commissioning her to do the portrait. His desire for it, and his urgency to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his visits of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the betraying signs. Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the passion in numbers of gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration with her lively play of dia- logue, must be coquettish ; she could hold them only by coldness. Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to the lips of a woman who is under an emotional spell : 278 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS rather they prove that she has the spell for casting. It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham thought: it was cruel to Mr. Redworth ; at whom, of all her circle, the beauti- ful woman looked, when speaking to him, sometimes tenderly. " Beware the silent one of an assembly ! " Diana had written. She did not think of her words while Miss Payn- ham continued mutely sketching. The silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at work, critically perforce ; the faster if their hands are occupied ; and the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts. Miss Paynham felt for Mr. Redworth. Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to the pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support it : — just a doubt, with, all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of naturalness in a continuous cleverness. But he signified pleasure, and in pleasing him she was happy : in the knowledge that she dazzled, was her sense of safety. Percy hated scandal ; he heard none. He wanted stirring, cheering; in her house he had it. He came daily, and as it was her wish that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him and show her exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed him without consulting the world. He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's presentation of a costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array of ornaments, and excuse a visit. Judging by the absence of any blow within, he saw not a sign of coquetry. Some such visit had been anticipated by the prescient woman, so there was no red- dening. She brought about an exchange of sentences be- tween him and her furious admirer, sparing either of them a glimpse of which was the sacrifice to the other, amusing them both. Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit him ; and he left them, proud of his absolute confidence in her. She was mistaken in imagining that her social vivacity, mixed with comradeship of the active intellect, was the charm which kept Mr. Percy Dacier temperate when he well knew her to distinguish him above her courtiers. Her powers of dazzling kept him tajne ; they did not stamp her THE SUBJECT OF A POBTKAIT 279 mark on him. He was one of the order of highly polished men, ignorant of women, who are impressed for long terms by temporary flashes, that hold them bound until a fresh impression comes, to confirm or obliterate the preceding. Affairs of the world he could treat competently ; he had a head for high politics and the management of men ; the feminine half of the world was a confusion and a vexation to his intelligence, characterless; and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied it must be owing to her possession of character, a thing prized the more in women because of his latent doubt of its existence. Character, that was the mark he aimed at ; that moved him to homage as neither sparkling wit nor incomparable beauty, nor the un- usual combination, did. To be distinguished by a woman of character (beauty and wit for jewellery), was his minor ambition in life, and if Fortune now gratified it, he owned to the flattery. It really seemed by every test that she had the quality. Since the day when he beheld her by the bed- side of his dead uncle, and that one on the French sea-sands, and again at Copsley, ghostly white out of her wrestle with death, bleeding holy sweat of brow for her friend, the print of her features had been on him as an index of depth of character, imposing respect and admiration — a sentiment imperilled by her consent to fly with him. Her subsequent reserve until they met — by an accident that the lady at any rate was not responsible for, proved the quality posi- tively. And the nature of her character, at first suspected, vanquished him more, by comparison, than her vivid intel- lect, which he originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in condescension, as a singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now and then assailably feminine. But, after her consent to a proposal that caused him retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition of the madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real majesty, and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes for satellites. His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by the experience to justify him in saying. Here is a worthy one ! She was health to him, as well as trusty counsel. Furthermore, where he respected, he was a governed man, free of the common masculine craze to scale fortresses for the sake of lowering flags. Whilst 280 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS under his impression of her character, he submitted honour- ably to the ascendancy of a lady whose conduct suited him and whose preference flattered; whose presence was very refreshing; whose letters were a stimulant. Her letters were really running well-waters, not a lover's delusion of the luminous mind of his lady. They sparkled in review and preserved their integrity under critical analysis. The reading of them hurried him in pursuit of her from house to house during the autumn ; and as she did not hint at the shadow his coming cast on her, his conscience was easy. Regarding their future, his political anxieties were a moun- tainous defile, curtaining the outlook. They met at Lockton, where he arrived after a recent consultation with his Chief, of whom, and the murmurs of the Cabinet, he spoke to Diana openly, in some dejection. " They might see he has been breaking with his party for the last four years," she said. " The plunge to be taken is tremendous." "But will he ? He appears too despondent for a header." " We cannot dance on a quaking floor." " N"o ; it 's exactly that quake of the floor which gives ' much qualms,' to me as well," said Dacier. " A treble Neptune's power ! " she rejoined, for his particular delectation. " Enough if he hesitates. I forgive him his nausea. He awaits the impetus, and it will reach him, and soon. He will not wait for the mob at his heels, I am certain. A Minister who does that, is a post, and goes down with the first bursting of the dam. He has tried com- promise and discovered that it does not appease the Fates ; is not even a makeshift-mending at this hour. He is a man of nerves, very sensitively built ; as quick — quicker than a woman, I could almost say, to feel the tremble of the air — forerunner of imperative changes." Dacier brightened fondly. " You positively describe him ; paint him to the life, without knowing him ! " " I have seen him ; and if I paint, whose are the colours ? " " Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit," said Dacier. " I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat," said Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful. Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CKISIS 281 Thin food for passion ! The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the appointments to meet. When separated they were interchanging letters, formally worded in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly full : or Diana thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for his manner of opening his heart in amatory correspond- ence was to confide important secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in counsel. He proved his affec- tion by trusting her ; his respect by his tempered style : — " A Greenland style of writing," she had said of an unhappy gentleman's epistolary compositions resembling it ; and now the same official baldness was to her mind Italianly rich ; it called forth such volumes. Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by the nature of the discourse they held, so consequent to their joint interest in the great crisis antici- pated, as to rouse her indignant surprise and a turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world signified the fact of its having one eye, or more, wide open. Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London. CHAPTEE XXIX SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CKISIS IN COMPANT Theee was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane and her customary visitor Tom Eedworth now. She was shy in speaking of the love-stricken woman, and more was in his mind for thought than for speech. She sometimes wondered how much he might know, ending with the re- flection that little passing around was unknown to him. He had to shut his mind against thought, against all medi- tation upon Mrs. Warwick ; it was based scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material element — a talisman. Men and women crossing the high seas of life 282 DIANA 01" THE CROSSWAYS he had found most readable under that illuminating in- quiry, as to their means. An inspector of seaworthy ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would the money come ? He could not help the bent of his mind ; but he could avoid subjecting her to the talismanic touch. The girl at the Dublin Ball, the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his Diana. Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with the mere woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately from charges not distinctly formulated within him : — " She 's not made of stone." That was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his roots ; but, then, he had no hopes of his own ; and he stuck to it. Her choice of a man like Dacier, too, of whom Eedworth judged highly, showed nobility. She irradiated the man ; but no base- ness could be in such an alliance. If allied, they were bound together for good. The tie — supposing a villain world not wrong — was only not the sacred tie because of impediments. The tie! — he deliberated, and said stoutly No. Men of Redworth's nature go through sharp con- tests, though the duration of them is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up of the latter under lock and bar ; so that a man, very little of an idealist, was able to sustain her in the pure im- agination — where she did almost belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because she might have been his — but for an incredible extreme of folly. The dark ring of the eclipse cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while admitting her lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of per- fect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely past belief that he flew at the circumstances con- firming the charge, and had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming backward, after flinging him. He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter. " Mr. Dacier is also in town," Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication of the needless men- tion of it. "We have not seen him." She invited Red- THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CEISIS 283 worth to meet a few friends at dinner. " I think you admire Miss Asper : in my idea a very saint among young women ; and you know what the young women of our day are. She will be present. She is, you are aware, Eng- land's greatest heiress. Only yesterday, hearing of that poor man Mr. Warwick's desperate attack of illness — heart! — and of his having no relative or friend to soothe his pillow, — he is lying in absolute loneliness, — she offered to go and nurse him ! Of course it could not be done. It is not her place. The beauty of the character of a dear innocent young girl, with every gratification at command, who could make the offer, strikes me as unparalleled. She was perfectly sincere — she is sincerity. She asked at once. Where is he ? She wished me to accompany her on a first visit. I saw a tear." Eedworth had called at Lady Wathin's for information of the state of Mr. Warwick, concerning which a rumour was abroad. No stranger to the vagrant compassionate- ness of sentimentalists ; -^ rich, idle, conscience-pricked or praise-catching ; — he was unmoved by the tale that Miss Asper had proposed to go to Mr. Warwick's sick-bed in the uniform of a Sister of Charity : — " Speaking French ! " Lady Wathin exclaimed ; and his head rocked, as he said : " An Englishman would not be likely to know better." " She speaks exquisite French — all European languages, Mr. Eedworth. She does not pretend to wit. To my think- ing, depth of sentiment is a far more feminine accomplish- ment. It assuredly will be found a greater treasure." The modest man (modest in such matters) was led by degrees to fancy himself sounded regarding Miss Asper: a piece of sculpture glacially decorative of the domestic mansion in person, to his thinking ; and as to the nature of it — not a Diana, with all her faults ! If Diana had any faults, in a world and a position so heavily against her ! He laughed to himself, when alone, at the neatly implied bitter reproach cast on the wife by the forsaken young lady, who proposed to nurse the aban- doned husband of the woman bereaving her of the man she loved. Sentimentalists enjoy these tricks, the conceiving or the doing of them — the former mainly, which are cheaper, and equally effective. Miss Asper might be defi* 284 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS cient in wit ; this was a form of practical wit, occasionally exhibited by creatures acting on their instincts. Warwick he pitied, and he put compulsion on himself to go and see the poor fellow, the subject of so sublime a generosity. Mr. Warwick sat in an arm-chair, his legs out straight on the heels, his jaw dragging hollow cheeks, his hands loosely joined ; improving in health, he said. A demure woman of middle age was in attendance. He did not speak of his wife. Three times he said disconnectedly, "I hear reports," and his eyelids worked. Eedworth talked of general affairs, without those consolatory efforts, useless between men, which are neither medicine nor good honest water : — he judged by personal feelings. In consequence, he left an invalid the sourer for his visit. Kext day he received a briefly-worded summons from Mrs. Warwick. Crossing the park on the line to Diana's house, he met Miss Paynham, who grieved to say that Mrs. Warwick could not give her a sitting ; and in a still mournfuller tone, imagined he would find her at home, and alone by this time. " I left no one but Mr. Dacier there," she observed. " Mrs. Warwick will be disengaged to-morrow, no doubt," he said consolingly. Her head performed the negative. " They talk politics, and she becomes animated, loses her pose. I will per- severe, though I fear I have undertaken a task too much for me." "I am deeply indebted to you for the attempt." Bed- worth bowed to her and set his face to the Abbey-towers, which wore a different aspect in the smoked grey light since his two minutes of colloquy. He had previously noticed that meetings with Miss Paynham produced a similar effect on him, a not so very impressionable man. And how was it done ? She told him nothing he did not know or guess. Diana was alone. Her manner, after the greeting, seemed feverish. She had not to excuse herself for abrupt- ness when he heard the nature of the subject. Her coun- sellor and friend was informed, in feminine style, that she had requested him to call, for the purpose of consulting him with regard to a matter she had decided upon ; and it THE POLITICAIi AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS 285 ■was, the sale of The Crossways. She said that it would have gone to her heart once ; she supposed she had lost her affection for the place, or had got the better of her superstitions. She spoke lamely as well as bluntly. The place was hers, she said ; her own property. Her husband could not interdict a sale. Eedworfch addressed himself to her smothered antago- nism. "Even if he had rights, as they are termed ... I think you might count on their not being pressed." " I have been told of illness." She tapped her foot on the floor. " His present state of health is unequal to his ordinary duties." "Emma Dunstane is fully supplied with the latest in- telligence, Mr. Eedworth, You know the source." " I mention it simply ..." "Yes, yes. What I have to protest is, that in this respect I am free. The Law has me fast, but leaves me its legal view of my small property. I have no authority over me. I can do as I please in this, without a collision, or the dread of one. It is the married woman's perpetual dread when she ventures a step. Your Law originally presumed her a China-footed animal. And more, I have a claim for maintenance." She crimsoned angrily. Eedworth showed a look of pleasure, hard to understand. " The application would be sufficient, I fancy," he said. " It should have been offered." " Did you not decline it ? " "I declined to apply for it. I thought — But, Mr. Eedworth, another thing, concerning us all : I want very much to hear your ideas of the prospects of the League ; be- cause I know you have ideas. The leaders are terrible men ; they fascinate me. They appear to move with an army of facts. They are certainly carrying the country. I am obliged to think them sincere. Common agitators would not hold together, as they do. They gather strength each year. If their statistics are not illusory — an army of phantoms instead of one of facts ; — and they knock at my head without admission, I have to confess; — they must win." 286 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS " Ultimately, it is quite calculable that they will win," said Redvforth ; and he was led to discourse of rates and duties and prohibitive tariffs to a woman surprisingly athirst, curious for every scrap of intelligence relating to the power, organization, and schemes of the League. " Common sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation," he said, " Eap it unremittingly on crowds of the thickest of human heads, and the response comes at last to sweep all before it. You may reckon that the country will beat the landlords — for that is our question. Is it one of your political themes ? " "I am not presumptuous to such a degree: — a poor scholar," Diana replied. " Women striving to lift their heads among men deserve the sarcasm." He denied that any sarcasm was intended, and the lesson continued. When she had shaped in her mind some por- tion of his knowledge of the subject, she reverted casually to her practical business. Would he undertake to try to obtain a purchaser of The Crossways, at the price he might deem reasonable ? She left the price entirely to his judge- ment. And now she had determined to part with the old place, the sooner the better! She said that smiling; and Eedworth smiled, outwardly and inwardly. Her talk of her affairs was clearer to him than her curiosity for the mysteries of the League. He gained kind looks besides warm thanks by the promise to seek a purchaser ; especially by his avoidance of prying queries. She wanted just this excellent automaton fac-totum ; and she referred him to Mr. Braddock for the title-deeds et caetera — the chirping phrase of ladies happily washing their hands of the mean details of business. " How of your last work ? " he asked her. Serenest equanimity rejoined : " As I anticipated, it is not popular. The critics are of one mind with the public. You may have noticed, they rarely flower above that rocky sur- face. The Cantatrice sings them a false note. My next will probably please them less." Her mobile lips and brows shot the faint upper-wreath of a smile hovering. It was designed to display her philosophy. " And what is the name of your next ? " said he. " I name it The Man of Two Minds, if you can allow that to be in nature." THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS 287 ."Contra-distinguished from the woman ?" " Oh ! you must first believe the woman to have one." " You are working on it ? " " By fits. And I forgot, Mr. Eedworth : I have mislaid my receipts, and must ask you for the address of your wine- merchant ; — or, will you ? Several dozen of the same wines. I can trust him to be in awe of you, and the good repute of my table depends on his honesty." Eedworth took the definite order for a large supply of wine. ' She gave him her hand : a lost hand, dear to hold, need- ing to be guided, he feared./' For him, it was merely a hand, cut off from the wrist ; and he had performed that executive part ! A wiser man would now have been the lord of it. . . . So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and cherish the beloved woman, while saying : " If we find a speedy bidder for The Crossways, you will have to thank our railways." " You ! " said Diana, confident in his ability to do every- thing of the practical kind. Her ingenuousness tickled him. He missed her comic touches upon men and things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it. As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour previously been hearing her voice ; the note of her theme being Party ; and how to serve it, when to sacri- fice it to the Country. She wrote, carolling bars of the Puri- tani marches ; and such will passion do, that her choice of music was quite in harmony with her theme. The mar- tially-amorous melodies of Italian Opera in those days fostered a passion challenged to intrepidity from the heart of softness; gilding at the same time, and putting warm blood even into dull arithmetical figures which might be important to her lover, her hero fronting battle. She con- densed Redworth's information skilfully, heartily giving it and whatever she had imbibed, as her own, down to the remark : " Common sense in questions of justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and wins the certain majority, if we strike with it incessantly." Whether any- thing she wrote was her own, mattered little : the savour of Percy's praise, which none could share with her, made it 288 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS instantly all her own. Besides she wrote to strengthen him ; she naturally laid her friends and the world under contri- bution ; and no other sort of writing was possible. Percy had not a common interest in fiction ; still less for high, comedy. He liked the broad laugh when he deigned to open books of that sort ; puns and strong flavours and har- lequin surprises ; and her work would not admit of them, however great her willingness to force her band for his amusement : consequently her inventiveness deadened. She had to cease whipping it. " My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass ! " she sighed, looking to the sale of The Crossways for money ; looking no farther. Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order, the weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger bearing the form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the reconciling news that a hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr. Eedworth's — both of whom wore a gloomy hue in her mind immedi- ately — had offered a sum for the purchase of The Cross- ways. Considering the out-of-the-way district, Mr. Braddock thought it an excellent price to get. She thought the re- verse, but confessed that double the sum would not have altered her opinion. Double the sum scarcely counted for the service she required of it for much more than a year. The money was paid shortly after into her Bank, and then she enjoyed the contemptuous felicity of tossing meat to her lions, tigers, wolves, and jackals, who, but for the fortunate intervention, would have been feeding on her. These me- nagerie beasts of prey were the lady's ti-adesmen, Debit's hungry brood. She had a rapid glimpse of a false position in regarding that legitimate band so scornfully : another glimpse likewise of a day to come when they might not be stopped at the door. She was running a race with some- thing ; — with what ? It was unnamed ; it ran in a shroud. At times she surprised her heart violently beating when there had not been a thought to set it in motion. She traced it once to the words " next year," incidentally mentioned. "Eree," was a word that checked her throbs, as at a ques- tion of life or death. Her solitude, excepting the hours of sleep, if then, was a time of irregular breathing. The some- thing unnamed, running beside her, became a dreadful THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS 289 familiar; the race between them past contemplation for ghastliness. "But this is your Law!" she cried to the world, while blinding her eyes against a peep of the shrouded features. Singularly, she had but to abandon hope, and the shadowy figure vanished, the tragic race was ended. How to live and think, and not to hope : the slave of passion had this problem before her. Other tasks were supportable, though one seemed hard at moments and was not passive; it attacked her. The men and women of her circle derisively, unanimously, dis- believed in an innocence that forfeited reputation. Women were complimentarily assumed to be not such gaping idiots. And as the weeks advanced, a change came over Percy. The gentleman had grown restless at covert congratulations, hollow to his knowledge, however much caressing vanity, and therefore secretly a wound to it. One day, after sitting silent, he bluntly proposed to break "this foolish trifling;" just in his old manner, though not so honourably ; not very definitely either. Her hand was taken. " I feared that dumbness ! " Diana said, letting her hand go, but keeping her composure. " My friend Percy, I am not a lion-tamer, and if you are of those animals, we break the chapter. Plainly you think that where there appears to be a choice of fools, the woman is distinctly designed for the person. Drop my hand, or I shall repeat the fable of the G-oose with the Golden Eggs." " Fables are applicable only in the school-room," said he ; and he ventured on " Tony ! " " I vowed an oath to my dear Emma — as good as to the heavens ! and that of itself would stay me from being in- sane again." She released herself. "Signor Percy, you teach me to suspect you of having an idle wish to pluck your plaything to pieces : — to boast of it ? Ah ! my friend, I fancied I was of more value to you. You must come less often ; even to not at all, if you are one of those idols with feet of clay which leave the print of their steps in a room ; or fall and crush the silly idolizer." " But surely you know ..." said he. " We can't have to wait long." He looked full of hopeful meanings. " A reason ! " . . . She kept down her breath. A long^ 19 290 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS drawn sigh followed, through parted lips. She had a sen- sation of horror. " And I cannot propose to nurse hini — Emma will not hear of it," she said. " I dare not. Hypo- crite to that extreme ? Oh, no! But I must hear nothing. As it is, I am haunted. Now let this pass. Tony me no Tonies ; I am atony to such whimpering business now we are in the van of the struggle. All round us it sounds like war. Last night I had Mr. Tonans dining here ; he wished to meet you ; and you must have a private meeting with Mr. Whitmonby : he will be useful ; others as well. You are wrong in affecting contempt of the Press. It perches you on a rock ; but the swimmer in politics knows what draws the tides. Your own people, your set, your class, are a drag to you, like inherited superstitions to the waken- ing brain. The greater the glory ! For you see the lead you take ? You are saving your class. They should lead, and will, if they prove worthy in the crisis. Their curi- ous error is to believe in the stability of a monumental position." " Perfectly true ! " cried Dacier ; and the next minute, heated by approbation, was begging for her hand earnestly. She refused it. " But you say things that catch me ! " he pleaded. " Re- member, it was nearly mine. It soon will be mine. I heard yesterday from Lady Wathin . . . well, if it pains you ! " " Speak on," said Diana, resigned to her thirsty ears. " He is not expected to last through the autumn." '.' The calculation is hers ? " " Not exactly : — judging from the symptoms." Diana flashed a fiery eye into Dacier's, and rose. She was past danger of melting, with her imagination darkened by the funeral image ; but she craved solitude, and had to act the callous, to dismiss him. "Good. Enough for the day. Now leave me, if you please. When we meet again, stifle that raven's croak. I am not a ' Sister of Charity,' but neither am I a vulture hovering for the horse in the desert to die. A poor sim- ile ! — when it is my own and not another's breath that I want. Nothing in nature, only gruesome German stories, will fetch comparisons for the yoke of this Law of yours. It seems the nightmare dream following an ogre's supper." THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS 291 She was not acting the shiver of her frame. To-morrow was open to him, and prospect of better for- tune, so he departed, after squeezing the hand she cere- moniously extended. But her woman's intuition warned her that she had not maintained the sovereign impression which was her secur- ity. And hope had become a flame in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher. The race she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the shroud ; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images of sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence — for the stilling of her passionate heart. And when this was partly effected, the question, Am I going to live ? renewed her tragical struggle. Who^ was it under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks ? and with human sensibility to swell the horror ! Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow needed for herself ; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities was needed to soothe her. She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured woman. Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette. Had she beauty and charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her days ? — and all doomed to waste ? No insurgency of words arose in denun- ciation of the wrong done to her nature. An undefined heavy feeling of wrong there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without gravely shaming, that one or an- other must be slain for peace to come ; for it is the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is pitiless tO; women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession ; detesting and reviling them for a feeble human cry, and for one ap- parent step of revolt piling the pelted stones on them. It will not discriminate shades of hue, it massacres all the shadowed. They are honoured, after a fashion, at a certain elevation. Descending from it, and purely to breathe com- mon air (thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast. And alas ! the very pleading for them excites a sort of ridi- cule in their advocate. How ? She was utterly, even des- perately, nay personally, earnest, and her humour closed her lips ; though comical views of the scourged and outcast coming from the opposite party — the huge bully world — 292 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS she would not have tolerated. Diana raged at a prevailing strength on the part of that huge bully world, which seemed really to embrace the atmosphere. Emma had said: "The rules of Christian Society are a blessed Government for us women. We owe it so much that there is not a brick of the fabric we should not prop." Emma's talk of obedience to the Laws, being Laws, was repeated by the rebel, with an involuntary unphrased comparison of the vessel in dock and the vessel at sea. When Dacier next called to see Mrs. Warwick, he heard that she had gone to Copsley for a couple of weeks. The lesson was emphasized by her not writing : — and was it the tricky sex, or the splendid character of the woman, which dealt him this punishment ? Knowing how much Diana forfeited for him, he was moved to some enthusiasm, despite his inclinatiou to be hurt. She, on her return to London, gained a considerable in- crease of knowledge as to her position in the eye of the world; and unlike the result of her meditations derived from the clamouring tradesmen, whom she could excuse, she was neither illuminated nor cautioned by that dubious look; she conscientiously revolted. Lady Pennon hinted a word for her government. "A good deal of what you so capitally call ' Green tea talk ' is going on, my dear." Diana replied, without pretending to misunderstand : "Gos- sip is a beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the creature it devours. They are welcome to my shadow, if the liberty I claim casts one, and it feeds them." To which the old lady rejoined: "Oh! I am with you through thick and thin. I presented you at Court, and I stand by you. Only, walk carefully. Women have to walk with a train. You are too famous not to have your troops of watchers." " But I mean to prove," said Diana, " that a woman can walk with her train independent of the common reserves and artifices." " Not on highways, my dear ! " Diana, praising the speaker, referred the whole truth in that to the material element of her metaphor. She was more astonished by Whitmonby's candid chid- ing; but with him she could fence, and men are easily diverted. She had sent for him, to bring him and Percy THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC OEISIS 293 Dacier together to a conference. Unaware of the project, he took the opportunity of their privacy to speak of the great station open to her in London being imperilled ; and he spoke of "tongues," and ahem! A very little would have induced him to fill that empty vocable with a name. She had to pardon the critic in him for an unpleasant review of her hapless Cantateicb ; and as a means of eva- sion, she mentioned the poor book and her slaughter of the heroine, that he had complained of. " I killed her ; I could not let her live. You were unjust in accusing the authoress of heartlessness." " If I did, I retract," said he. " She steers too evi- dently from the centre of the vessel. She has the organ in excess." "Proof that it is not squandered." " The point concerns direction." " Have I made so bad a choice of my friends ? " " It is the common error of the sprightly to suppose that in parrying a thrust they blind our eyes." " The world sees always what it desires to see, Mr. Whitmonby." "The world, my dear Mrs. Warwick, is a blundering machine upon its own affairs, but a cruel sleuth-hound to rouse in pursuit." " So now you have me chased by sight and scent. And if I take wing ? " "Shots! volleys! — You are lawful game. The choice you have made of your friends, should oblige you to think of them." " I imagine I do. Have I offended any, or one ? " "I will not say that. You know the commotion in a French kitchen when the guests of the hoiise declined a particular dish furnished them by command. The cook and his crew were loyal to their master, but, for the love of their Art, they sent him notice. It is ill serving a mad sovereign." Diana bowed to the compact little apologue. "I will tell you another story, traditional in our family from my great-grandmother, a Spanish woman," she said. " A cavalier serenaded his mistress, and rascal mercenaries fell upon him before he could draw sword. He battered 294 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS his guitar on their pates till the lattice opened with a cry, and startled them to flight. ' Thrice blessed and beloved! ' he called to her above, in reference to the noise, ' it was merely a diversion of the accompaniment.' Jifow there was loyal service to a sovereign ! " "You are certainly an angel!" exclaimed Whitmonby. " I swallow the story, and leave it to digestion to discover the appositeness. Whatever tuneful instrument one of your friends possesses shall solace your slumbers or batter the pate of your enemy. But discourage the habitual serenader." "The musician you must mean is due here now, by appointment to meet you," said Diana, and set him mo- mentarily agape with the name of Mr. Percy Dacier. That was the origin of the alliance between the young statesman and a newspaper editpr. "Whitmonby, accept- ing proposals which suited him, quitted the house, after an hour of political talk, no longpr inclined to hint at the "habitual serenader," but very ready to fall foul of those who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly. Times were masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana's comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weat matter aside. Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Papier; and the qook could stand priticisn^; the wines — wonderful to say of a lady's table — were trusty; the talk, on the pplitical evenings and the social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with his ideal of the conversational orchestra: an improvized harmony, unmatched elsewhere. She did not, he considered, so per- fectly assort her dinner-guests; that was her one fault. She had therefore to strain her adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them. But what other woman could have done it! She led superbly. If an Irishman was present, she kept him from overflooding, managed to ex- tract just the flavour of him, the smack of salt. She did even, at Whitmonby's table, on a red-letter Sunday even- ing, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down that cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dia- logue by seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before. Sullivan Smith, unbridled in the middle of A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTEKTASTE 295 (Jinner, was docile to her. "Irishmen," she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race too raw for an Olympian feast, " are invaluable if you hang them up to smoke and cure;" and the master of social converse could not deny that they were responsive to her magic. The supper-nights were mainly devoted to Percy's friends. He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless. So they wore through the Session and the Autumn, clouds heavier, the League drumming, the cry of Ireland "omi- nously Banshee," as she wrote to Emma. CHAPTER XXX IN WHICH THEEE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN APTEETASTE "But Tony lives!" Emma Dunstane cried, on her soli- tary height, with the full accent of envy marking the verb; and when she wrote enviously to her friend of the life among bright intelligences, and of talk worth hearing, it was a happy signification that health, frail though it might be, had grown importunate for some of the play of life. Diana sent her word to name her day, and she would have her choicest to meet her dearest. They were in the early days of December, not the best of times for improvized gatherings. Emma wanted, however, to taste them as they cropped; she was also, owing to her long isolation, timid at a notion of encountering the pick of the London world, prepared by Tony to behold " a wonder more than worthy of them," as her friend unadvisedly wrote. That was why she came unexpectedly, and for a mixture of reasons, went to an hotel. Fatality designed it so. . She was reproached, but she said : " You have to write or you entertain at night; 296 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS I should be a clog and fret you. My hotel is Maitland's; excellent; I believe I am to lie on the pillow -where a crowned head reposed! You will perceive that I am proud as well as comfortable. And I would rather meet your usual set of guests." " The reason why I have been entertaining at night is, that Percy is harassed and requires enlivening," said Diana. "He brings his friends. My house is open to them, if it amuses him. What the world says, is past a thought. I owe him too much." Emma murmured that the world would soon be pacified. Diana shook her head. "The poor man is better; able to go about his affairs; and I am honestly relieved. It lays a spectre. As for me, I do not look ahead. I serve as a kind of secretary to Percy. I labour at making abstracts by day, and at night preside at my supper-table. You would think it monotonous; no incident varies the course we run. I have not time to ask whether it is hap- piness. It seems to bear a resemblance." Emma replied: "He may be everything you tell me. He should not have chosen the last night of the Opera to go to your box and sit beside you till the fall of the cur- tain. The presence at the Opera of a man notoriously indifferent to music was enough in itself." Diana smiled with languor. "You heard of that? But the Opera was The Puritani, my favourite. And he saw me sitting in Lady Pennon's box alone. We were com- promised neck-deep already. I can kiss you, my own Emmy, till I die; but what the world says, is what the wind says. Besides he has his hopes. ... If I am black- ened ever so thickly, he can make me white. Dear me! if the world knew that he comes here almost nightly ! It will; and does it matter? I am his in soul; the rest is waste-paper — a half -printed sheet." "Provided he is worthy of such devotion! " "He is absolute worthiness. He is the prince of men: I dread to say, mine ! for fear. But Emmy will not judge him to-morrow by contrast with more voluble talkers. — I can do anything but read poetry now. That kills me ! — See him through me. In nature, character, intellect, he has no rival. Whenever I despond — and it comes now A LITTLE DINNEK AND AN AFTERTASTE 297 and then — I rebuke myself with this one admonition: Simply to have known him! Admit that for a woman to find one who is worthy among the opposite creatures, is a happy termination of her quest, and in some sort dis- misses her to the Shades, an uncomplaining ferry-bird. If my end were at hand I should have no cause to lament it. We women miss life only when we have to confess we have never met the man to reverence." Emma had to hear a very great deal of Mr. Percy. Diana's comparison of herself to "the busy bee at a window-pane," was more in her old manner; and her friend would have hearkened to the marvels of the gentle- man less unrefreshed, had it not appeared to her that her Tony gave in excess for what was given in return. She hinted her view. -= "It is expected of our sex," Diana said. -^ The work of busy bee at a window-pane had at any rate not spoilt her beauty, though she had voluntarily, profit- lessly, become this man's drudge, and her sprightly fancy, her ready humour and darting look all round in discussion, were rather deadened. But the loss was not perceptible in the circle of her guests. Present at a dinner little indicating the last, were Whitmonby, in lively trim for shuffling, dealing, cutting, trumping or drawing trumps; Westlake, polishing epi- grams under his eyelids; Henry Wilmers, who timed an anecdote to strike as the passing hour without freezing the current; Sullivan Smith, smoked, cured and ready to flavour; Percy Dacier, pleasant listener, measured speaker; and young Arthur Rhodes, the neophyte of the hostess's training; of whom she had said to Emma, "The dear boy very kindly serves to frank an unlicenced widow ; " and whom she prompted and made her utmost of, with her natural tact. These she mixed and leavened. The talk was on high levels and low; an enchantment to Emma Dunstane : now a story ; a question opening new routes ; sharp sketches of known personages; a paradox shot by laughter as soon as uttered; and all so smoothly; not a shadow of the dominant holder-forth or a momentary pros- pect of dead flats; the mellow ring of appositeness being the concordant note of deliveries running linked as they 298 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS flashed, and a tolerant philosophy of the sage in the world recurrently the keynote. Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling. He cited a funny line from a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect^ propos, looking at Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for him, and he read none now. Diana said: "There are many Alexanders, but Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number." She gave him an opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment — against Whitmonby's cardinal rule: " The neatest turn of the wrist that ever swung a hero to crack a crown ! " and he bowed to young fihodes : " I '11 read your versicler to-morrow morning early." The latter expressed a fear that the hour was too critical for poetry. "I have taken the dose at a very early hour," said Whitmonby, to bring conversation to the flow again, "and it effaced the critical mind completely." \ "But did not silence the critical nose," observed Westlake. Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe. " Potentially, indeed a critic ! " said Diana. " Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if the poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican I " Sullivan Smith exclaimed. " But there 's character in noses." " Calculable by inches? " Dacier asked. "More than in any other feature," said Lady Dunstane. "The RifEords are all prodigiously gifted and amusing: suspendens omnia naso. It should be prayed for in families." " Totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum, " rejoined Whit- monby. "Lady Isabella was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel stationed some hun- dred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned to me that her hand instinctively travelled upward." " Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of absurdity," said Diana. "Touchstone's ' poor thing, but mine own,' is godlike in its enveloping fold." "The most comforting sermon ever delivered on prop- erty in poverty," said Arthur Erhodes. A LITTLE DtNNEB AKD AN AS'TfiRTASTE 299 Westlake assented. " His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest." "With nature's -woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at home," said Lady Dunstane. " Baron Pawle is an example, " added Whitmonby. " Hi9 cook Is a pattern wife to him. I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all except the wines. ' I would n't have them on my conscience, with a Judge ! ' my lady retorted." "When poor Madame de Jacquiferes was dying," said Wilmers, " her confessor sat by her bedside, prepared for his ministrations. ' Pour commencer, mon ami, jamais je n'aifais rien hors nature.' " Lord Wadaster had uttered something tolerably simi" lar: "I am a sinner, and in good society." Sir Abraham Hartiston, a minor satellite of the Eegent, diversified this: "I am a sinner, and go to good society." Madame la Comtesse de la Eoche-Aigle, the cause of many deaths, declared it unwomanly to fear anything save "fos reve- nants." Yet the countess could say the pretty thing: " Foot on a flower, then think of me ! " "Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution," said Diana. "But tell me," Lady Dunstane inquired generally, "why men are so much happier than women in laughing at their spouses?" They are humaner, was one dictum; they are more frivolous, ironically another. " It warrants them for blowing the bugle-horn of mascu- line superiority night and morning from the Castle-wallS, " Diana said. "I should imagine it is for joy of heart that they still have cause to laugh ! " said Westlake. On the other hand, are women really pained by having to laugh at their lords? Curious little speeches flying about the great world, affirmed the contrary. But the fair speakers were chartered libertines, and their laugh ndmittedly had a biting acid. The parasite is concerned in the majesty of the tree. "We have entered Botany Bay," Diana said to Emma; 300 DIANA OF THE CBOSSWAYS who answered: "A metaphor is the Deus ex machine of an argument;" and Whitmonby, to lighten a shadow of heaviness, related allusively an anecdote of the Law- Courts. Sullivan Smith begged permission to " black cap " it with Judge FitzGerald's sentence upon a convicted crim- inal: " Your plot was perfect but for One above." Dacier ' cited an execrable impromptu line of the Chief of the Opposition in Parliament. The Premier, it was remarked, played him like an angler his fish on the hook; or say, Mr. Serjeant Eufus his witness in the box. "Or a French journalist an English missionary," said Westlake ; and as the instance was recent it was relished. The talk of Premiers offered Whitmonby occasion for a flight to the Court of Vienna and Kaunitz. Wilmers told a droll story of Lord Busby's missing the Embassy there. Westlake furnished a sample of the tranquil sententious- ness of Busby's brother Eobert during a stormy debate in the House of Commons. "I remember," Dacier was reminded, "hearing him say, when the House resembled a Chartist riot, ' Let us stand aside and meditate on Life. If Youth could know, in the season of its reaping of the Pleasures, that it is but sowing Doctor's bills ! ' " Latterly a malady had supervened, and Bob Busby had retired from the universal to the special; — his mysterious case. " Assure him, that is endemic. He may be cured of his desire for the exposition of it," said Lady Dunstane. Westlake chimed with her: "Yes, the charm in dis- coursing of one's case is over when the individual appears no longer at odds with Providence." " But then we lose our Tragedy," said Whitmonby, " Our Comedy too," added Diana. "We must consent to be Busbied for the sake of the instructive recreations." "A curious idea, though," said Sullivan Smith, "that some of the grand instructive figures were in their day colossal bores ! " "So you see the marvel of the poet's craft at last?" Diana smiled on him, and he vowed: "I'll read nothing else for a month." Young Rhodes bade him beware of a deluge in proclaiming it. A A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE 301 They rose from table at ten, witli the satisfaction of knowing that they had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the civilized world, who mean to practise philosophy, making the hour of the feast a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body and mindj/* "iJvenings like these are worth a pilgrimage," Emma said, embracing Tony outside the drawing-room door. "I am so glad I came : and if I am strong enough, invite me again in the Spring. To-morrow early I start for Copsley, to escape this London air. I shall hope to have you there soon." She was pleased by hearing Tony ask her whether she did not think that Arthur Rhodes had borne himself well ; for it breathed of her simply friendly soul. The gentlemen followed Lady Dunstane in a troop, Dacier yielding perforce the last adieu to young Rhodes. Five minutes later Diana was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition. Beginning to dwell on The Man op Two Minds, she glanced at the woman like- wise divided, if not similarly ; and she sat brooding. She did not accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step : her error was the step into Society without the wherewithal to support her position there. Girls of her kind, airing their wings above the sphere of their birth, are cryingly adventuresses. As adventuresses they are treated. Vain to be shrewish with the world! Eather let us turn and scold our nature for irreflectively rushing to the cream and honey ! Had she subsisted on her small income in a coun- try cottage, this task of writing would have been holiday. Or better, if, as she preached to Mary Paynham, she had apprenticed herself to some productive craft. The sim- plicity of the life of labour looked beautiful. What will not look beautiful contrasted with the fly in the web ? She had chosen to be one of the flies of life. Instead of running to composition, her mind was elo- quent with a sermon to Arthur Rhodes, in Redworth's vein; more sympathetically, of course. "For I am not one of the lecturing Mammonites ! " she could say. 302 DIAliTA OP THE CEOSSWAYS She was far from that. Penitentially, in the thidk of her disdain of the arrogant money-getters, she pulled out a drawer where her bank-book lay, and observed it con- templatively; jotting down a reflection before the dread book of facts was opened : " Gaze on the moral path you should have taken, you are asked for courage to commit a sanctioned suicide, by walking back to it stripped — a skeleton self." She sighed forth : " But I have no courage : I never had ! " The book revealed its tale in a small pencilled compu- tation of the bank-clerk's, on the peccant side. Credit presented many pages blanks. She seemed to have with- drawn from the struggle with such a partner. It Signified an immediate appeal to the usurers, unless the publisher could be persuaded, with three parts of the book in his hands, to come to the rescue. Work ! roared old Debit, the sinner turned slavedriver. Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the simulation of an attitude of combat. She took up her pen. And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff that Danvers delighted to read ! — wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a gallows dang- ling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed be- neath. She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the middle as well as in the lowef classes of the country, there would be a multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between them, are they one in their literary tastes. And why should they not read it ? Her present mood was a craving for excite- ment; for incident, wild action, the primitive machinery of our species; any amount of theatrical heroics, pathos, and clown-gabble. A panorama of scenes came sweeping round her. She was, however, harnessed to a different kind of vehicle, and had to drag it. The sound of the house-door shutting, imagined perhaps, was a fugitive distraction. Now to animate The Man of Two Minds! He is courting, but he is burdened with the task of tasks. He has an ideal of womanhood and of the union GEEAT POLITICAL NEWS 803 of cduples: & delicacy extreme as his attachment: and he must induce the lady to school herself to his ideal, not allowing her to suspect him less devoted to her person; "while she, an exacting idol, will drink any quantity of idealization as long as he starts it from a full acceptance of her acknowledged qualities. Diana could once have tripped the scene along airily. She stared at the opening sentence, a heavy bit of moralized manufacture, fit to yoke beside that on her view of her bank-book. "It has come to this — I have no head," she cried. And is our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce? The doubt reduced her whole MS. to a leaden weight, composed for sinking. Percy's addiction to burlesque was a further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be strained to gratify it. There was a knock, and Danvers entered. "You have apparently a liking for late hours," observed her mistress. " I told you to go to bed." "It is Mr. Dacier," said Danvers. "He wishes to see me?" "Yes, ma'am. He apologized for disturbing you." "He must have some good reason." What could it be ! Diana's glass approved her appear- ance. She pressed the black swell of hair above her temples, rather amazed, curious, inclined to a beating of the heart. CHAPTER XXXI A CHAPTBE CONTAINING GEEAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEKBWITH AN INTRUSION OF THE LOVE-GOD. Daciee was pacing about the drawing-room, as in a place too narrow for him. Diana stood at the door. "Have you forgotten to tell me anything I ought to know? " He came up to her and shut the door softly behind her, holding her hand. "You are near it. I returned . . . 304 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS But tell me first : — You were slightly under a shadow this evening, dejected." "Did I show it?" She was growing a little suspicious, but this cunning touch of lover-like interest dispersed the shade. "To me you did." "It was unpardonable to let it be seen." "No one else could have observed it." Her woman's heart was thrilled; for she had concealed the dejection from Emma. "It was nothing," she said; "a knot in the book I am writing. We poor authors are worried now and then. But you? " His face rippled by degrees brightly, to excite a reflec- tion in hers. "Shall I tune you with good news? I think it will excuse me for coming back." "Very good news ? " "Brave news, as far as it goes." " Then it concerns you ! " "Me, you, the country." "Oh! do I guess?" cried Diana. "But speak, pray; I burn." " What am I to have for telling it ? " "Put no price. You know my heart. I guess — or fancy. It relates to your Chief ? " Dacier smiled in a way to show the lock without the key ; and she was insensibly drawn nearer to him , specu- lating on the smile. "Try again," said he, keenly appreciating the blindness to his motive of her studious dark eyes, and her open- lipped breathing. " Percy ! I must be right." " Well, you are. He has decided ! " " Oh ! that is the bravest possible. When did you hear? " "He informed me of his final decision this afternoon." " And you were charged with the secret all the evening, and betrayed not a sign! I compliment the diplomatic statesman. But when will it be public?" " He calls Parliament together the first week of next month." GREAT POLITICAL NEWS 305 " The proposal is — ? No more compromises ! " "Total!" Diana clapped hands ; and her aspect of enthusiasm was intoxicating. " He is a wise man and a gallant Minister ! And while you were reading me through, I was blind to you," she added meltingly. " I have not made too much of it ? " said he. "Indeed you have not." She was radiant with her dark lightnings, yet visibly subject to him under the spell of the news he had artfully lengthened out to excite and overbalance her : — and her enthusiasm was all pointed to his share in the altered situation, as he well knew and was flattered in knowing. " So Tony is no longer dejected ? I thought I could freshen you and get my excuse." " Oh ! a high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird. I soar. Now I do feel proud. I have longed for it — to have you leading the country : not tugged at like a waggon with a treble team uphill. We two are a month in advance of all England. You stand by him ? — only to hear it, for I am sure of it ! " " We stand or fall together." Her glowing look doated on the faithful lieutenant. " And if the henchman is my hero I am but a waiting- woman. But I must admire his leader." "Tony!" "Ah! no,"' she joined her hands, wondering whither her armed majesty had fled; "no softness! no payments ! Flatter me by letting me think you came to a head — not a silly woman's heart, with one name on it, as it has not to betray. I have been frank; you need no proofs ..." The supplicating hands left her figure an easy prey to the storm, and were crushed in a knot on her bosom. She could only shrink. " Ah ! Percy . . . you undo my praise of you — my pride in receiving you." They were speechless perforce. " You see, Tony, my dearest, I am flesh and blood after all." "You drive me to be ice and door -bolts! " Her eyes broke over him reproachfully. "It is not so much to grant," he murmured. 20 306 DIANA OP THE CBOSSWAYS "It changes everything between us." "Not me. It binds me the faster." "It makes me a loathsome hypocrite." "But, Tony! is it so much ? " "Not if you value it low." " But how long do you keep me in this rag-puppet's state of suspension ? " "Patience." "Dangling and swinging day and night ! " " The rag-puppet shall be animated and repaid if I have life. I wish to respect my hero. Have a little mercy. Our day will come : perhaps as wonderfully as this won- derful news. My friend, drop your hands. Have you forgotten who I am ? I want to think, Percy!" " But you are mine." " You are abasing your own." " No, by heaven ! " "Worse, dear friend; you are lowering yourself to the woman who loves you." " You must imagine me superhuman." " I worship you — or did." " Be reasonable, Tony. What harm ! Surely a trifle of recompense ? Just to let me feel I live ! You own you love me. Then I am your lover." " My dear friend Percy, when I have consented to be your paramour, this kind of treatment of me will not want apologies." The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning. He sighed. "You know how my family bother me. The woman I want, the only woman I could marry, I can't have." " " You have her in soul."- - " Body and soul, it must be ! I believe you were made without fire."' "Perhaps. The element is omitted with some of us: happily, some thiuk. Now we can converse. There seems to be a measurement of distances required before men and women have a chance with their brains : — or before a man GEBAT POLITICAL NEWS 307 will understand that lie can be advised and seconded. Wlien will the Cabinet be consulted?" " Oh, a few days. Promise me . . ." " Any honourable promise ! " " You will not keep me waiting longer than the end of the Session ? " " Probably there will be an appeal to the country." "la any case, promise me : have some compassion." " Ah, the compassion ! You do not choose your words, Percy, or forget who is the speaker." " It is Tony who forgets the time she has kept her lover dangling. Promise, and I will wait." " You hurt my hand, sir." " I could crack the knuckles. Promise ! " " Come to me to-morrow." " To-morrow you are in your armour — triple brass ! All creation cries out for now. We are mounted on barbs and you talk of ambling." " Arthur Ehodes might have spoken that." " Rhodes ! " he shook off the name in disgust. " Pet him as much as you like ; don't . . ." he was unable to phrase his objection. She. cooled him further with eulogies of the cheva- leresque manner of speaking which young Mr. Ehodes could assume ; till for very wrath of blood — not jealousy : he had none of any man, with her ; and not passion ; the little he had was a fitful gust — he punished her coldness by taking what hastily could be gathered. Her shape was a pained submission ; and she thought : Where is the woman who ever knows a man ! — as women do think when one of their artifices of evasion with a lover, or the trick of imposingness, has apparently been subduing him. But the pain was less than previously, for she was now mistress of herself, fearing no abysses. Dacier released her quickly, saying : " If I come to-mor- row, shall I have the promise ?" She answered : " Be sure I shall not lie." " Why not let me have it before I go ? " "My friend, to tell you the truth, you have utterly dis' tracted me." " Forgive me if I did hurt your hand." 308 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS " The hand ? You might strike it off." " I can't be other than a mortal lover, Tony. There 's the fact." "No; the fault is mine when I am degraded. I trust you : there 's the error." The trial for Daoier was the sight of her quick-lifting bosom under the mask of cold language : an attraction and repulsion in union; a delirium to any lover impelled to trample on weak defences. But the evident pain he in- flicted moved his pity, which helped to restore his concep- tion of the beauty of her character. She stood so nobly meek. And she was never prudish, only self-respecting. Although the great news he imparted had roused an ardent thirst for holiday and a dash out of harness, and he could hardly check it, he yielded her the lead. " Trust me you may," he said. " But you know we are one. The world has given you to me, me to you. Why should we be asunder ? There 's no reason in it." She replied : " But still I wish to burn a little incense in honour of myself, or else I cannot live. It is the truth. You make Death my truer friend, and at this moment I would willingly go out. You would respect me more dead than alive. I could better pardon you too." He pleaded for the red mouth's pardon, remotely irri- tated by the suspicion that she swayed him overmuch : and he had deserved the small benevolences and donations of love, crumbs and heavenly dews ! "Not a word of pardon," said Diana. "I shall never count an iota against you 'in the dark backward and abysm of Time.' This news is great, and I have sunk beneath it. Come to-morrow. Then we will speak upon whatever you can prove rational. The hour is getting late." Dacier took a draught of her dark beauty with the crimson he had kindled over the cheeks. Her lips were firmly closed, her eyes grave ; dry, but seeming to waver tearfully in their heavy fulness. He could not doubt her love of him; and although chafing at the idea that she swayed him absurdly — beyond the credible in his world of wag-tongues — he resumed his natural soberness, as a gar- ment, not very uneasily fitting: whence it ensued — for A GIDDY TTJKN AT THE SPECTBAL CROSSWATS 309 SO are we influenced by the garb we put on us — that his manly sentiment of revolt in being condemned to play second, was repressed by the refreshment breathed on him from her lofty character, the pure jewel proffered to his inward ownership. "Adieu for the night," he said, and she smiled. He pressed for a pressure of her hand. She brightened her smile instead, and said only : " Good night, Percy." CHAPTEE XXXTI ■WHBKEIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY XUEN AT THE SPECTEAIi CKOSSWAYS Dantees accompanied Mr. Dacier to the house-dbor. Climbing the stairs, she found her mistress in the drawing- room still. "You must be cold, ma'am," she said, glancing at the fire-grate. " Is it a frost ? " said Diana. " It 's midnight and midwinter, ma'am." " Has it struck midnight ? " The mantel-piece clo&b said five minutes past. " You had better go to bed, Danvers, or yon will lose your bloom. Stop ; you are a faithful soul. Great things are happening and I am agitated. Mr. Dacier has told me nevvs. He came back purposely." " Yes, ma'am," said Danvers. " He had a great deal to tell ? " "Well, he had." Diana coloured at the first tentative impertinence she had heard from her maid. "What is the secret of you, Danvers ? What attaches you to me ? " " I 'm sure I don't know, ma'am. I 'm romantic." " And you think me a romantic object ? " " I 'm sure I can't say, ma'am. I 'd rather serve you than any other lady ; and I wish you was happy." " Do you suppose I am unhappy ? " 310 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS "I'm sure — but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady ! and young ! I can't bear to see it." " Tush, you silly woman. You read your melting tales, and imagine. I must go and write for money : it is my profession. And I haven't an idea in my head. This news disturbs me. Kuin if I don't write ; so I must. — I can't ! " Diana beheld the ruin. She clasped the great news for succour. Great indeed : and known but to her of all the outer world. She was ahead of all — ahead of Mr. Tonans ! The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose toweringly. She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight. With the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving and flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very furnace-hissing of Events : an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy. Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to stupefy him ! He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for staleness in her information. But this news, great though it was, and throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but for a brief term, a day or two ; after which, great though it was, immense, it relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude, merely historically curious. " You are not afraid of the streets at night ? " Diana said to her maid, as they were going upstairs. " ]^ot when we 're driving, ma'am," was the answer. The Man of Two Minds faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still delivering that most ponderous of sen- tences — a smothering pillow ! I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana: I am certainly the flattest proser who ever penned a line. She sent Danvers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear the woman's proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her. She pressed her hands on her eyelids. Would Percy have humiliated her so if he had respected her ? He took advantage of the sudden loss of her habitual queenly initia^ tive at the wonderful news to debase and stain their inti- A GIDDY TUKN AT THE SPECTRAL CEOSSWATS 311 macy. The lover's behaviour was judged by her sensa- tions: she felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long been sitting securely, very proudly. That was at an end. If she was to be better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his admission to the house. And then what was her life I Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had suffered. She was a dethroned woman. Deeper within, an unmasked actress, she said. Oh, she forgave him! But clearly he took her for the same as other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor. And sounding herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better? Her face flamed. She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought political news, and treated her as — name the thing ! Not designedly, it might be : her position invited it. " The world had given her to him." The world is always a prophet of the mire ; but the world is no longer an utterly mistaken world. She shook before it. She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the verge of bankruptcy. She was an adventuress. When she held The Crossways she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone. An adventu- ress without an idea in her head: witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds, at his work of sermonizing his mistress. The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause, when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral di£B.culties and endeavour to elude that mud-visaged monster, chiefly by feigning unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she was wrought. Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit of a lengthened confusion. She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly. — I gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as my enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air of intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away, exposing me to myself, as well as to him, the most 312 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS ordinary of reptiles. I kept up a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and having him near me. Hence this bitter need of money! — Either it must be money or disgrace. Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete her work. Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two years, was the material cause of her recklessness. It was, her revived and uprising pudency declared, the principal, the only cause. Mere want of money. And she had a secret worth thousands I The secret of a day, no more : anybody's secret after some four and twenty hours. She smiled at the fancied elongation and stare of the features of Mr. Tonans in his editorial midnight den. What if he knew it and could cap it with something novel and stranger ? Hardly. But it was an inciting suggestion. She began to tremble as a lightning-flash made visible her fortunes recovered, disgrace averted, hours of peace for composition stretching before her: a summer afternoon's vista. It seemed a duel between herself and Mr. Tonans, and she sure of her triumph — Diana victrix ! " Danvers ! " she called. " Is it to undress, ma'am ? " said the maid, entering to her. " Yon are not afraid of the streets, you tell me. I have to go down to the City, I think. It is urgent. Yes, I must go. If I were to impart the news to you, your head would be a tolling bell for a month." " You will take a cab, ma'am." " We must walk out to find one. I must go, though I should have to go on foot. Quick with bonnet and shawl ; muffle up warmly. We have never been out so late : but does it matter? You're a brave soul, I'm sure, aind you shall have your fee." " I don't care for money, ma'am." " When we get home you shall kiss me." Danvers clothed her mistress in furs and rich wrappings : Not paid for ! was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one ; but she had to seem the precipitated bankrupt and A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CKOSSWAYS 313 succeeded. She was near being it. The boiling of her secret carried her through the streets rapidly and unobser- vantly except of such small things as the glow of the lights on the pavements and the hushed cognizance of the houses, in silence to a thoroughfare where a willing cabman was met. The destination named, he nodded alertly: he had driven gentlemen there at night from the House of Com- mons, he said. " Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies," Diana replied. " I hope I know one, never mind the hour," said he of the capes. He was bidden to drive rapidly. "Complexion a tulip : you do not often see a pale cab- man," she remarked to Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion with her mistress. " Do you remember, ma'am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you thought of going to the continent ? " "And I went to The Cross ways? I have forgotten him." " He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of England for nothing." " It must have been when I was paying him. Put it out of your mind, Danvers, that there are individual cabmen. They are the painted flowers of our metropolitan thorough- fares, and we gather them in rows." "They have their feelings, ma'am." " Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me." " I like to think kindly of them," Danvers remarked, in reproof of her inhumanity ; adding : " They may overturn us ! " at which Diana laughed. Her eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street. " Ah ! that miserable sight ! " she cried. " It is the everlasting nightmare of London." Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it. She wondered her mistress should deign to. Eolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a funeral convoy with- out followers. 314 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the wheels, the bell of the hour. " Paster ! faster ! my dear man," Diana murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows. "This must be where the morrow is manufactured," she said. "Tell the man to wait. — Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look backward to see forward in life." She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself. Her card, marked : " Imperative — two minutes," was taken up to Mr. Tonans. They ascended to the editorial ante-room. Doors opened and shut, hasty feet traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty business at work. Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the establishment. Danvers was left to speculate. She heard the voice of Mr. Tonans: "Not more than two ! " This was not a place for compliments. Men passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a woman. She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became an object — a disregarded object. Things of more importance were about. Her feminine self-esteem was troubled ; all idea of attractiveness expired. Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as supernu- meraries. A gentleman — sweet vision I — shot by to the editor's door, without even looking cursorily. He knocked. Mr. Tonans appeared and took him by the arm, dictating at a great rate ; perceived Danvers, frowned at the female, and requested him to wait in the room, which the gentleman did, not once casting eye upon a woman. At last her mistress returned to her, escorted so far by Mr. Tonans, and he refreshingly bent his back to bow over her hand : so we have the satisfaction of knowing that we are not such poor creatures after all ! Suffering in person, Danvers was revived by the little show of homage to her sex. They descended the stairs. " You are not an Editor of a paper, but you may boast THE SPEINGING OF A MINE 315 that you have been near the nest of one," Diana said, when they resumed their seats in the cab. She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or relieved of it, but she seemed animated, and she dropped now and again a funny observation or the kind that tickled Danvers and caused the maid to boast of her everywhere as better than a Play. At home, Danvers busied her hands to supply her mis- tress a cup of refreshing tea and a plate of biscuits. Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedi- tion, and had not a thought. In spite of tea at that hour, she slept soundly through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly till late into the morning. CSAPTER XXXIII EXHIBITS THE SPEINGIKG OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE The powers of harmony would seem to be tried to their shrewdest pitch when Politics and Love are planted together in a human breast. This apparently opposite couple can nevertheless chant a very sweet accord, as was shown by Dacier on his homeward walk from Diana's house. Let Love lead, the God will make music of any chamber-com- rade. He was able to think of affairs of State while feel- ing the satisfied thirst of the lover whose pride, irritated by confidential wild eulogies of the beautiful woman, had recently clamoured for proofs of his commandership. The impression she stamped on him at Copsley remained, but it could not occupy the foreground for ever. ^He did not object to play second to her sprightly wits in converse, if he had some warm testimony to his mastery over her bloodji For the world had given her to him, enthusiastic frien^Ss had congratulated him : she had exalted him for true knightliness ; and he considered the proofs well earned, though he did not value them low. They were little by comparison. They lighted, instead of staining, her unpar- alleled high character. 316 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWATS She loved him. Full surely did she love him, or such a woman would never have consented to brave the world ; once in their project of flight, and next, even more endear- ingly when contemplated, in the sacrifice of her good name ; not omitting that fervent memory of her pained submission, but a palpitating submission, to his caress. She was in his arms again at the thought of it. He had melted her, and won the confession of her senses by a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so vigilantly selfr guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and aloof. Such a woman deserved long service. But then the long service deserved its time of harvest. Her surging look of reproach in submission pointed to the golden time, and as he was a man of honour, pledged to her for life, he had no remorse, and no scruple in determining to exact her dated promise, on this occasion deliberately. She was the woman to be his wife ; she was his nfind's mate : they had hung apart in deference to mere scruples too long. During the fierce battle of the Session she would be his help, his fountain of counsel ; and she would be the rosy gauze-veiled more than cold helper and adviser, the being which would spur her womanly intelligence to acknowledge, on this occasion deliberately, the wisdom of the step. They had been so close to it ! She might call it madness then : now it was wisdom. Each had complete experience of the other, and each vowed the step must be taken. As to the secret communicated, he exulted in the pardon- able cunning of the impulse turning him back to her house after the guests had gone, and the dexterous play of his bait on the line, tempting her to guess and quit her queenly guard. Though it had not been distinctly schemed, the review of it in that light added to the enjoyment. It had been dimly and richly conjectured as a hoped result. Small favours from her were really worth, thrice worth, the utmost from other women. They tasted the sweeter for the winning of them artfully — an honourable thing in love. Nature, rewarding the lover's ingenuity and enter- prise, inspires him with old Greek notions of right and wrong : and love is indeed a fluid mercurial realm, continu- ally shifting the- principles of rectitude and larceny. As THE SPRINGING OP A iHNE 317 long as he means nobly, what is there to condemn him ? Not she in her heart. She was the presiding divinity. And she, his Tony, that splendid Diana, was the woman the world abused ! Whom will it not abuse ? The slough she would have to plunge in before he could make her his own with the world's consent, was already up to her throat. She must, and without further hesitation, be steeped, that he might drag her out, washed of the imputed defilement, and radiant, as she was in character. Inflection now said this ; not impulse. ''' Her words rang through him. At every meeting she said things to confound his estimate of the wits of women, or be remembered for some spirited ring they had : — A high wind ivill make a dead leaf fly like a bird. He murmured it and flew with her. She quickened a vein of imagination that gave him entrance to a strangely brilliant sphere, above his own, where, she sustaining, he too could soar ; and he did, scarce conscious of walking home, undressing, falling The act of waking was an instantaneous recovery of his emotional rapture of the overnight ; nor was it a bar to graver considerations. His Chief had gone down to a house in the country ; his personal business was to see and sound the followers of their party — after another sight of his Tony. She would be sure to counsel sagaciously ; she always did. She had a marvellous intuition of the natures of the men he worked with, solely from his chance descrip- tions of theni : it was as though he started the bird and she transfixed it. And she should not have matter to ruffle her smooth brows : that he swore to. She should sway him as she pleased, be respected after her prescribed manner. The promise must be exacted ; nothing besides the promise. — You see, Tony, you cannot be less than Tony to me now, he addressed the gentle phantom of her. Let me have your word, and I am your servant till the Session ends. — Tony blushes her swarthy crimson : Diana, fluttering, rebukes her ; but Diana is the appeasable Goddess ; Tony is the woman, and she loves him.' The glorious Goddess need not cut them adrift ; they can show her a book of honest pages. Dacier could truthfully say he had worshipped, done knightly service to the beloved woman, homage to the 318 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS aureole encircling her. /Those friends of his, covertly congratalating him on her preference, doubtless thought him more privileged than he was ; but they did not know Diana ; and they were welcome, if they would only believe, to the knowledge that he was at the feet of this most sover- eign woman. He despised the particular Satyr-world which, whatever the nature or station of the woman, crowns the desecrator, and bestows the title of T'ool on the worshipper. He could have answered veraciously that she had kept him from follyy/ NevertHeless the term to service must come. In the assurance of the approaching term he stood braced against a blowing world ; happy as men are when their muscles are strung for a prize they pluck with the energy and aim of their whole force. Letters and morning papers were laid for him to peruse in his dressing-room. He read his letters before the bath. Not much public news was expected at the present season. While dressing, he turned over the sheets of Whitmonby's journal. Dull comments on stale tidings. Foreign news. Home news, with the leaders on them, identically dull. Behold the effect of Journalism : a witty man, sparkling overnight, gets into his pulpit and proses ; because he must say something, and he really knows nothing. Journalists have an excessive overestimate of their influence. They cannot, as Diana said, comparing them with men on the Parliamentary platform, cannot feel they are aboard the big vessel ; they can only strive to raise a breeze, or find one to swell ; and they cannot measure the stoutness or the greatness of the good ship England. Dacier's personal ambition was inferior to his desire to extend and strengthen his England. Parliament was the field, Government the office. How many conversations had passed between him and Diana on that patriotic dream ! She had often filled his drooping sails ; he owned it proudly : — and while the world, both the hoofed and the rectilinear portions, were biting at her character ! Had he fretted her self-respect ? He blamed himself, but a devoted service must have its term. The paper of Mr. Tonans was reserved for perusal at breakfast. He reserved it because Tonans was an opponent, THE SPELNGING OF A MINE 319 tricksy and surprising now and then, amusing too ; unlikely to afford him serious reflections. The recent endeavours of his journal to whip the Government-team to a right-about- face were annoying, preposterous. Dacier had admitted to Diana that Tonans merited the thanks of the country during the discreditable Railway mania, when his articles had a fine exhortative and prophetic twang, and had done marked good. Otherwise, as regarded the Ministry, the veering gusts of Tonans were objectionable : he " raised the breeze " wantonly as well as disagreeably. Anyone can whip up the populace if he has the instruments ; and Tonans frequently intruded on the Ministry's prerogative to govern. The journalist was bidding against the states- man. But such is the condition of a rapidly Radicalizing country ! We must take it as it is. With a complacent, What now, Dacier fixed his indifferent eyes on the first column of the leaders. He read, and his eyes grew horny. He jerked back at each sentence, electrified, staring. The article was shorter than usual. Total Repeal was named; the precise data when the Minister intended calling Parliament together to propose it. The " Total Repeal " might be guess-work — • an editor's bold stroke : but the details, the date, were significant of positive information. The Minister's definite and immediate instructions were exactly stated. Where could the fellow have got hold of that ? Dacier asked the blank ceiling. He frowned at vacant corners of the room in an effort to conjure some speculation indicative of the source. Had his Chief confided the secret to another and a traitor? Had they been overheard in his library when the project determined on was put in plain speech ? The answer was no, impossible, to each question. He glanced at Diana. She ? But it was past midnight when he left her. And she would never have betrayed him, never, never. To imagine it a moment was an injury to her. Where else could he look ? It had been specially men- tioned in the communication as a secret by his Chief, who trusted him and no others. Up to the consultation with the Cabinet, it was a thing to be guarded like life itself. 320 DIANA OP THE CROSSWAYS Kot to a soul except Diana would Dacier have breathed syllable of any secret — and one of this weight I He ran down the article again. There were the facts ; undeniable facts ; and they detonated with audible roaring and rounding echoes of them over England. How did they come there ? As well inquire how man came on the face of the earth. He had to wipe his forehead perpetually. Think as he would in exaltation of Diana to shelter himself, he was the accused. He might not be the guilty, but he had opened his mouth; and though it was to her only, and she, as Dunstane had sworn, true as steel, he could not escape condemnation. He had virtually betrayed his master. Diana would never betray her lover, but the thing was in the air as soon as uttered : and off to the printing-press ! Dacier's grotesque fancy under annoyance pictured a stream of small printer's devils in flight from his babbling lips. He consumed bits of brea/kfast, with a sour confession that a newspaper-article had hit Jiim at last, and stunningly. Hat and coat were called for. The state of aimlessness in hot perplexity demands a show of action. Whither to go first was as obscure as what to do. Diana said of the Englishman's hat and coat, that she supposed they were to make him a walking presentment of the house he had shut up behind him. A shot of the eye at the glass confirmed the likeness, but with a ruefully wry-faced repudiation of it internally : — Not so shut up ! the reverse of that — a common babbler. However, there was no doubt of Diana. First he would call on her. The pleasantest dose in perturbations of the kind is instinctively taken first. She would console, perhaps direct him to guess how the secret had leaked. — But so suddenly, immediately ! It was inexplicable. Sudden and immediate consequences were experienced. On the steps of his house his way was blocked by the arri- val of Mr. Quintin Manx, who jumped out of a cab, bellowing interjections and interrogations in a breath. Was there anything in that article ? He had read it at break- fast, and it had choked him. Dacier was due at a house and could not wait : he said, rather sharply, he was not responsible for newspaper articles. Quintin Manx, a senior THE CKIMINAL's JUDGE LOVE'S CEIMINAL 321 gentleman and junior landowner, vowed that no Minister intending to sell the country should treat him as a sheep. The shepherd might go; he would not carry his flock with him. But was there a twinkle of probability in the story ? . . . that article ! Dacier was unable to inform him ; he was very hurried, had to keep an appointment. " If I let you go, will you come and lunch with me at two ? " said Quintin. To get rid of him, Dacier nodded and agreed. " Two o'clock, mind ! " was bawled at his heels as he walked off with his long stride, unceremoniously leaving the pursy gentleman of sixty to settle with his cabman far to the rear. CHAPTEE XXXIV IN WHICH IT IS DAEKLT SEEN HOW THE CEIMINAl's JUDGE When we are losing balance on a precipice we do not think much of the thing we have clutched for support. Our balance is restored and we have not fallen ; that is the comfortable reflection : we stand as others do, and we will for the future be warned to avoid the dizzy stations which cry for resources beyond a common equilibrium, and where a slip precipitates us to ruin. When, further, it is a woman planted in a burning blush, having to idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering position are speedily swal- lowed in the one pervading flame. She sees but an ashen curl of the path she has traversed to safety, if anything. Knowing her lover was to come in the morning, Diana's thoughts dwelt wholly upon the way to tell him, as tenderly as possible withoiit danger to herself, that her time for enter- tainingwas over until she had finished her book ; indefinitely, therefore. The apprehension of his complaining pricked the memory that she had something to forgive. He had sunk her in her own esteem by compelling her to see her 322 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS woman's softness. But how high above all other men her experience of him could place him notwithstanding ! He had bowed to the figure of herself, dearer than herself, that she set before him : and it was a true figure to the world ; a too fictitious to any but the most knightly of lovers. She forgave ; and a shudder seized her. — Snake ! she rebuked the delicious run of fire through her veins ; for she was not like the idol women of imperishable type, who are never for a twinkle the prey of the blood : statues created by man's common desire to impress upon the sex his possess- ing pattern of them as domestic decorations. When she entered the room to Dacier and they touched hands, she rejoiced in her coolness, without any other feel- ing or perception active. Not to be unkind, not too kind : this was her task. She waited for the passage of common- places. " You slept well, Percy ? " "Yes; and you?" "I don't think I even dreamed." They sat. She noticed the cloud on him and waited for his allusion to it, anxious concerning him simply. Dacier flung the hair off his temples. Words of Titanic formation were hurling in his head at journals and journal- ists. He muttered his disgust at them. " Is there anything to annoy you in the papers to-day ? " she asked, and thought how handsome his face was in anger. The paper of Mr. Tonans was named by him. "You have not seen it ? " " I have not opened it yet." He sprang up. " The truth is, those fellows can now af- ford to buy right and left, corrupt every soul alive ! There must have been a spy at the keyhole. I 'm pretty certain — I could swear it was not breathed to any ear but mine ; and there it is this morning in black and white." " What is ? " cried Diana, turning to him on her chair. " The thing I told you last night." Her lips worked, as if to spell the thing. " Printed, do you say ? " she rose. " Printed. In a leading article, loud as a trumpet ; a hue and cry running from end to end of the country. And my Chief has already had the satisfaction of seeing the secret THE CKIMINAL'S JUDGE LOVE'S CEIMINAIi 323 he confided to me yesterday roared in all the thoroughfares this morning. They 've got the facts : his decision to pro- pose it, and the date — the whole of it ! But who could have betrayed it ? " Por the first time since her midnight expedition she felt a sensation of the full weight of the deed. She heard thunder. She tried to disperse the growing burden by an inward summons to contempt of the journalistic profession, but nothing would come. She tried to minimize it, and her brain succumbed. Her views of the deed last night and now throttled reason in two contending clutches. The enormity swelled its dimensions, taking shape, and pointing magneti- cally at her. She stood absolutely, amazedly, bare before it. " Is it of such very great importance ? " she said, like one supplicating him to lessen it. " A secret of State ? If you ask whether it is of great importance to me, relatively it is of course. Nothing greater. Personally my conscience is clear. I never men- tioned it — couldn't have mentioned it — to any one but you. I 'm not the man to blab secrets. He spoke to me because he knew he could trust me. To tell you the truth, I 'm brought to a dead stop. I can't make a guess. I 'm certain, from what he said, that he trusted me only with it : perfectly certain. I know him well. He was in his library, speaking in his usual conversational tone, deliberately, not overloud. He stated that it was a secret between us." "Will it affect him?" " This article ? Why, naturally it will. You ask strange questions. A Minister coming to a determination like that! It affects him vitally. The members of the Cabinet are not so devoted. ... It affects us all — the whole Party ; may split it to pieces ! There 's no reckoning the upset right and left. If it were false, it could be refuted ; we could despise it as a trick of journalism. It 's true. There 's the mischief. Tonans did not happen to call here last night ? — absurd ! I left later than twelve." "No, but let me hear," Diana said hurriedly, for the sake of uttering the veracious negative and to slur it over. " Let me hear . . ." She could not muster an idea. 324 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS Her delicious thrilling voice was a comfort to him. He lifted his breast high and thumped it, trying to smile. " After all, it 's pleasant being with you, Tony. Give me your hand — you may : I 'm bothered — confounded by this morning surprise. It was like walking against the muzzle of a loaded cannon suddenly unmasked. One can't fathom the mischief it will do. And I shall be suspected, and can't quite protest myself the spotless innocent. Not even to one's heart's mistress ! to the wife of the bosom ! I sup- pose I 'm no Roman. You won't give me your hand ? Tony, you might, seeing I am rather . . ." A rush of scalding tears flooded her eyes. " Don't touch me," she said, and forced her sight to look straight at him through the fiery shower. " I have done positive tnischief? " "You, my dear Tony?" He doated on her face. "I don't blame you, I blame myself. These things should never be breathed. Once in the air, the devil has hold of them. Don't take it so much to heart. The thing 's bad enough to bear as it is. Tears ! Let me have the hand. I came, on my honour, with the most honest intention to submit to your orders : but if I see you weeping in sym- pathy ! " " Oh ! for heaven's sake," she caught her hands away from him, " don't be generous. Whip me with scorpions. And don't touch me," cried Diana. " Do you understand ? You did not name it as a secret. I did not imagine it to be a secret of immense, immediate importance." " But — ivhat ? " shouted Dacier stiffening. He -Ranted her positive meaning, as she perceived, having hoped that it was generally taken and current, and the shock to him over. " I had ... I had not a suspicion of doing harm, Percy." " But what harm have you done ? No riddles ! " His features gave sign of the break in their common ground, the widening gulf. " I went ... it was a curious giddiness : I can't account for it. I thought ..." " Went ? You went where ? " " Last night. I would speak intelligibly : my mind has gone. Ah ! you look. It is not so bad as my feeling." THE CEIMINAL's JUDGE LOVE's CRIMINAI. 325 " But where did you go last night ? What ! — to Tonans ? " She drooped her head: she saw the track of her route cleaving the darkness in a demoniacal zig-zag and herself in demon's grip. " Yes," she confronted him. " I went to Mr. Tonans." " Why ? " " I went to him — " " You went alone ? " " I took my maid." « Well ? " " It was late when you left me ..." " Speak plainly ! " " I am trying : I will tell you all." " At once, if you please." " I went to him — why ? There is no accounting for it. He sneered constantly at any stale information." " You gave him constant information ? " " No : in our ordinary talk. He railed at me for being * out of it.' I must be childish : I went to show him — oh ! my vanity ! I think I must have been possessed." She watched the hardening of her lover's eyes. They penetrated, and through them she read herself insufferably. But it was with hesitation still that he said : " Then you betrayed me ? " " Percy ! I had not a suspicion of mischief." " You went straight to this man ? " " Not thinking ..." " You sold me to a journalist ! " " I thought it was a secret of a day. I don't think you — no, you did not tell me to keep it secret. A word from you would have been enoiigh. I was in extremity." Dacier threw his hands up and broke away. He had an impulse to dash from the room, to get a breath of different air. He stood at the window, observing tradesmen's carts, housemaids, blank doors, dogs, a beggar fifer. Her last words recurred to him. He turned : " You were in ex- tremity, you said. What is the meaning of that ? What extremity ? " Her large dark eyes flashed powerlessly; her shape appeared to have narrowed ; her tongue, too, was a feeble penitent. 826 DIAfTA OF THE CEOSSWAYS " Tou ask a creature to recall her acts of insanity." " There must be some signification in your words, I Suppose." " I will tell you as clearly as I can. You have the right to be my judge. I was in extremity — that is, I saw no means ... I could not write : it was ruin coming." " Ah ? — you took payment for playing spy ? " " I fancied I could retrieve . . . Now I see the folly, the baseness. I was blind." " Then you sold me to a joiirnalist for money ? " The intolerable scourge fetched a stifled scream from her and drove her pacing, but there was no escape ; she returned to meet it. The room was a cage to both of them, and every word of either was a sting. " Percy, I did not imagine he -v^ould use it — make use of it as he has done." « Not ? And virhen he paid for it ? " "I fancied it would be merely of general service' — ^if ^ny." " Distributed ; I see : not leading to the exposure of the communicant ! " " You are harsh ; but I would not have yoU milder." The meekness of such a mischief-doer was revolting and called for the lash. "Do me the favour to name the sum. I am curious to learn what my imbecility was counted worth." " No sum was named." " Have I been bought for a song ? " "It was a suggestion -i^ no definite . . • nothing stipu- lated." " You were to receive money ! " " Leave me a bit of veiling ! No, you shall behold me the thing I ato. Listen ... I was poor . . ." " You might have applied to me." "For money ! That I could not do." "Better than betraying me, believe me." " I had no thought of betraying. I hope I could have died rather than consciously betray." " Money ! My whole fortune was at your disposal." " I was beset with debts, unable to write, and, last night THE criminal's JUDGE LOVE'S CEIMINAIj 327 when yoTi left me, abject. It seemed to me that you dis- respected me . . ." " Last night ! " Dacier cried with lashing emphasis. " It is evident to me that I have the reptile in me, Percy. Or else I am subject to lose my reason. I went ... I went like a bullet : I cannot describe it ; I was mad. I need a strong arm, I want help. I am given to think that I do my best and can be independent; I break down. I went blindly — now I see it — for the chance of recovering my position, as the gambler casts ; and he wins or loses. With me it is the soul that is lost. No exact sum was named ; thousands were hinted." " You are hardly practical on points of business." " I was insane." "I think you said you slept well after it," Dacier remarked. " I had so little the idea of having done evilly, that I slept without a dream." -~ He shrugged : — the consciences of women are such smooth deeps, or running shallows. — "I have often wondered how your newspaper men got their information," he said, and muttered : " Money — women ! " adding : " Idiots to prime them ! And I one of the leaky vessels ! Well, we learn. I have been rather astonished at times of late at the scraps of secret knowl- edge displayed by Tonans. If he flourishes his thousands ! The wonder is, he does n't corrupt the Ministers' wives. Perhaps he does. Marriage will become a danger-sign to Parliamentary members. Foreign women do these tricks . . . women of a well-known stamp. It is now a full year, I think, since I began to speak to you of secret matters — and congratulated myself, I recollect, on your thirst for them." "Percy, if you suspect that I have uttered one word before last night, you are wrong. I cannot paint my temp- tation or my loss of sense last night. Previously I was blameless. I thirsted, yes ; but in the hope of helping you." He looked at her. She perceived how glitteringly love- less his eyes had grown. It was her punishment ; and though the enamoured woman's heart protested it exces- sive, she accepted it. 328 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS " I can never trust you again," he said. " I fear you will not," she replied. His coming back to her after the departure of the guests last night shone on him in splendid colours of single- minded loverlike devotion. " I came to speak to my own heart. 1 thought it would give you pleasure; thought I could trust you utterly. I had not the slightest conception I was imperilling my honour ! . . ." He stopped. Her bloodless fixed features revealed an intensity of anguish that checked him. Only her mouth, a little open for the sharp breath, appeared dumbly be- seeching. Her large eyes met his like steel to steel, as of one who would die fronting the weapon. He strangled a loathsome inclination to admire. " So good bye," he said. She moved her lips. He said no more. In half a minute he was gone. To her it was the plucking of life out of her breast. She pressed her hands where heart had been. The pallor and cold of death took her body. CHAPTER XXXV REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER TIME OF TRIUMPH The shutting of her house-door closed for Dacier that woman's history in connection with himself. He set his mind on the consequences of the act of folly — the trusting a secret to a woman. All were possibly not so bad : none should be trusted. The air of the street fanned him agreeably as he revolved the horrible project of confession to the man who had put faith in him. Particulars might be asked. She would be unnamed, but an imagination of the effect of naming her placarded a notorious woman in fresh paint : two members of the same family her victims ! And last night, no later than last night, he had swung round at this very corner of the street to give her the full- THE TEITE HEROINE'S TIME OE TRIUMPH. 329 est proof of his affection. He beheld a dupe trotting into a carefully-laid pitfall. She had him by the generosity of his confidence in her. Moreover, the recollection of her recent feeble phrasing, when she stood convicted of the treachery, when a really clever woman would have de- veloped her resources, led him to doubt her being so finely gifted. She was just clever enough to hoodwink. He attributed the dupery to a trick of imposing the idea of her virtue upon men. Attracted by her good looks and sparkle, they entered the circle of her charm, became de- lightfully intimate, suffered a rebuff, and were from that time prepared to serve her purpose. How many other wretched dupes had she dangling ? He spied at Westlake, spied at Red worth, at old Lord Larrian, at Lord Dannis- burgh, at Arthur Ehodes, dozens. Old and young were alike to her if she saw an end to be gained by keeping them hooked. Tonans too, and Whitmonby. Newspaper editors were especially serviceable. Perhaps " a young Minister of State" held the foremost rank in that respect: if com- pletely duped and squeezeable, he produced more sub- stantial stuff. The background of ice in Dacier's composition was brought to the front by his righteous contempt of her treachery. No explanation of it would have appeased him. She was guilty, and he condemned her. She stood con- demned by all the evil likely to ensue from her misdeed. Scarcely had he left her house last night when she was away to betray him ! — He shook her from him without a pang. Crediting her with the one merit she had — that of not imploring for mercy — he the more easily shook her off. Treacherous, she had not proved theatrical. So there was no fuss in putting out her light, and it was done. He was justified by the brute facts. Honourable, courteous, kindly gentleman, highly civilized, an excellent citizen and a patriot, he was icy at an outrage to his principles, and in the dominion of Love a sultan of the bow-string and chop- per period, sovereignly endowed to stretch a finger for the scimitared Mesrour to make the erring woman head and trunk with one blow : and away with those remnants I This internally he did. Enough that the brute facts jus- tified him. 330 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS St. James's park was crossed, and the grass of the Green park, to avoid inquisitive friends. He was obliged to walk ; exercise, action of any sort, was imperative, and but for some engagement he would have gone to his fencing-rooms for a bout with the master. He remembered his engage- ment and grew doubly embittered. He had absurdly pledged himself to lunch with Quintin Manx; that was, to pretend to eat while submitting to be questioned by a political dullard strong on his present right to overhaul and rail at his superiors. The house was one of a block along the North- Western line of Hyde park. He kicked at the subjection to go there, but a promise was binding, though he gave it when stunned. He could have silenced IV^r. Manx with the posing interrogation : Why have I so long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore ? For him, he could not answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Ship- ping interest, was influential. The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics. Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner's niece till Miss Constance Asper stepped into her drawing- room to welcome him. She was an image of repose to his mind. The calm pure outline of her white features re- freshed him as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke, wrangle, the wrestling city's wiekednesa, behind him. "My uncle is very disturbed," she said. "Is the news — if I am not very indiscreet in inquiring ? " "I have a practice of never paying attention to news- paper articles," Dacier replied. " I am only affected by living with one who does," Miss Asper observed, and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral attractiveness in addition to physi- cal beauty. Her water-colour sketches were on her uncle's walls : the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed her. She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque of the nunnery. She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess. " It 's a dusty game for ladies," Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled by it. And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a pathos in a man's discovery of the fair THE TRUE heroine's TIME OP TRIUMPH QS% young creature undefiled by any interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower's environments. The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person capti- vated him, by contrast. His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married : who, by the way, contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from their traffic with the masculine world : often — if we did but know ! — a parrot repetition of the last male visitor's remarks. But tha,t which the fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own. She too is her own : or vowed but to one. She is on all sides impressive in purity. The world worships her as its perfect pearl : and we are brought refreshfully to acknpsrl- edge that the world is right. By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distin- guished Constance Asper celestially. As he was well aware, she had long preferred him — the reserved among many pleading pressing suitors. Her steady faithfulness had fe,d on the poorest crumbs. He ventured to express the hope that she was well. "Yes," she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his concern in so humble a person. " You look a little pale," he said. She coloured like a sea-water shell. *' I am inclined to paleness by nature." Her uncle disturbed them. Lunch was ready. He apolQ;- gized for the absence of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who k&pt house for them. Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister. Dacier found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite. He mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with him at midday : and Miss Asper, support- ing him in that effort, said beneyolently : " Gentlemen should eat ; they have so many fatigues and troubles." She her- self did not like to be seen eating in public Her lips opened to the morsels, as with a bird's bill, though wi^i none of the pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry. " But now, I say, positively, how about that article ? " said Quintin. 332 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said : " Oh, ! spare us politics, dear uncle." Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs. "Come, you can say whether there's anything in it," Dacier's host pushed him. " I should not say it if I could," he replied. The mild sweetness of Miss Asper's look encouraged him. He was touched to the quick by hearing her say : " You ask for Cabinet secrets, uncle. All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a seal next to divine." Next to divine! She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle. " I 'm not prying into secrets," Quintin persisted ; " all I want to know is, whether there 's any foundation for that article — all London 's boiling about it, I can tell you — or it 's only newspaper's humbug." "Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor's office," rejoined Dacier. " A pretty sort of answer I should get." " It would at least be complimentary," " How do you mean ? " " The net was cast for you — and the sight of a fish in it ! " Miss Asper almost laughed. " Have you heard the choir at St. Catherine 's ? " she asked. / Dacier had not. He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday. " Do," she murmured. " Well, you seem to be a pair against me," her uncle grumbled. " Anyhow I think it 's important. People have been talking for some time, and I don't want to be taken unawares ; I won't be a yoked ox, mind you." " Have you been sketching lately ? " Dacier asked Miss Asper. She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said. "May I see it?" J "If you wish." i They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped. He THE TETJE HEEOINE's TIME OP TEIUMPH 333 was conducted to a room midway upstairs : an heiress's conception of a saintly little room; and more impressive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint's, with the many cruci- fixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs, jewel-clasped sacred volumes :, every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness. ' She depreciated her sketching powers. " I am impatient with my imperfections. I am therefore doomed not to advance." " On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence," he said, much disposed to drone about it. She sighed : " I fear not." He turned the leaves, comparing her modesty with the performance. The third of the leaves was a subject in- stantly recognized by him. It represented the place he had inherited from Lord Dannisburgh. He named it. She smiled : " You are good enough to see a likeness ? My aunt and I were passing it last October, and I waited for a day, to sketch." " You have taken it from my favourite point of view." " I am glad." " How much I should like a copy ! " " If you will accept that ? " " I could not rob you." " I can make a duplicate." " The look of the place pleases you ? " " Oh ! yes ; the pines behind it ; the sweet little village church ; even the appearance of the rustics ; — it is all im- pressively old English. I suppose you are very seldom there ? " " Does it look like a home to you ? " " No place more ! " " I feel the loneliness," " Where I live I feel no loneliness ! " " You have heavenly messengers near you." " They do not always come." " Would you consent to make the place less lonely to me ? " Her bosom rose. In deference to her maidenly under- standing, she gazed inquiringly. " If you love it ! " said he. 334 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS " The place ? " she said, looking soft at the possessor. " Constance ! " " Is it true ? " "As you yourself. Could it be other than true ? This hand is mine ? " "Oh! Percy." Borrowing the world's poetry to describe them, the long prayed-for Summer enveloped the melting snows. So the recollection of Diana's watch beside his uncle's death-bed was wiped out. Ay, and the hissing of her treachery silenced. This maidenly hand put him at peace with the world, instead of his defying it for a worthless woman ■. — who could not do better than accept the shelter of her husband 's house, as she ought to be told, if her friends wished her to save her reputation. Dacier made his way downstairs to Quintin Manx, by whom he was hotly congratulated and informed of the extent of the young lady 's fortune : on the strength of which it was expected that he would certainly speak a pri- vate word in elucidation of that newspaper article. "I know nothing of it," said Dacier, but promised to come and dine. Alone in her happiness Constance Asper despatched various brief notes under her gold-symboUed crest to sisterly friends ; one to Lady Wathin, containing the single line : — " Your prophesy is confirmed." Dacier was comfortably able to face his Club after the excitement of a proposal, with a bride on his hands. He was assaulted concerning the article, a,nd he parried capi- tally. Say that her lips were rather cold: at any rate, they invigorated him. Her character was guaranteed — not the hazy idea of a dupe. And her fortune would be enormous ; a speculation merely due to worldly prudence and prospective ambition. At the dinner-table of four, in the evening, conversation would have seemed dull to him, by contrast, had it not been for the presiding grace of his bride, whose habitually emi- nent feminine air of superiority to the repast was throned by her appreciative reeeptiveness of his looks and utterances. Before leaving her, he won her consent to a very early mar- THE TKUE heroine's TIME OP TRIUMPH 335 riage ; on the plea of a possibly' approacMng Session, and also that they had waited long/ The consent, notwithstanding the hurry of preparations it involved, besides the annihila- tion of her desire to meditate on so solemn a change in her life and savour the congratulation of her friends and have the choir of St. Catherine's rigorously drilled in her favour- ite anthems, wa^ beautifully yielded to the pressure of circumstances. , There lay on his table at night a letter; a bulky letter, Ko need to tear it open for sight of the signature : the superscription was redolent of that betraying woman. He tossed it unopened into the fire. As it was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the address, as she had done, and still ofEering him a last chance of viewing the contents. She fought on the consum- ing fire to have her exculpation heard. But was she not a shameless traitor ? She had caught him by his love of his country and hope to serve it. She had wound into his heart to bleed him of all he knew and sell the secrets for money. A wonderful sort of eloquence lay there, on those coals, no doubt. He felt a slight move- ment of curiosity to glance at two or three random sentences •, very slight. And why read them now ? They were value- less to him, mere outcries. He judged her by the brute facts. She and her slowly-consuming letter were of a com- mon blackness. Moreover, to read them when he was plighted to another woman would be senseless. In the dis- .covery of her baseness, she had made a poor figure. Douht- iess during the afternoon she had trimmed her intuitive Belial art of making " the worse appear the better cause : " queer to peruse, and instructive in an unprofitable depart- ment of knowledge — r- the tricks of the sex. He said to himself, with little intuition of the popular taste : She would n't be a bad heroine of Eomance ! He said it derisively of the Romantic. But the right worship- ful heroine of Eomance was the front-face female picture he had won for his walls. Poor Diana was the flecked heroine of Reality : not always the same ; not impeccable ; not an ignorant-innocent, nor a guileless : good under good leadings devoted to the death in a grave crisis ; often wrestling with iher terrestrial nature nobly; and a growing soul; but not 836 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS one whose purity was carved in marble for the assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the changeless thing defies time and his fellows, is the pillar of his home and universally enviable. Your fair one of Romance cannot suffer a mishap without a plotting villain, perchance many of them, to wreak the dread iniquity : she cannot move without him ; she is the marble block, and if she is to have a feature, he is the sculptor ; she depends on him for life, and her human history at least is married to him far more than to the rescuing lover. N"o wonder, then, that men should find her thrice cherishable featureless, or with the most moderate possible indication of a countenance. Thou- sands of the excellent simple creatures do ; and every reader of her tale. On the contrary, the heroine of Reality is that woman whom you have met or heard of once in your course of years, and very probably despised for bearing in her com- position the motive principle ; at best, you say, a singular mixture of good and bad ; anything but the feminine ideal of man. Feature to some excess, you think, distinguishes her. Yet she furnishes not any of the sweet sensual excite- ment pertaining to her spotless rival pursued by villainy. She knocks at the doors of the mind, and the mind must open to be interested in her. Mind and heart must be wide open to excuse her sheer descent from the pure ideal of man. Dacier's wandering reflections all came back in crowds to the judicial Bench of the Black Cap. He felt finely, apart from the treason, that her want of money degraded her : him too, by contact. Money she might have had to any extent : upon application for it, of course. How was he to imagine that she wanted money ! Smilingly as she welcomed him and bis friends, entertaining them royally, he was bound to think she had means. A decent propriety bound him not to think of the matter at all. He naturally sup- posed she was capable of conducting her affairs. And — money ! It soiled his memory : though the hour at Eovio was rather pretty, and the scene at Copsley touching : other times also, short glimpses of the woman were taking. The flood of her treachery effaced them. And why reflect? Constance called to him to look her way.^^^- Diana's letter died hard. The corners were burnt to HEAKTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS 337 black tissue, with an edge or two of discoloured paper. A small frayed central heap still resisted, and in kindness to the necessity for privacy, he impressed the fire-tongs to complete the execution. After which he went to his desk and worked, under the presidency of Constance. CHAPTEE XXXVI IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEAETLESSNBSS OF WOMEN WITH BEAINS Htmen^eal rumours are those which might be backed to run a victorious race with the tale of evil fortune ; and clearly for the reason that man's livelier half is ever alert to speed them. They travel with an astonishing celerity over the land, like flames of the dry beacon-faggots of old time in announcement of the invader or a conquest, gather- ing as they go : wherein, to say nothing of their vastly wider range, they surpass the electric wires. Man's nuptial half is kindlingly concerned in the launch of a new couple ; it is the business of the fair sex : and man himself (very strangely, but nature quickens him still) lends a not un- favouring eye to the preparations of the matrimonial vessel for its oily descent into the tides, where billows will soon be rising, captain and mate soon discussing the fateful question of who is commander. We consent, it appears, to hope again for mankind ; here is another chance ! Or else, assuming the happiness of the pair, that pomp of ceremo- nial, contrasted with the little wind-blown candle they carry between them, catches at our weaker fibres. After so many ships have foundered, some keel up, like poisoned fish, at the first drink of water, it is a gallant spectacle, let us avow ; and either the world perpetuating it is heroical or nature incorrigible in the species. Marriages are unceasing. Friends do it, and enemies ; the unknown contractors of this engagement, or armistice, inspire an interest. It certainly is both exciting and comforting to hear that man and woman are ready to join in a mutual affirmative, say Yes together again. It sounds like the end of the war. 22 338 -DIAJSA OF THE CEOSSWAYS The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State and the greatest heiress of her day ; — ■ notoriously " The young Minister of State " of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman madly enamoured of him — and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a Duchy ; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place. It did away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise abroad like nonsense. The Hod. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper ; and she rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the Papists. She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily for the Protest- ant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal. Town and country buzzed the news ; and while that dreary League trumpeted about the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental chattered of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely state, with every musical accessory, short of Operatic. Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement* The excellent woman enjoyed marriages of High Life : which, as there is presumably wealth to support them, are manifestly under sanction : and a marriage that she could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a marriage in the family ; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter of her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the pomp that bids the heavens open. She and no other spread the tidings of Miss Asper's debating upon the step to Eome at the very instant of Percy Dacier's declaration of his love ; — and it was a beautiful struggle, that of the half -dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love prevailing ! She sent word of to Lady Dunstane: "You know the interest I have always taken in dear Constance Asper," &c. ; inviting her to come on a visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the ceremony of a wedding " likely to be the grandest of our time." Pitiful though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their "mutual devotion to duty" was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers. HEABTLESSNESS OP "WOMEN WITH BKAHSTS 339 Lady Dunstane declined the invitation. She waited to hear from her friend, and the days went by ; she could only sorrow for her poor Tony, divining her state. However little of wrong in the circumstances, they imposed a silence on her decent mind, and no conceivable shape of writing would transmit condolences. She waited, with a dull heart- ache : by no means grieving at Dacier's engagement to tlie heiress; until Redworth animated her, as the bearer of rather startling intelligence, indirectly relating to the soul she loved. An accident in the street had befallen Mr. War- wick. Redworth wanted to know whether Diana should be told of it, tliough he had no particulars to give ; and some- what to his disappointment, Lady Dunstane said she would write. She delayed, thinking the accident might not be serious ; and the information of it to Diana surely would be so. Next day at noon her visitor was Lady Wathin, evidently perturbed and anxious to say more than she dared : but she received no assistance. After beating the air in every direction, especially dwelling on the fond reciprocal affection of the two devoted lovers, to be united within three days' time, Lady Wathin said at last : " And is it not shocking ! I talk of a naarriage and am appalled by a death. That poor man died last night in the hospital. I mean poor Mr. Warwick. He was recovering, getting strong and well, and he was knocked down at a street- Grossing and died last night. It is a warning to us ! " " Mr. Redworth happened to hear of it at his Club, near which the accident occurred, and he called at the hospital. Mr. Warwick was then alive," said Lady Dunstane ; add- ing : " Well, if prevention is better than cure, as we hear ! Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age, which are a certain crop ! " Lady Wathin's eyelids worked and her lips shut fast at the coldhearted remark void of meaning. She sighed. " So ends a life of misery, my dear ! " " You are compassionate." "I hope so. But . . . Indeed I must speak, if you will let me. I think of the living." Lady Dunstane widened her eyes. " Of Mrs. Warwick ? " " She has now the freedom she desired. I think of others. Forgive me, but Constance Asper is to me as a 340 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS daughter. I have perhaps no grounds for any apprehen- sion. Love so ardent, so sincere, was never shown by bridegroom elect : and it is not extraordinary to those acquainted with dear Constance. But one may be a wor- shipped saint and experience defection. The terrible sto- ries one hears of a power of fascination almost . . . ! " Lady Wathin hung for the word. " Infernal," said Lady Dunstane, whose brows had been bent inquiringly. " Have no fear. The freedom you allude to will not be used to interfere with any entertainment in prospect. It was freedom, mj friend desired. Now that her jewel is restored to her, she is not the person to throw it away, be sure. And pray, drop the subject." " One may rely . . . you think ? " "Oh! Oh!" " This release coming just before the wedding ! . . ," " I should hardly suppose the man to be the puppet you depict, or indicate." " It is because men — so many — are not puppets that one is conscious of alarm." " Your previous remark," said Lady Dunstane, " sounded superstitious. Your present one has an antipodal basis. But, as for your alarm, check it : and spare me further. My friend has acknowledged powers. Considering that she does not use them, you should learn to respect her." Lady Wathin bowed stifly. She refused to partake of lunch, having, she said, satisfied her conscience by the per- formance of a duty and arranged with her flyman to catch a train. Her cousin Lady Dunstane smiled loftily at every- thing she uttered, and she felt that if a woman like this Mrs. Warwick could put division between blood-relatives, she could do worse, and was to be dreaded up to the hour of the nuptials. / " I meant no' harm in coming," she said, at the shaking of hands. " No, no ; I understand," said her hostess : " you are hen- hearted over your adopted brood. The situation is percep- tible and your intention creditable." As one of the good women of the world, Lady Wathin in departing was indignant at the tone and dialect of a younger woman not modestly concealing her possession of the larger HEABTLESSNESS OP WOMEN WITH BRAINS 341 brain.! Brains in women she both dreaded and detested; she believed them to be devilish,,' Here were instances : — ■ they had driven poor Sir Lukin to evil courses, and that poor Mr. Warwick straight under the wheels of a cab. Sir Lukin's name was trotting in public with a naughty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's : Mrs. Warwick might still trim her arts to baffie the marriage. Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless : they have no pity for distress, no horror of catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving. Brains in men advance a household to station ; but brains in women divide it and are the wrecking of society. For- tunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief. She was a really good woman of the world, head- ing a multitude ; the same whom you are accustomed to hear exalted; lucky in having had a guided girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence ; and in having stock in the moral funds, shares in the sentimental tramways. Wherever the world laid its hoards or ran its lines, she was found, and forcible enough to be eminent ; though at fixed hours of the day, even as she washed her hands, she abjured world- liness : a performance that cleansed her. If she did not make morality appear loveable to the objects of her dislike, it was owing to her want of brains to see the origin, nature and right ends of morality. But a world yet more deficient than she, esteemed her cordially for being a bulwark of the present edifice; which looks a solid structure when the microscope is not applied to its components. Supposing Percy Dacier a dishonourable tattler as well as an icy lover, and that Lady Wathin, through his bride, had become privy to the secret between him and Diana ? There is reason to think that she would have held it in terror over the baneful woman, but not have persecuted her : for she was by no means the active malignant of theat- rical plots. No, she would have charged it upon the posses- sion of brains by women, and have had a further motive for inciting the potent dignitary her husband to employ his authority to repress the sex's exercise of those fell weapons, hurtful alike to them and all coming near them. So extreme was her dread of Mrs. Warwick, that she 342 DIANA OF THE CBOSSWAYS drove from the London railway station to see Constance and be reassured by her tranquil aspect. Sweet Constance and her betrothed Percy were together, examining a missal. Lady Dnnstane despatched a few words of the facts to Diana. She hoped to hear from her; rather hoped, for the moment, not to see her. No answer came. The great day of the nuptials came and passed. She counted on her hus- band's appearance the next morning, as the good gentle- man made a point of visiting her, to entertain the wife he adored, whenever he had a wallet of gossip that would overlay the blank of his absence. He had been to the church of the wedding — he did not say with whom : — all the world was there; and he rapturously described the ceremony, stating that it set women weeping and caused him to behave like a fool. "You are impressionable," said his wife. He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage — when celebrated impressively, it seemed. "Tony calls the social world ' the theatre of appetites,' as we have it at present," she said; "and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in the second act of the hun- gry tragi-comedy." "Yes, there's the breakfast," Sir Lu kin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him : in fact, quite so, as to her speech. Emma's heart now yearned to her Tony. Consulting her strength, she thought she might journey to London, and on the third morning after the Dacier-Asper inarriage, she started. Diana's door was open to Arthur Rhodes when Emma reached it. "Have you seen her?" she asked him. His head shook dolefully. "Mrs. Warwick is unwell; she has been working too hard." "You also, I 'm afraid." "No." He could deny that, whatever the look of him. "Come to me at Copsley soon," said she, entering to Danvers in the passage. " My mistress is upstairs, my lady," said Danvers. " She is lying on her bed." HEAKTLESSNES3 OF WOMEN WITH BEAINS 343 "She is ill?" "She has been lying on her bed ever since." " Since what ? " Lady Dunstane spoke sharply. Danvers retrieved her indiscretion. " Since she heard of the accident, my lady." "Take my name to her. Or no: I can venture." " I am not allowed to go in and speak to her. You will find the room quite dark, my lady, and very cold. It is her command. My mistress will not let me light the fire; and she has not eaten or drunk of anything since. . . . She will die, if you do not persuade her to take nourish- ment: a little, for a beginning. It wants the beginning." Emma went upstairs, thinking of the enigmatical maid, that she must be a good soul after all. Diana's bedroom door was opened slowly. "You will not be able to see at first, my lady," Danvers whispered. " The bed is to the left, and a chair. I would bring in a candle, but it hurts her eyes. She forbids it." Emma stepped in. The chill thick air of the unlighted London room was cavernous. She almost forgot the beloved of her heart in the thought that a living woman had been lying here more than two days and nights, fasting. The proof of an uttermost misery revived the circumstances within her to render her friend's presence in this desert of darkness credible.- She found the bed by touch, silently, and distinguished a dark heap on the bed; she heard no breathing. She sat and listened; then she stretched her hand and met her Tony's. It lay open. It was the hand of a drowned woman. -- Shutters and curtains and the fireless grate gave the room an appalling likeness to the vaults. So like to the home of death it seemed, that in a few minutes the watcher had lost count of time and kept but a wormy memory of the daylight. She dared not speak, for some fear of startling; for the worse fear of never getting answer. Tony's hand was lifeless. Her clasp of it struck no warmth. She stung herself with bitter reproaches for having let common mundane sentiments, worthy of a Lady Wathin, bar her instant offer of her bosom to the beloved who suffered in this depth of mortal agony. Tony's love of 344 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWATS a man, as she should have known, would he wrought of the elements of our being : when other women named Hap- piness, she said Life; in division, Death. Her body lying still upon the bed here was a soul borne onward by the river of Death. The darkness gave sight after a while, like a curtain lifting on a veil : the dead light of the underworld. Tony lay with her face up, her underlip dropped; straight from head to feet. The outline of her face, without hue of it, could be seen: sign of the hapless women that have souls in love. Hateful love of men ! Emma thought, and was moved to feel at the wrist for her darling's pulse. He has killed her! the thought flashed, as, with pangs chilling her frame, the pressure at the wrist continued insensible of the faintest heat. She clasped it, trembling, in pain to stop an outcry. "It is Emmy," said the voice. Emma's heart sprang to heaven on a rush of thanks. "My Tony," she breathed softly. She hung for a further proof of life in the motionless body. " Tony ! " she said. The answer was at her hand, a thread-like return of her clasp. "It is Emmy come to stay with you, never to leave you." The thin still answer was at her hand a moment; the fingers fell away. A deep breath was taken twice to say : "Don't talk to me." Emma retained the hand. She was warned not to press it by the deadness following its effort to reply. But Tony lived; she had given proof of life. Over this little wavering taper in the vaults Emma cowered, cherish- ing the hand, silently hoping for the voice. It came: "Winter." "It is a cold winter, Tony." "My dear will be cold." "I will light the fire." Emma lost no time in deciding to seek the match-box. The fire was lit and it flamed ; it seemed a revival in the room. Coming back to the bedside, she discerned her Tony's lack-lustre large dark eyes and her hollow cheeks: HEAETLESSNESS OP WOMEN WITH BEAINS 345 her mouth open to air as to the drawing-in of a sword; rather as to the releaser than the sustainer. Her feet were on the rug her maid had placed to cover them. Emma leaned across the bed to put them to her breast, beneath her fur mantle, and held them there despite the half- animate tug of the limbs and the shaft of iciness they sent to her very heart. When she had restored them to some "warmth, she threw aside her bonnet and lying beside Tony, took her in her arms, heaving now and then a deep sigh. She kissed her cheek. "It is Emmy." "Kiss her." "I have no strength." Emma laid her face on the lips. They were cold; even the breath between them cold. " Has Emmy been long . . . ? " "Here, dear? I think so. I am with my darling." Tony moaned. The warmth and the love were bringing back her anguish. She said: "I have been happy. It is not hard to go." Emma strained to her. " Tony will wait for her soul's own soul to go, the two together." There was a faint convulsion in the body. " If I cry, I shall go in pain." "You are in Emmy's arms, my beloved." Tony's eyes closed for forgetfulness under that sensa- tion. A tear ran down from her, but the pain was lax and neighboured sleep, like the pleasure. So passed the short winter day, little spoken. Then Emma bethought her of a way of leading Tony to take food, and she said: "I shall stay with you; I shall send for clothes; I am rather hungry. Don't stir, dear. I will be mistress of the house." She went below to the kitchen, where a few words in the ear of a Frenchwoman were sufficient to waken imme- diate comprehension of what was wanted, and smart ser- vice: within ten minutes an appetizing bouillon sent its odour over the bedroom. Tony, days back, had said her last to the act of eating ; but Emma sipping at the spoon and expressing satisfaction, was a pleasant picture. The bouillon smelt pleasantly. 346 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS " Your servants love you, " Emma said. "Ah, poor good souls." " They crowded up to me to hear of you. Madame of course at the first word was off to her pots. And w^e English have the habit of calling ourselves the practical people ! — This bouillon is consummate. — However, we have the virtues of barbarians; we can love and serve for love. I never tasted anything so good. I could become a glutton." "Do," said Tony. "I should be ashamed to ' drain the bowl ' all to myself: a solitary toper is a horrid creature, unless he makes a song of it." "Emmy makes a song of it to me." "But ' pledge me ' is a noble saying, when you think of humanity's original hunger for the whole. It is there that our civilizing commenced, and I am particularly fond of hearing the call. It is grandly historic. So pledge me, Tony. We two can feed from one spoon; it is a closer bond than the loving cup. I want you just to taste it and excuse my gluttony." Tony murmured, "No." The spoon was put to her mouth. She sighed to resist. The stronger will com- pelled her to move her lips. Emma fed her as a child, and nature sucked for life. The first effect was a gush of tears. Emma lay with her that night, when the patient was the better sleeper. But during the right at intervals she had the happiness of feeling Tony's hand travelling to make sure of her. CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY 347 CHAPTER XXXVTI A2T EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY CtiOSE upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously stately greetings, the salu- tation of the raised hat and a bow of the head from a posi- tion of military ereotness, followed by the remark: "I trust you are well, sir: " to which the reply: "I am very well, sir, and trust you are the same," was deemed a com- plimentary fulfilment of their mutual obligation in pres- ence. Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Ehodes, whose renewed appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye. The inquiry after the state of Mrs. War- wick's health having received its tolerably comforting answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed their contrary ways. The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would be welcomed by Lady Dunstane. There- upon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about to Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: "Sir, I might claim, by right of seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the lady, but the way is open to you." "Sir," said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, "permit me to defer to your many superior titles to that distinction." "The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking." " 1 venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my betters." "I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpower- ing condescension," said Mr. Sullivan Smith; "and I entreat you to ascribe my acceptance of your brief retire- ment to the urgent chai-acter of the business I have at heart." 348 DIAJiTA OF THE CKOSSWAYS He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed. Mr. Arthur Ehodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward. "If I mistake not," said the Irish gentleman, "I am indebted to Mr. Ehodes; and we have been joint partici- pators in the hospitality of Mrs. Warwick's table." The English gentleman replied: "It was there that I first had the pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of the wise king on tablets of gold and silver." Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: "I shall not long detain you, Mr. Ehodes," he passed through the doorway. Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quar- ter of an hour, when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness. He was ac- costed : " Now, my dear boy, it 's your turn to try if you have a chance, and good luck go with ye. I 've said what I could on your behalf, for you 're one of ten thousand in this country, you are." Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore been per- fectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian manner. Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in consequence, he con- ceived a cordial relish; and as he pac§d in the footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept ejaculating: "Not a bit! The fellow can't be Saxon ! And she had a liking for him. She 's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the chicks. Better he than another, if it 's to be any one. For he 's got fun in him ; he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the popular castors, as is their way over here. But I might have known there's always sure to CHAMPIONS OF THE STEICKEN LADY 349 be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing. Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal cur, no more worthy of you than Beelze- bub of Paradise. No matter! The daughters of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow. For personal and patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature But her friend says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert, kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest. They know me not, who think I can't worship. Why, what were I with- out my star? At best a pickled porker." Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodious- ness in the soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. " So, here 's the boy. Query, the face he wears." "How kind of you to wait," said Arthur. "We'll call it sympathy, for convenience," rejoined Sullivan Smith. " Well, and what next? " "You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering." "Is that all?" "Why, what more?" Arthur was jealously inspected. "You look open-hearted, my dear boy." Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a reflective ahem. "Excuse me for cornemusing in your company," he said. " But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world. She 's down with a cold, you know." "An influenza," said Arthur. The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to cloak her sad plight. " She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country. 'T is the fate of us Irish, and we're con- demned to it for the sin of getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead. Unbutton a 350 DIAITA OP THE CROSSWATS •waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and yon 're lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap. Ah, but call at her house in shoals, the world '11 soon be saying it 's worse than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye understand? " The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of the darting cracker-metaphor. "I think I do," he said. "She will soon be at Copsley — Lady Dunstane's house, on the hills — and there we can see her." " And that 's next to the happiness of consoling — if only it had been granted ! She 's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of lamentation has opened a prac- ticable path or water-way to the poor nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Ehodes! Well, and I '11 be one with you; for there 's not a star in the firmament more deserving of homage than that lady." "Let 's walk in the park and talk of her," said Arthur. "There 's no sweeter subject to me." His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. " As long as you like ! — nor to me ! " he exclaimed. " And that ever since I first beheld her on the night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name: — none of your Warwicks and your . . . But let the cur go bark- ing. He can't tell what he 's lost; perhaps he does n't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on her tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady, to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'T is a law they 've instituted for the protection of dirty dogs — their majority 1 " "I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know," said Arthur. " Let 's hear," quoth Sullivan Smith ; proceeding : " She 's the Arabian Nights in person, that 's sure ; and Shake- speare's Plays, tragic and comuc; and the Book of Celtic History ; and Erin incarnate — down with a cold, no matter CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY 351 where; but we know where it was caught. So there's a pretty library for who 's to own her now she 's enfranchized by circumstances ; — and a poetical figure too ! " He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize. Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: "It would be another world to me if I lost her." "True; but what of the lady ? " "No praise of mine could do her justice." "That may be, but it 's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the object. Has n't she the brain of Socrates — or better, say Minerva, on the bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver? " " She has a wise head and is beautiful. " "And chaste." Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it. " She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine," he said, and was applauded. " Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your echo, my friend. Is n't the seeing and listening to her like sitting under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer ? " " All the comparisons are yours, " Arthur said enviously. "Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour to dine with me at my Club this evening, we '11 resume the toast that should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend." Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines. It surprised him to meet Mr. Eedworth at the table of his host. A greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him. But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the many occasions when S52 DIAITA OP THE CKOSSWAYS Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the pleasure he had expected from it. Eedworth's bluntness killed the flying metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were drumming upon politics. " Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty ! " said the latter, clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of bless- ing, as they parted at the Club-steps. Eedworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him. "I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing," he remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. "I am glad to have met you this evening. I hope you '11 dine with me one day next week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately? " "She is unwell; she has been working too hard," said Arthur. "Seriously unwell, do you mean?" "Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering." "Ah. You 've not seen her? " "Not yet." "Well, good-night." Eedworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his mention of Mrs. Warwick's "working too hard," as the cause of her illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his address. He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living, were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both ; the end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the offer of a seat at his table. He owned himself incomplete. He never could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune. But they led to happiness ! Redworth was guilty of a sigh : for now Diana Warwick stood free ; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering dubiousness. Her CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY 353 more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his habitual fresh countenance. As for the scandal, it had never shaken his faith in her nature. He thought of the passion. /His heart struck at Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him little, if but her heart were at liberty. That was the prize he coveted, having long read the nature of the woman ,and wedded his spirit to it. She would com- plete him,/ Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them. _At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes. The difference between appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship ; knowing that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser mis- chances : partaking of them indeed, but sublimely. Now Eedworth believed in the soul of Diana. For him it burned, and it was a celestial radiance about her, un- quenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses, and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained for strength. She was a soul; therefore per- petually pointing to growth in purification. He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could not have phrased it. The something sovereignly characteristic that aspired in Diana enchained him."?" With her, or rather with his thought of her soul, he' understood the right union of women and men, from the roots to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often ex- plained. With her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of 23 354 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness : the speed- ing of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined. Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite jus- tifying the Lady Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threat- ening to become a majority, as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness. Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike. He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he too; and they were as distant as the horizon sail and the raft -floating castaway. Her passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart. And at present he had no claim to visit her, dared not intrude. He would have nothing to say, if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business : as to which. Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him wiien he was wanted. Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet. "She's got a cold, you know," said Sir Lukin; adding, "confoundedly hard on women! — eh? Obliged to keep up a show. And I'd swear, by all that 's holy, Diana Warwick has n't a spot, not a spot, to reproach ifierself with. I fancy I ought to know women by this time. And look here, Eedworth, last night — that is, I mean, yesterday evening, I broke with a woman — a lady of my acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal -mongering about Diana Warwick. I broke with her. I told her I 'd have out any man who abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her. By Jove! Eedworth, those women can prove spitfires. CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY 355 They 've bags of venom under their tongues, barley-sugar though they look — and that 's her colour. But I broke with her for good. I doubt if I shall ever call on her again. And in point of fact, I won't." Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the- lady. Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Eedworth mused on a moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Pryar-Gunnett's like to hang on to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that Diana was not disallowed a similar licence. When he saw Emma Danstane, some days later, she was in her carriage driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr. Braddock, on her friend's affairs. He took a seat beside her. "No, Tony is not well," she replied to his question, under the veil of candour. " She is recovering, but she — you can understand — suffered a shock. She is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done." "I used to be her man of business," Kedworth observed. " She speaks of your kind services. This is mere matter for lawyers." "She is recovering?" " You may see her at Copsley next week. You can come down on Wednesdays or Saturdays? " " Any day. Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things." "It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things." Emma feared she had said too much. She tried candour again for concealment. " My poor Tony has been struck down low. I suppose it is like losing a diseased limb : — she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow to the system." "She may be trusted for having strength," said Eedworth. "Yes." Emma's mild monosyllable was presently fol- lowed by an exclamation : " One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how cruel it is ! " Then she remem- bered that such language was peculiarly abhorrent to him. " Irony of Fate ! " he echoed her. " I thought you were above that literary jargon. 356 DLiNA OF THE CEOSSWAYS "And I thought I was: or thought it could be put in a dialect practically explicable," she answered, smiling at the lion roused. "Upon my word," he burst out, "I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence. There 's a subject c^ — let some one write, Fables in illustration of the irony of Fate : and I '11 undertake to tack-on my grandmother's maxims for a moral to each of 'em. We prate of that irony when we slink away from the lesson — the rod we conjure. And you to talk of Fate ! It 's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I 'm bound-up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins my fortune, but not me, unless I 'm bound-up in myself. At least I hope that's my ease." He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Eedworth. His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the phrase might be brought home to him so as to render "my Grandmother's moral" a conclusion less comfortingly, if quitfe intelligibly, summary. And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance ; and thinking with her heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud. Perceiving the moisture in her look, Eedworth under- stood that it was foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular query whirring round Diana's ears. [Her senses were too heavy for a suspicion. | A HEALTHY MIND PISTKATJGHT 357 CHAPTEE XXXVIII CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her body. She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had been scat- tered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does. But she was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world. She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others, and made the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being is to men. She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed it the reverse. It was in fact the pain- ful gathering of the atoms composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure; one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she had been guilty of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the incapacity to forgive; it Was to her mind godlike. Aild her excuses of herself? At the first confession, she said she had none, and sul- lenly maintained that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was related — her version of the story : for hot even as woma,n to woman, friend to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state of shivering abjection in which Daeier had left her on the fatal night; of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief. That was an unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had 358 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS struck her down, rendered it difScult to be understood; and not till Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The very word Money thick- ened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse ■was her own to dip in at her pleasure ; yet she, to escape so small an obligation, had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in spurning her. "You see what I am, Emmy," Diana said. "What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly." "I proved myself unworthy of him." But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a cause, the ties uniting her to him ? Un- worthiness of that kind is not commonly the capital offence in love. — Tony's deep prostration and her resplen- dent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning within herself. Gradually she became enlight- ened enough to distinguish in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished, inter- nally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of their courtship. Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret ; and the ascent uuhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions, was mountainous. She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud ; sure nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be discovered somewhere. Having never wanted money herself, she was unable perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began, however, to comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her character and her purse. Surely an honourable man was bound to her in honour ? Tony's remark : " I have the reptile in me, dear," — her exaggera^ tion of the act, in her resigned despair, — was surely no justification for his breaking from her, even though he had A HEALTHY MIND DISTBAUGHT 359 discovered a vestige of the common " reptile," to leave her with a stain on her name ? — There would not have been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily, refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed. Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber, where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or the long falling breath of wakeful grief. One night she asked whether Tony would like to have her by her side. " No, dear," was the answer in the dark ; " but you know my old pensioners, the blind fifer and his wife ; I 've been thinking of them." " They were paid as they passed down the street yester- day, my love." "Yes, dear, 1 hope so. But he flourishes his tune so absurdly. I 've been thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the female's duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies. I won't cry any more." She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to dis- burden her heart in tears. For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened. She not merely abased herself and exalted Dacier pre- posterously, she had sunk her intelligence in her sensa- tions : a state that she used to decry as the sin of mankind, the origin of error and blood. Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the sugges- tion of it, notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show her face in public. She said : " I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I can fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark. At present, I feel like a wrestler who has had a fall. As soon as the stiffness is over, it 's best to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I shall never be in the wrestling ring again." " That is a good decision — when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony," Emma replied. " I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose. I feel my new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf of the old. What is the task ? — merely to drive a face ! " " It is not known." " It will be known." 360 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS " But this is a sealed secret." "Nothing is a secret that has been spoken. It's in the air, and I have to breathe to live by it. And I would rather it were out. ' She betrayed him.' Eather that, than have them think — anything! They will exclaim, How could she! I have been unable to answer it to you — my own heart. How ? Oh ! our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt lis; we cannot escape it. But I have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none of them would have done the like." "None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do." " I talk, dear. If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust. The moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover. She could not otherwise exist. I am sensible of evasion when I open my lips." "But Tony has told me all." " I think I have. But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not." "Dear girl, accounting for it is not the same as excusing." "Who can account for it! I was caught in a whirl — Oh ! nothing supernatural : my weakness ; which it pleases me to call a madness — shift the ninety-ninth I When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am certain I had my clear wits, but I telt like a bolt. I saw things, but at too swift a rate for the conscience of them. Ah ! let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to its perdition. I remember I was writing a story, named The Man of Two Minds. I shall sign it By The Woman of Two Natures. If ever it is finished. Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing. It should ; I do not say that it does. Capacity for assimi- lating the public taste and reproducing it is the com- monest. The stuif is perishable, but it pays us for our labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming tricksters. Now I can see that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of his — the authoress outliving her income!" " He dared not speak." " Why did he not dare ? " " Would it have checked you ? " A HEALTHY MIND DISTEAFGHT 361 " T was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way. What power charged the gun, is another question. Dada used to say, that it is the devil's master- stroke to get us to accuse him. ' So fare ye well, old Nickie Ben.' My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a spotted reputation ; I must wash and wash ; and not with water — with sulphur-flames." She sighed. "I am down there where they burn. You should have let me lie and die. You were not kind. I was going quietly." "My love! "cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, — " you live for me. Do set your mind on that. Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma. Will you?" Tony bowed her head mechanically. "But I am in love: with King Death, and must confess it," she said. "That hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him. And I feel that if I had gone, 1 should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody." "Except by me," said Emma, embracing her. "Tony would have left her friend for her last voyage in mourning. And my dearest will live to know happiness." "I have no more belief in it, Emmy." " The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses." " Yes ; we distil that fine essence through the senses ; and the act is called the pain of life. It is the death of them. So much I understand of what our existence must be. But I may grieve for having done so little." " That is the sound grief, with hope at the core — not in love with itself and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes ; especially the chief one." "Name it." " It is best named Amor." There was a writhing in, the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to be respecied ; not shadowed by her mis- fortune. Her still-flushed senses protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was obliged to thint Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no-knowl- edge of it. A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, waaa 362 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS sharp trial of Diana's endurance of the irony of Tate. She had. spoken of the irony in allusion to her freedom. Now that, according to a communication from her lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily. " Kead it and tear it all to strips," she said in an abhor- rence to Emma, who rejoined : " Shall I go at once and see him ? " " Can it serve any end? But throw it into the fire. Oh ! no simulation of virtue. There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did. But I perceive clearly — I can read only by events — that there was an understanding. You behold it. I went to him to sell it. He thanks me, says I served the good cause well. I have not that consolation. If I had thought of the cause — of anything high, it would have arrested me. On the fire with it ! " The letter and square slip were consumed. Diana watched the blackening papers. " So they cease their sinning, Emmy ; and as long as I am in torment, I may hope for grace. We talked of the irony. It means, the pain of fire." "I spoke of the irony to Eedworth," said Emma; "inci- dentally, of course." "And he fumed?" " He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature. He is never less than acceptably rational. I won't repeat his truisms ; but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims would expound the enigma." "Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life," said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the letter. " He behaves wisely ; so perhaps we are bound to take his words for wisdom. Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the world's reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy phalanx of copimon sense. It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled to express themselves." She relapsed. " But neither he nor any of them could under- stand my case ! " " He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of im- patience, Tony." A SHORT EXCtTRSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX 363 " Could there be a keener irony than that ? A friend of Dada's waited patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out man, just assisted to go decently to his grave." " But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting." "Oh! true. We are warmer if we travel on foot sun- ward, but it is a discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward. The material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it. All life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit. I will brood on your saying." " It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying always are ! " exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark. CHAPTEE XXXIX OF NATURE WITH ONE OP HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN ANXI-CLIMAX A MIND that after a long season of oblivion in pain re- turns to wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of souring permanently. Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of sleep. February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds. A broad warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or piling the amphi- theatre for majestic sunset. Or sometimes those daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the bosom of the viewer. Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with rain-skirts and sink with sun-shafts. Or they drenched wood and field for a day 364 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS and opened on the high Southrwestern star. Daaghters of the wind, hut shifty daughters of thig wind of the drop- ping sun, they have to be watched to be Ipved in their transformations. Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions. If Arthur said : " Such a day would be considered melancholy by London people," she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does Nature restore us, by, drugging the brain and malting her creature confidingly ajiimal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have lost the power to think ; certainly she had not the striving or th^ wish. Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears ai)d eyea to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her daily desires. She gathered unknow- ingly a sheaf of landscapes, images, keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance breath altering shape or hue : a different world from the one of her old ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her ; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a bar- renness to her sensibilities. In time the craving was evolved for positive- knowledge, and shells and stones and weeds were deposited on tha library-table at Copsley, botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always eager to assist ; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods. Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away headlong to Glub-life. He sent down Eedworth, with whom the walks of the zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to herr self, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal; mood, larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man. The suspicion Emma had sown was not excited to an alarm- ing activity j but she began to question : could the best of men be simply a woman's friend ? — was not long service rather less than a proof of friendship ? She could be blind. A SHOET EXCTTESION IN ANTI-CLIMAX 365 when her heart was on fire for another. Her passion for her liberty, however, received no ominous warning to look to the defences. He was the same blunt speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a trans- parent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood. She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness and her appearance unmentioned. He forebore even to scan her features. Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact. But her instinct of a present safety was true. She and Arthur discovered ^-. and it set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very accurately — that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow School, a little book, a record of his ob^ servations in nature. Lady Dunstane was the casual be- trayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's publishing ; anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity. His excuse was, that he had not published opinions. Let us observe, and assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights! " We retire," Diana said, for herself and Arthur. " The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing," said he, to the discomposure of his raw junior. In the fields he was genially helpful ; commending them to the study of the South-west wind, if they wanted, to. forecast the weather and understand the climate of our country. "We have no Seasons, or only a shufiie of them. Old calendars give seven months of the year to the South- west, and that's about the average. Count on it, you may generally reckon what to expect. When you don't have the excess for a year or two, you are drenched the year following." He knew, every bird by its flight and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original, human ; and his 'remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a spell to his thirsty hearers. Something of a,stronomy he knew ; but in relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who felt drawn to kinship 366 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS with him when he had a pupil's tone. An allusion by- Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably- pleasant evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our mortal eyes. Altogether the mind of the practical man became distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic. Diana said of him to Arthur : " He does not supply me with similes ; he points to the source of them." Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge, disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing. Eedworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs. Neither of them replied. Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world. Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense of life. Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it. When he had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a broader and cheerfuller liveliness. Arthur was flattered by an idea of her casting off incubus — a most worthy gentle- man, and a not perfectly sympathetic associate. Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step was brisker ; she challenged him to former games of conversation, excur- sions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated. They amused themselves, and Emma too. She revelled in seeing Tony's younger face and hearing some of her natural outbursts. That Dacier never could have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured. She hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom she little comprehended, was her rightful mate. March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of wind. It came, after wet- tings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the Crisp North-easter ; and what was it, when he had A SHORT EXCTJESION IN ANTI-CLIMAX 36? taken his leave, that brought Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection ? It could not be her seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit passed and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the French -coast : the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her happiness. She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma, who promised her to make an expedi- tion at the end of it by way of holiday, to see The Cross- ways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted. " You won't go through it like a captive ? " said Emma. " I don't like it, dear," Diana put up a comic mouth. " The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing age : and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the debts of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will see. If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the contrary way, I think I have courage." " You will not fear to meet . . . anyone ? " Emma said. " The world and all it contains ! I am robust, eager for the fray, an Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do you discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And besides again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not outraged the world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy." She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier; equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of their companionship in imagina- tion to a waste. Her clearing intellect prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him. He had loved her. " I shall die knowing that a man did love me once," she said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But the thought grew inveterate : " He could not bear much." And in her quick brain it shot tip a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel. He had not given her a chance ; he had not replied to her letter 368 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS written with the pen dipped in her heart's blood ; he must have gone straipfht away to the woman he married. This after almost justifying the scandalous world : — after . . . She realized her sensations of that night when the house- door had closed on him ; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine danger, friendlessness : and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty" secret. She knew too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high her conceit of herself might place her. Happily she now stood out of the sun, in a bracing temperature. Polar ; and her compassion for women was deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding. She spoke of it to Emma as her gain. " I have not seen that you required to suffer to be con- siderate," Emma said. " It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others — and because you did not take to her^ Emmy." " The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you." " She was not in my coniidenee, and so I construe it as delicacy."* One never loses by believing the best." -. " If one is not duped." !if Expectations dupe us, not trust. The light of every soul burns upward. Of course, most) of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for atmospheric disturbance.! Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to life. Tsee that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have power to do some good, and belong to the army. When we are beginning to reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the world at the dawn and know wo are young in it, with great riches, great things gained and greater to achieve. Personally I behold a queer little wriggling worm for myself ; but as one of the active world I stand high and shapely ; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the desert-springs to me. In- stead of which, I have once more to go about presenting my face to vindicate my character. Mr. Eedworth would admit no irony in that ! At all events, it is anti-climax."- A SHOUT EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX S6'9 "I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for," said Emma; and there -was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks. Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr. Sullivan Smith. " My poor dear countryman ! And he thought me -worthy, did he ? Some day, when we are past his repeating it, I '11 thank him." The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sul- livan Smith's absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted for the smallest sup- port in her self-esteem. The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement, owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asuuder. Intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful memories. Diana sat startled and para- lyzed. The melody crashed a revival of her days with Dacier, as in gibes ; and yet it reached to her heart. She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the thresh- old, striking at her feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of deadly abandonment to miseryj resembling the run of poison through her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend ; to whom subsequently ' she said : " Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are ! I have to join myself together again, as well as I can. It 's done, dear ; but don't notice the cement." " You will be brave," Emma petitioned. " I long to show you I will." The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant Diana of her nominal lumi- nary issuing from cloud. Eace and tongue, she was the same ; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran 24 370 DIAJS^A OP THE CKOSSWAYS about with them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up to her finest mark. Mrs. Fryar- Gunnett had then become the blazing regnant antisocial star ; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called the Upper class ; and she was angelically blonde, a straw- coloured Beauty. " A lovely wheatsheaf, if the head were ripe," Diana said of her. "Threshed, says her fame, my dear," Lady Pennon re- plied, otherwise allusive. " A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind," said Diana, thinking of foolish Sir Lukin ; thoughtless of talking to a gossip. She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix. ^Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal. Iris o/Ate, sped straight away on wing to the empty wheat- 'gheaf-ears of the golden-visaged Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men ; filling that pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester : which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory verification upon the delivery of the saying : — "Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody and bread for nobody." Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits, curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the infant-in-cradle smile, in that de- formation of the original utterance ! To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subtersensual perfumed caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light^other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last page of the final chapter. A prospec- tively popular narrative indeed ! and coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bou- quet of aristocracy to lure the native taste. "When we have satisfied English sentiment, our task is done, in every A SHOKT EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX 371 branch, of art, I hear : and it will account to posterity for the condition of the branches. Those yet wakeful eccen- trics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads concerning her : which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily: But it happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period plants the main threads in her bosom. Rogues and a po- liceman, or a hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow machinery. Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love they must have for her 'likewise : and how it can be quickened on behalf of a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of brains, and is in sooth an alien : a princess of her kind and time, but a foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile, traffick- ing in ideas: — this is the problem. For to be true to her, one cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world than that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett. Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the common men- tal trick in adversity of setting her personally known in- nocence to lessen her generally unknown error : but antici- pating that this might become known, and the other not ; and feeling that the motives of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation com- pounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay in London, and longer, to the dis- comfort of one among her friends; and it was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it. For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride, by Mr, Percy Dacier. She 372 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS had \Fatclied their approaich up the Ball-room, thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked. l>ifEerently, had it been Tony and Dacier : but Emma could not persuade herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to Suttee. Per- fectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his effigy bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his breeding, without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her creed was on the heroine's neck ; also dependant at her waist. She was white from head to foot ; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared deeply studied in purity. Judging from her look and her reputation, Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy sentimentalist, likely to 'f fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings2j ioT him at a mad ]?ate in the years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take it, one may concede to them, for an in- spired elimination of the higher notes of life : the very highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full signifi- cance to Emma now. Not sensualism, biit sham spiritual- ism, was the meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the under-brute in us. Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks. She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sen- tence of her friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them ; for she was boiling angrily at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of passion. But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, I all idea save tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, \ who had been wounded nigh to death, passed from Emma's 1 mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to address the fa^ | voured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of , goodness of nature ; - and it became a halo rather than a i personal eclipse that she cast. /' '"' A SHORT EXCURSION EST AJSTTI-CLIMAX 373 Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed con- ventional air, subject in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have been inimically ima- gined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink. The happy couple bowed, proceeding ; and Emma had Dacier's back for a study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to hostile observations, and un- protected, the device we choose. Her harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle above the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and straitened : perhaps a mere hostile fancy : though it was conceivable that he should desire as little of these meetings as possible }*^clipses are not courted.—* The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling error, easily to be over- looked by a manful lover, and had asserted its dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benign- ness, was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the expedition was over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and all it contained. "I would sell Danvers too," she said, "but the creature de- clines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have a faithful servant ; very much like my life, not quite to my taste ; the one thing out of the wreck ! — with my dog ! " Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr. Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview. She came out of it notice- ably shattered. Nothing was related to Emma, beyond the remark : " I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest." The weighty litble word — woman's native watchdog and guardian, if she calls it to her aid in earnest — had encountered and withstood a fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance. Emma contented herself with the result. "Were you much supplicated?" " An Operatic Fourth-Act," said Diana, by no means feel- ing so flippantly as she spoke. She received, while under the impression of this man's 374 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS honest, if primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to cap- ture, a characteristic letter from Westlake, choicely phrased; containing presumeably an application for her hand, in the generous offer of. his own. Her reply to a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack, re- freshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing ■weapons. To Westlake, the unwritten No was conreyed in a series of kindly ironic subterfuges, that played it like an impish flea across the pages, just giving the bloom of the word ; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in read- ing the dexterous composition : which, however, proved so thoroughly to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley. CHAPTER XL IN WHICH WE SEE NATUEE MAKING OP A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THKICE WHIMSICAL On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through the valley led them past a iield, where cricketers were at work bowling and batting under a verti- cal sun : not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emina Dunstane discovered the Copsley head gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Eedworth facing him, bat in hand^ she sat up, greatly interested^ Sir Lukin stopped the car- riage at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven. Eedworth, like the good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year. Eight of their wickets had fallen for a lamentable figure of twenty-nine runs ; himself clean-bowled the first ball. But A -WOMAN A MAID AGAIN 875 Tom Eedworth had got fast hold of his wicket, and already- scored fifty to his bat. " There I grand hit I " Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails. " Once a cricketer, always a cricketer, if you 've legs to fetch the runs. And PuUen's not doing badly. His business is to stick. We shall mark them a hundred yet. I do hate a score on our side without the two OO's." He accounted for Kedworth's mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill. Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement. "And why are you doing nothing?" Sir Lukin was asked ; and he explained : "My stumps are down: I'm married." He took his wife's hand prettily. Diana had a malicious prompting. She smothered the wasp, and said : " Oh ! look at that ! " " Grand hit again ! Oh ! good I good 1 " cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it, while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball flying away, fly- ing back, and others after it, and still the batsmen running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading the flelders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers. Diana said merrily : " Bravo our side ! " " Bravo, old Tom Eedworth ! " rejoined Sir Lukin. " Four, and a three 1 And capital weather, have n't we 1 Hope we shall have same sort day next month — return match, my ground. I've seen Tom Eedworth score — old days — over two hundred t' his bat. And he used to bowl too. But bowling wants practice. And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe in mouth and cheer- ing. They do enjoy a day like this. We '11 have a supper for fifty at Copsley's : — it 's fun. By Jove ! we must have reached up to near the hundred." He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson. 376 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS Diana praised the little fellow. "Yes, he 's a real English boy," said Emma. "We've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand ! " exclaimed Sir Lukin ; " and a confounded Eadi- calized country ..." he muttered gloomily of "l_ets us be kicked ! . . . any amount of insult, meek as gruel ! . . . making of the finest army the world has ever seen ! You saw the papers this morning ? Good heaven ! how a nation with an atom of self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners ! We do. We 're insulted and we 're threatened, and we call for a hymu ! — Now then, my man, what is it ? " The boy had flown back. " Ninety-two marked, sir ; ninety-nine runs ; one more for the hundred." " Well reckoned ; and mind you 're up at Copsley for the return-match. — And Tom Eedworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone — they don't hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we 're not prepared for war. We never are ! And whose the fault ? Says, we 're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us ! He does n't feel a kick. — Oh ! clever snick ! Hurrah for the hundred ! — Two — three. No, don't force the running, you fools ! — though they 're wild with the ball : ha ! — no ! — all right ! " The wicket stood. Hurrah ! The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on. " Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monot- ony," said Emma. " He looks well in flannels." " Yes, he does," Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having spoken so simply. " I think the chief advanta>e was not a whit ashamed of it. The beloved woman was throned on the very highest of the man. Furthermore, not being encouraged, he had his peculiar reason for delay, though now he could offer her wealth. She had once in his hearing derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of Mrs. There was no harm in the accustomed title, to his taste ; but she disliking it, he did the same, on her special behalf ; and the prospect, funereally draped, of a title sweeter-sounding to her eai-S, was above his horizon. Bear in mind, that he underwent the reverse of encouragement. Any small thing to please her was magnified, and the anticipation of it nerved the modest hopes of one who deemed himself and any man alive deeply her inferior. Such was the mood of the lover condemned to hear an- other malignant scandal defiling the name of the woman he Worshipped. Sir Lukin Dunstane, extremely hurried, bumped him on the lower step of the busy Bank, and said: " Pardon ! " and " Ha ! Kedworth ! making money ? " " Why, what are you up to down here ? " he was asked, and he answered: "Down to the Tower, to an ofiicer quartered there. Not bad quarters, but an infernal distance. Business." , Having cloaked his expedition to the distance with the comprehensive word, he repeated it ; by which he feared he THE ORIGIN OP THE TIGEESS INDIANA 387 had rendered it too significant, and he said: "No, no; nothing particular ; " and that caused the secret he contained to swell in his breast rebelliously, informing the candid creature of the fact of his hating to lie : whereupon thus he poured himself out, in the quieter bustle of an alley, off the main thoroughfare. " You 're a friend of hers. I 'm sure you care for her reputation ; you 're an old friend of hers, and she 's my wife's dearest friend : and I 'm fond of her too ; and I ought to be, and ought to know, and do know : — pure ? Strike off my fist if there 's a spot on her character ! And a scoundrel like that fellow Wroxeter ! — Damnedest rage I ever was in! — Swears . . . down at Lockton . . . when she was a girl. Why, Eedworth, I can tell you, when Diana Warwick was a girl ! - — " Eedworth stopped him. " Did he say it in your presence ? " Sir Lukiu was drawn-Up by the harsh question. " Well, no ; not exactly." He tried to hesitate, but he was in the hot vein of a confidence and he wanted advi3e. " The cur said it to a woman -^ hang the woman ! And she hates Diana Warwick : I can't tell why — a regular snake's hate. By Jove ! how women can hate ! " " Who is the woman ? " said Eedworth. Sir Lukiu complained of the mob at his elboWs. " I don't like mentioning names here." A convenient open door of offices invited him to drag his receptacle, and possible counsellor, into the passage, where immediately he bethought him of a postponement of the distinct communication ; but the vein was too hot. " I say, Eedworth, I wish you 'd dine with me. Let 's drive up to my Club. — Very well, two words. And I warn you, I shall call him out, and make it appear it 's about another woman, who '11 like nothing so much, if I know the Jezebel. Some women are hussies, let 'em be handsome as houris* And she 's a fire-ship; by heaven, she is ! Come, you 're a friend of my wife's, but you 're a man of the world and my friend, and you know how fellows are tempted, Tom Eedworth. — Cur though he is, he 's likely to step out and receive a les- son. — Well, he 's the favoured cavalier for the present . . . h'm . s . Fryar-Gunnett. Swears he told her, circumstan- tially ; and it was down at Lockton, when Diana Warwick was a girl. Swears she '11 spit her venom at her, so that DIANA OF THE CKOSS"WAYS Diana Warwick sha'n't hold her head up in London Society, what with that cur Wroxeter, Old Dannisburgh, and Dacier. And it does count a list, does n't it ? — confound the hand- Bome hag ! She 's jealous of a dark rival. I 've been down to Colonel Hartswood at the Tower, and he thinks Wroxeter deserves horsewhipping, and we may manage it. I know you 're dead against duelling ; and so am I, on my honour. But you see there are cases where a lady must be protected ; and anything new, left to circulate against a lady who has been talked of twice — Oh, by Jove ! it must be stopped. If she has a male friend on earth, it must be stopped on the spot." Eedworth eyed Sir Lukin curiously through his wrath. " We'll drive up to your Club," he said. " Hartswood dines with me this evening, to confer," re- joined Sir Lukin. " Will you meet him ? " " I can't," said Eedworth, " I have to see a lady, whose affairs I have been attending to in the City ; and I 'm engaged for the evening. You perceive, my good fellow," he resumed, as they rolled along, " this is a delicate busi- ness. You have to consider your wife. Mrs. Warwick's name won't come up, but another woman's will." " I meet Wroxeter at a gambling-house he frequents, and publicly call him cheat — slap his face, if need be." " Sure to ! " repeated Eedworth. " No stupid pretext will quash the woman 's name. Now, such a thing as a duel would give pain enough." " Of course ; I understand," Sir Lukin nodded his clear comprehension. " But what is it you advise, to trounce the scoundrel, and silence him ? " " Leave it to me for a day. Let me have your word that you won't take a step : positively — neither you nor Colonel Hartswood. I '11 see you by appointment at your Club." Eedworth looked up over the chimneys. "We're going to have a storm and a gale, I can tell you." " Gale and storm ! " cried Sir Lukin ; " what has that got to do with it ? " " Think of something else for a time." " And that brute of a woman — deuced handsome she is 1 — if you care for fair women, Eedworth : — she 's a Venus jumped slap out of the waves, and the Devil for sire — that THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGKESS IN DIANA. 389 you learn : — running about, sowing her lies. She 's a yel- low witch. Oh ! but she 's a shameless minx. And a black-leg cur like Wroxeter ! Any woman intimate with a fellow like that, stamps herself. I loathe her. Sort of woman who swears in the morning you 're the only man on earth ; and next day — that evening — engaged ! — fee to Polly Hopkins — and it 's a gentleman, a nobleman, my lord ! — been going on behind your back half the season ! — and she isn't hissed when she abuses a lady, a saint in comparison ! You know the world, old fellow : — Brighton, "Richmond, visits to a friend as deep in the bog. How Tryar-Gunnett — a man, after all — can stand it! And drives of an afternoon for an airing — by heaven ! You 're out of that mess, Eedworth : not much taste for the sex ; and you 're right, you 're lucky. Upon my word, the cor- ruption of society in the present day is awful ; it 's appall- ing. — I rattled at her : and oh ! dear me, perks on her hind heels and defies me to prove : and she 's no pretender, but hopes she 's as good as any of my ' chaste Dianas.' My dear old friend, it' s when you come upon women of that kind you have a sickener. And I 'm bound by the best there is in a man — honour, gratitude, all the list — to defend Diana Warwick." " So, you see, for your wife's sake, your name can't be hung on a woman of that kind," said Eedworth. " I '11 call here the day after to-morrow at three p. m." Sir Lukin descended and vainly pressed Eedworth to run up into his Club for refreshment. Said he roguishly : " Who 's the lady ? " The tone threw Eedworth on his frankness. " The lady I 've been doing business for in the' City, is Miss Paynham." "I saw her once at Copsley ; good-looking. Cleverish ? " " She has ability." Entering his Club, Sir Lukin was accosted in the reading- room by a cavalry officer, a Colonel Launay, an old Harro- vian, who stood at the window and asked him whether it was not Tom Eedworth in the cab. Another, of the same School, standing squared before a sheet of one of the evening news- papers, heard the name and joined them, saying: "Tom Eedworth is going to be married, some fellow told me." 390 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS " He '11 make a deuced good husband to any woman — if it 's true," said Sir Lukin, with Miss Paynham ringing in his head. " He 's a cool-blooded old boy, and likes women • for their intellects." Colonel Launay hummed in meditative emphasis. He stared at vacancy with a tranced eye, and turning a similar gaze on Sir Lukin, as if through him, burst out : " Oh, by George, I say, what a hugging that woman '11 get ! " The cocking of ears and queries of Sir Lukin put him to the test of his right to the remark ; for it sounded of occult acquaintance with interesting subterranean facts ; and there was a communication, in brief syllables and the dot language, crudely masculine. Immensely surprised. Sir Lukin exclaimed : " Of course ! when fellows live quietly and are careful of themselves. Ah ! you may think you know a man for years, and you don't : you don't know more than an inch or two of him. Why, of course, Tom Red- worth 'd be uxorious — the very man 1 And tell us what has become of the Mrefly now? One never sees her. Did n't complain ? " • "Very much the contrary." Both gentlemen were grave, believing their knowledge in the subterranean world of a wealthy city to give them a positive cognizance of female humanity ; and the sub- stance of Colonel Launay 's communication had its impres- siveness for them. "Well, it's a turn right-about-face for me," said Sir Lukin. " What a world we live in ! I fancy I 've hit on the woman he means to marry ; — had an idea of another woman once ; but he 's one of your friendly fellows with women. That 's how it was I took him for a fish. Great mistake, I admit. But Tom Red worth's a man of morals after all ; and when those men do break loose fot a plunge — ha ! Have you ever boxed with him ? Well, he keeps himself in training, I can tell you." Sir Lukin's round of visits drew him at night to Lady Singleby's, where he sighted the identical young lady of his thoughts. Miss Paynham, temporarily a guest of the house; and he talked to her of Redworth, and had the satisfaction to spy a blush, a rageing blush : which avowal presented her to his view as an exceedingly good-looking girl ; so THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA 891 that he began mentally to praise Eedworth for a manly superiority to small trifles and the world 's tattle. "You saw him to-day," he said. She answered: "Yes. He goes down to Copsley to. morrow." " I think not," said Sir Lukin. "I have it from him." She closed her eyelids in speaking. " He and I have some rather serious business in town." "Serious?" " Don't be alarmed : not concerning him." " Whom, then ? You have told me so much — I have a right to know." " Not an atom of danger, I assure you ? " " It concerns Mrs. Warwick ! " said she. Sir Lukin thought the guess extraordinary. He pre- served an impenetrable air. But he had spoken enough to set that giddy head spinning. Kowhere during the night was Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett visible. Earlier than usual, she was riding next day in the Eow, alone for perhaps two minutes, and Sir Lukin passed her, formally saluting. He could not help the look behind him, she sat so bewitchingly on horseback ! He looked, and behold, her riding-whip was raised erect from the elbow. It was his horse that wheeled ; compulsorily he was borne at a short canter to her side. " Your commands ? " The handsome Amabel threw him a sombre glance from the corners of her uplifted eyelids ; and snakish he felt it ; but her colour and the line of her face went well with sullenness ; and, her arts of fascination cast aside, she fascinated him more in seeming homelier, girlish. If the trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper can bear the strain, she has attractive lures indeed; irresistible to the amorous idler: and when, in addition, being the guilty person, she plays the injured, her show of temper on the taking face pitches him into perplexity with his own emotions, creating a desire to strike and be stricken, howl and set howling, which is of the happier augury for tender reconcilement on the terms of the gentleman on his kneecap. " You 've been doing a pretty thing ! " she said, and 392 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS briefly she named her house and half an hour, and flew. Sir Lukin was left to admire the figure of the horsewoman. Really, her figure had an air of vindicating her successfully, except for the poison she spat at Diana Warwick. And what pretty thing had he been doing ? He reviewed dozens of speculations until the impossibility of seizing one determined him to go to Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett at the end of the half -hour — " Just to see what these women have to say for themselves." Some big advance drops of Eedworth's thunderstorm drawing gloomily overhead, warned him to be quick and get his horse into stables. Dismounted, the sensational man was irresolute, suspecting a female trap. But curi- osity combined with the instinctive turning of his nose in the direction of the lady's house, led him thither, to an accom- paniment of celestial growls, which impressed him, judging by that naughty-girl face of hers and the woman's tongue she had, as a likely prelude to the scene to come below. CHAPTER XLII THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOB LIBERTY AND KUN INTO HARNESS The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction ; which, however, was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway between the valley and the heights of Copsley ; whither he was bound, on a mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances, he chose to take counsel of his active legs : an adviseable course when the brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying. Diana's face was clearly before him through the deluge ; now in single features, the dimple running from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and nostrils alive under their lightning ; now in her whole radiant smile, or musefuUy listening, nursing a thought. Or she was obscured, and he felt the face. The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his powers of visioning. Ou THE PENULTIMATE 393 his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like one of the trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious excla- mations. His portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried out at the first ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for walking in such weather. "Diana has left me," she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing. " We are neighbours ; she has taken cottage- lodgings at Selshall, about an hour's walk : — one of her wild dreams of independence. Are you disappointed ? " " I am," Eedworth confessed. Emma coloured. " She requires an immense deal of humouring at present. The fit will wear off; only we must wait for it. Any menace to her precious liberty makes her prickly. She is passing the day with the Pettigrews, who have taken a place near her village for a month. She promised to dine and sleep here, if she returned in time. What is your news ? " " I^Tothing ; the world wags on." " You have nothing special to tell her ? " "Nothing;" he hummed; "nothing, I fancy, that she does not know." " You said you were disappointed." " It 's always a pleasure to see her." " Even in her worst moods, I find it so." " Oh ! moods ! " quoth Eedworth. " My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women." "Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women." " Good ; but my meaning was ... I think I remember your once comparing them and the weather ; and you spoke of the ' one point more variable in women.' You may fore- stall your storms. There is no calculating the effect of a few little words at a wrong season." " With women ! I suppose not. I have no pretension to a knowledge of the sex." , Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs ; and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liherty. By and by, was her thought : perhaps next year. She dreaded Tony's refusal of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the 394 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWATS dearest of men proposing it : and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the refusal, for the sake of con- sistency, if it was once uttered. For her own sake, she shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good man, she would have to discountenance. His candour in confessing disappointment, and his open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some assurance of his not being fool- ishly impetuous. After he had read to her for an hour, as his habit was on evenings and. wet days, their discussion of this and that in the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence, enough to render it even a dubious point whether she might be speculating upon a wealthy bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the which she so abhorred that she rejected the idea. Consequently, E.ed- worth's proposal to walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her back, struck her as natural when a shaft of west- ern sunshine from a whitened edge of raincloud struck her windows. She let him go without an intimated monition or a thought of one ; thinking simply that her Tony would be more likely to come, having him for escort. Those are silly women who are always imagining designs and in- trigues and future palpitations in the commonest actions of either sex. Emma Dunstane leaned to the contrast be- tween herself and them. Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be on her way, with Mr. Eedworth. The maid's tale of the dreadful state of the lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been magnificent. Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside, hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an extra five minutes. Tak- ing full fifteen, she swam int« the drawing-room, lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses,, refcring her misconduct in being late to the seductions of " Sol " in his glory. Eedworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset. The result of their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious flaming heavens, appeared to her now as an opportunity lost. Erom sisterly sympathy, she fancied she could understand Tony's liberty- loving reluctance : she had no comprehension of the back« THE PENULTIMATE wardness of the man beholding the dear woman handsomer than in her maiden or her married time : and sprightlier as well. She chatted deliciously, and drew Eedworth to talk his best on his choicer subjects, playing over them like a fire- wisp, determined at once to Hounder him and to make him shine. Her tender esteem for the man was transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone hap- pily between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting : " You seemed to have been inspired by ' Sol,' my dear. You do like him, don't you ? " Diana vowed she adored him ; and with a face of laugh- ter in rosy suffusion, put Sol for Eedworth, Eedworth foi Sol ; but, watchful of Emma's visage, said finally : " If you mean the mortal man, I think him up to almost all your hyperboles — as far as men go; and he departed to his night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king. Not to admire him, would argue me senseless, heartless. I do; I have reason to." "And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony." "No; I said ' like a king; ' and he is one. He has, to me, morally the grandeur of your Sol sinking, Csesar stabbed, Gato on the sword-point. He is Eoman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick of the land. It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose the pick among us, to make her a happy woman — if she 's for running in harness. There, I can't say more." Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present. They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the windows. He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had ridden from London fast- ing; and why he had come at that early hour, he was too hungry to explain. The ladies retired to read their letters by the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Eedworth: "I met that woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley. I went beating about London for you all the afternoon and evening. She swears you rated her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter. Did you see him? She says, the story's true in one par- ticular, that he did snatch a kiss, and got mauled. Not so much to pay for it ! But what a ruffian — eh? " 396 DIANA OF THE CROSSWATS "I saw him," said Eedworth. "He's one of the new set of noblemen who take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City. They help to the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay. We won't judge it by him. He favoured me with his ' word of honour ' that the thing you heard was entirely a misstatement, and so forth : — apologized, I suppose. He mumbled something." " A thorough cur 1 " " He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not contented." " He spoke to the wrong man. I 've half a mind to ride back and have him out for that rascal ' osculation ' — and the lady unwilling ! — and she a young one, a girl, under the protection of the house ! By Jove ! Redworth, when you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's bile. There 's a deal of that sort of villany going — and succeeding sometimes ! He deserves the whip or a bullet." ■«-^'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him. J* "Oh ! I 'm a sinner, I know. But, go and tell one wo- •man of another woman, and that a lie ! That 's beyond me." "W The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measureable to those who are in them.'*" " The sermon 's at me — pop ! " said Sir Lukin. " By the way, I 'm coming round to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for throwing up my commission. Idleness is the devil — or mother of him. I manage my estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind." "Your time." "My mind, I say." "Whichever you please." "You 're crusty to-day, Eedworth. Let me tell you, I think — and hard too, when the fit 's on me. However, you did right in stopping — I'll own — a piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused me to come in for a regular drencher. But a pretty woman in a right-down termagant passion is good theatre ; because it can't last, at that pace ; and you 're sure of your agree- able tableau. Not that I trust her ten minutes out of sight — or any woman, except one or two ; my wife and THE PENULTIMATE 397 Diana Warwick. Trust those you 've tried, old boy. Diana Warwick ought to be taught to thank you ; though I don't know how it 's to be done." "The fact of it is," Eed worth frowned and rose, "I've done mischief. I had no right to mix myself in it. I 'm seldom caught ofE my feet by an impulse; but I was. I took the fever from you." He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky. " Come, let 's play open cards, Tom Eedworth," said Sir Lukin, leaving the table and joining his friend by the window. "You moral men are doomed to be marrying men, always; and quite right. Not that one doesn't hear a roundabout thing or two about you: no harm. Very much the contrary : — as the world goes. But you 're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess the lady, she 's a sen- sible girl and won't be jealous. I 'd swear she only waits for asking." "Then you don't guess the lady," said Eedworth. "Mary Paynham?" The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen denials. Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend ■who shunned inspection. " But is it ? . . . can it be ? it must be, after all ! . . . why, of course it is ! But the thing staring us in the face is just what we never see. Just the husband for her ! — • and she 's the wife ! Why, Diana Warwick 's the very woman, of course ! I remember I used to think so before she was free to wed." "She is not of that opinion." Eedworth blew a heavy breath; and it should be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine^: "Because you did n't attack, the moment she was free; that's what upset my calculations," the sagacious gentle- man continued, for a vindication of his acuteness: then seizing the reply : " Eefuses ? You don't mean to say you 're the man to take a refusal ? and from a green widow in the blush ? Did you see her cheeks when she was peep- ing at the letter in her hand ? She colours at half a word — takes the lift of a finger for Hymen coming. And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy. But 398 DIA2IA OF THE CBOSSWAYS you 're not the man to be refused. You 're her friend — her champion. That woman Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and sneered at my talk of old friendship. Women are always down dead on the facts; can't put them off a scent I " " There 's the mischief 1 " Bedworth blew again. " I had no right to be championing Mrs. Warwick's name. Or the world won't give it, at all events. I 'm a blundering donkey. Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty. And, upon my soul, I 'm in love with everything she wishes ! 1 've got the habit." " Habit be hanged ! " cried Sir Lukin. " You 're in love with the woman. I know a little more of yon now, Mr. Tom. You 're a fellow in earnest about what you do. You 're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven ! though you keep a bold face. Did she speak positively ? -^ sort of feminine of ' you 're the monster, not the man ? ' or measured little doctor's dose of pity ? — worse sign ! You 're not going ? " "If you'll drive me down in half an hour," said Redworth. "Give me an hour," Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's blue-room. Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held; by the entrance of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said : " I have he»e the very craziest bit of writing ! — but what is disturbing you, dear?" Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak. " Do you love me ? I throw policy to the winds, if only I can batter at you for your heart and find it 1 Tony, do you love me? But don't answer: give me your hand. You have rejected him I " "He has told you?" " No. He is not the man to cry out for a wound. He heard in London — Lukin has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion: — Tom Eedworth heard an old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly false, he knew. I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton. He went to man and woman both^ and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on peril; as he of all men is able to do when he wills it." THE PENULTIMATE 399 Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: "How you looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me ! But why are you the handsome tigress to him, of all men living ! The dear fellow, dear to me at least ! since the day he first saw you, has wor- shipped you and striven to serve you : — and. harder than any Scriptural service to have the beloved woman to wife. | I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a man of j warmth. He is one of those rare men of honour who can command their passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that women select for punishment! Yes, you 1 It is to the woman he loves that he cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet. You have managed to stamp your spirit on him ; and as a conse- quence, he defends you now, for flinging him off. And now his chief regret is, that he has caused his name to be coupled with yours. I suppose he had some poor hope, seeing you free. Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his heart and soul was too strong. I have seen what he Buffered, years back, at the news of your engagement." "Oh, for God's sake, don't," cried Tony, tears running over, and her dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning. " It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands firm," Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften. " But similes applied to hiifl will strike you as incongruous." Tony swayed her body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously. " He prob- ably did not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription." Again Tony swayed; she had to hug her- self under the stripes, and felt as if alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting. " You have sneered at him for his calculating — to his face: and it was when he was compar- atively poor that he calculated — to his cost ! — that he dared not ask you to marry a man who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the peerless woman. Peerless, I admit. There he was not wrong. But if he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you. You talk much of chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most chivalrous ! . . . 400 DIANA OF THE CKOSSWAYS He is a man quite other from what you think him : any- thing but a ' Cuthbert Bering ' or a ' Man of Two Minds.' He was in the drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from The Crossways — now his property, in the hope of making it yours." " I behaved abominably there ! " interposed Tony, with a gasp. "Let it pass. At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow of a sword." " But marriage, dear Emmy ! marriage ! Is marriage to be the end of me? " " What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect ? And are you steering so particularly well by yourself ? " "Miserably! But I can dream. And the thought of a husband cuts me from any dreaming. It 's all dead flat earth at once ! " " Would you have rejected him when you were a girl ? " "1 think so." " The superior merits of another ? ..." "Oh, no, no, no, no! I might have accepted him: and I might not have made him happy. I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather did not suit him." "No; he is not that description of lay-figure. You have pressed it, and gemmed it, and — made your discovery. /Bere is a true man; and if you can find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you. He came on the day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he then had . . . Well, I had to tell him you were engaged. The man has never wavered in his love of you since that day. He has had to bear something. "y/ This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from self-pity and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the tears ran in streams, as she said: "He bore it, Emmy, he bore it." She sobbed out: "And he went on building a fortune and batting! Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly — approve of the pattern or not. Oh! I have no doubt he had his nest of wishes piping to him all the while : only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and against everything we 've been reading of lovers ! Love was his bread and butter ! " Her dark eyes showered. " And to tell you what you do not know of THE PBNTJLTIMATB 401 him, his way of making love is really," she sobbed, "pretty. It ... it took me by surprise; I was expect- ing a bellow and an assault of horns; and if, dear: — you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with you ! - and I feel myself getting childish : — if Sol in his glory had not been so m . . . majestically m . . . magnificent, nor seemed to show me the king . . . kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered the opposite word to the one he heard. Last night, when he took my hand kindly before going to bed, I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him. I saw him bleed, and he held himself right royally. I told you he did; — Sol in his moral grandeur! How infinitely above the physical monarch — is he not, Emmy ? What one dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur to win a widow. It should be a maiden prin- cess. You feel it so, I am sure. And here am I, as if a maiden princess were I, demanding romantic accessories of rubious vapour in the man condescending to implore the widow to wed him. But, tell me, does he know every- thing of his widow — everything? I shall not have to go through the frightful chapter? " " He is a man with his eyes awake ; he knows as much as any husband could require to know," said Emma; add- . ing: "My darling! he trusts you. It is the soul of the ' man that loves you, as it is mine. You will not tease \him ? Promise me. Give yourself frankly. You see it clearly before you." " I see compulsion, my dear. What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs, bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women, especially at widows. They march; they form square; they enclose me in the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest. Eead that crazy letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet. I perceive I have been crying like a raw creature in her teens. I don't know myself. An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of the traces." Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment: "Utterly crazy." Tony said: "Is it not? I am to ' Pause before I trifle with a noble heart too long. ' She is to ' have her happiness in the constant prayer for ours; ' and she is ' warned by one of those intimations 20 402 DIANA OF THE CEOSSWAYS never failing her, that he runs a serious danger.' It reads like a Wizard's Almanack. And here: ' Homogeneity of sentiment the most perfect, is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination.' She should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such chicks ! But I '11 own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer. I have drivelled ... I was shudder- ing over it when you came in. I have sentimentalized up to thin smoke. And she tells a truth when she says I am not to ' count social cleverness ' — she means volu- bility — ' as a warrant for domineering a capacious intelli- gence : ' — because of the gentleman's modesty. Agreed : I have done it; I am contrite. I am going into slavery to make amends for presumption. Banality, thy name is marriage 1 " "Your business is to accept life as we have it," said Emma ; and Tony shrugged. She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate, and scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her cottage. After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last words with the kiss of her cheeks: "Here goes old Ireland!" But, from her look and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the singular sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had yielded place to the woman she loved. CHAPTER XLIII NUPTIAL CHAPTER; AND OP HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO BLOOM WITH THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face of the gentleman turning at times to his companion's, which steadily fronted the gale. She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good direction, with a chuckle at Tony's evident feeling of a ludicrous KUPTIAL CHAPTER 403 posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over. But her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done to her beloved by Dacier — the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as an injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man. , Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads to the end of the journey. Diana knew she would have to hoist the signal — and how ? The pros- pect was dumbfoundering. She had to think of appeasing her Emma. Redworth, for his part, actually supposed she had accepted his escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him over-night. " What do your ' birds ' do in weather like this ? " she said. "Cling to their perches and wait patiently. It's the bad time with them when you don't hear them chirp." "Of course you foretold the gale." "Oh, well, it did not require a shepherd or a skipper for that." "Your grand gift will be useful to a yachtsman." "You like yachting. When I have tried my new schooner in the Channel, she is at your command for as long as you and Lady Dunstane please." " So you acknowledge that birds — things of nature — have their bad time? " " They profit ultimately by the deluge and the wreck. Nothing on earth is ' tucked-up ' in perpetuity." "Except the dead. But why should the schooner be at our command ? " "I shall be in Ireland." He could not have said sweeter to her ears or more touching. " We shall hardly feel safe without the weatherwise on board." "You may count on my man Barnes; I have proved him. He is up to his work even when he 's bilious : only, in that case, occurring about once a fortnight, you must leave him to fight it out with the elements." "I rather like men of action to have a temper." "I cau't say much for a bilious temper." 404 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWAYS The weather to-day really seemed of tliat kind, she remarked. He assented, in the shrug manner — not to dissent : she might say what she would. He helped no- where to a lead; and so quick are the changes of mood at such moments that she was now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near. But thoughts of Emma pressed. "The name of the new schooner? Her name is her picture to me." "I wanted you to christen her." "Launched without a name?" "I took a liberty." Needless to ask, but she did. "With whom?" "I named her Diana." " May the Goddess of the silver bow and crescent protect her ! To me the name is ominous of mischance." " I would commit my fortunes and lite ! " . . . He checked his tongue, ejaculating: "Omens!" She had veered straight away from her romantic aspi- rations to the blunt extreme of thinking that a widow should be wooed in unornamented matter-of-fact, as she is wedded, with a "wilt thou," and "I will," and no deco- rative illusions. Downright, for the unpoetic creature, if you please ! So she rejected the accompaniment of the silver Goddess and high seas for an introduction of the crisis. " This would be a thunderer on our coasts. I had a trial of my sailing powers in the Mediterranean." As she said it, her musings on him then, with the con- trast of her position toward him now, fierily brushed her cheeks ; and she wished him the man to make one snatch at her poor lost small butterfly bit of freedom, so that she might suddenly feel in haven, at peace with her expectant Emma. He could have seen the inviting consciousness, but he was absurdly watchful lest the flying sprays of border trees should strike her. He mentioned his fear, and it became an excuse for her seeking protection of her veil. "It is our natural guardian," she said. "Not much against timber," said he. The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting dames — an exaggeration of honest zeal; KtTPTIAL CHAPTER 405 a present example of clownish goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow- rooted trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm in a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front. The veil did her positive service. He was honourably scrupulous not to presume. A right good unimpulsive gentleman : the same that she had always taken him for and liked. "These firs are not taproots," he observed, by way of apology. Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of the slope. "I will take your arm here," she said. Eedworth received the little hand, saying: "Lean to me." They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was shaken. But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering enemy made them one. It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it meant the sheer blissful instant. At the foot of the hill, he said : " It 's harder to keep to the terms of yesterday." "What were they?" said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the storm had done. " Raise the veil, I beg." " Widows do not wear it." The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the glittering shooter of arrows. " Have you ? . . ." changed to me, was the signification understood. "Can you? — for life! Do you think you can ? " His poverty in the pleading language melted her. " What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a throne, with you petitioning. Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine, if you hold it worthy of you. We will speak of that. Now tell me the name of the weed trailing along the hedge there." He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled him. It was clematis, he said. '±w I II A rM rt uJJ" xn ri uxfcuoD w Jiio " It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to. I passed it beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a likeness. How foolish I was ! I could volubly sermonize ; only it should be a young maid to listen. Torgive me the yesterday." " You have never to ask. You withdraw your hand — was I rough?" " Xo," she smiled demurely ; " it must get used to the shackles : but my cottage is in sight. I have a growing love for the place. We will enter it like plain people — if you think of coming in." As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably hawkish in their male glitter ; but her cool- ness was not disturbed, and without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the silly division and war of the sexes : — which two might surely enter on an engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl and falcon interlude. Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she was proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages, while untying her bonnet-strings : — " If I had begun my life in a cottage ! " — when really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and whirled her to mid-sea, out of every sensibility but the swimming one of her loss of self in the man. " You would not have been here ! " was all he said. She was up at his heart, fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works ; her thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount. This was not like being seated on a throne. " There," said he, loosening his hug, " now you belong to me ! I know you from head to foot. After that, my darl- ing, I could leave you for years, and call you wife, and be sure of you. I could swear it for you — my life on it ! That 's what I think of you. Don't wonder that I took my chance — the first : — I have waited ! " Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with man's kiss on her mouth : the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger, acting on rights she had given him. And who was she to dream of denying NUPTIAIi CHAPTER 407 them ? Kot an idea in her head ! Bound verily to be thankful for such love, on hearing that it dated from the , night in Ireland. ... " So in love with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow — whatever you wished; anything you chose. It's reckoned a fool's part. No, it 's love : the love of a woman — the one woman ! I was like the hand of a clock to the springs. I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him." " Ignorantly, admit," said she, and could have bitten her tongue for the empty words that provoked : " Would you have flung him nothing ? " and caused a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections. " I hear you have again been defending me. I told you, I think, I wished I had begun my girl's life in a cottage. All that I have had to endure ! ... or so it seems to me : it may be my way of excusing myself : — I know my cunning in that peculiar art. I would take my chance of mixing among the highest and the brightest." "Naturally." « Culpably." " It brings you to me." " Through a muddy channel." "Your husband has full faith in you, my own." "The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on the hill. I wish he had taken me from a cottage." " You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea." " Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads." "Better," Eedworth laughed joyfully, between admira- tion of the tongue that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened. By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion of regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of the novel masculine pres- sure on her throbbing blood ; and when he bent to her to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight Emma with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so much at variance : perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas. " Tell Emma you 408 DIANA OP THE CROSS-WATS have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be," she said perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were, out of the dawn to the man she could consent to wed : and he replied : " I shall tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight's grace before she and I set sail for the West coast of Ireland : " conjuring a picture that checked any protest against the shortness of time : — and Emma would surely be his ally. They talked of the Dublin Ball: painfully to some of her thoughts. But Eedworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no belabouring years rolled in the chasm : which led her to conceive partly, and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man's passion ; and it subjugated the woman knowing of a contrast. The smart of the blow dealt her by him who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss of that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her truer lover : though it was but the outer view of herself — the world's view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the sake of the truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world to lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity. Could it be named ? The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental : — By good fortune, she was no worse ! — She said to Eedworth, when finally dismissing him : " I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend." — To have had this sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest conscience, rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than the purity demanded of them. -:— His answer : " You are my wife ! " rang in her hearing. When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature's imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period, auspicious or luminous or fl.attering, since the hour of her first meeting this man, rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising helpfulness, and in- spiring a belief in her capacity to help. Not the Salvatore high raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear preferable : she strained her shattered wits tO' try them. As for her superlunary sphere, it was in fragments ; and she mused on the singularity, considering that she was not deeply enamoured. Was she so at all? The question NUPTIAL CHAPTER 409 drove her to embrace the dignity of being reasonable — under Emma's guidance. For she did not stand firmly- alone ; her story confessed it. Marriage might be the archway to the road of good service, even as our passage through the flesh may lead to the better state. She had thoughts of the kind, and had them while encouraging her- self to deplore the adieu to her little musk-scented sitting- room, where a modest freedom breathed, and her individu- ality had seemed pointing to a straighter growth. She nodded subsequently to the truth of her happy Emma's remark : " You were created for the world, Tony." A woman of blood and imagination in the warring world, ■without a mate whom she can revere, subscribes to a like- ness with those independent minor realms between greedy mighty neighbours, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten to devour. So, then, this union, the return to the wedding yoke, received sanction of grey-toned reason. She was not enamoured : she could say it to herself. She had, however, been surprised, both by the man and her unprotesting "Submission ; surprised and warmed, unaccountably warmed. Clearness of mind in the woman chaste by nature, however little ignorant it al- lowed her to be in the general review of herself, could not compass the immediately personal, with its acknowledge- ment of her subserviency to touch and pressure — and more, stranger, her readiness to kindle. She left it unex- plained. Unconsciously the image of Dacier was effaced. Looking backward, her heart was moved to her long-constant lover with most pitying tender wonderment — stormy man, as her threatened senses told her that he was. Looking at him, she had to mask her being abashed and mastered. And looking forward, her soul fell in prayer for this true man's never repenting of his choice. Sure of her now, Mr. Thomas Redworth had returned to the station of the courtier, and her feminine sovereignty was not ruf&ed to make her feel too feminine. Another revelation was his playful talk when they were more closely intimate. He had his humour as well as his hearty relish of hers. " If all Englishmen were like him ! " she chimed with Emma Dunstane's eulogies, under the influence. " My dear," the latter replied, " we should simply march 410 DIANA OP THE CEOSSWAYS over the Four Quarters and be blessed by the nations ! Only, avoid your trick of dashing headlong to the other extreme. He has his faults." " Tell me of them," Diana cooed for an answer. " Do. I want the flavour. A girl would be satisfied with super- human excellence. A widow asks for feature." " To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross the bridge with him," rejoined Emma. " Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he rescuing her — then perhaps ! " " But it has been happening ! " " But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly. I go to him a derelict, bearing a story of the sea; empty of ideas. I re- member sailing out of harbour passably well freighted for commerce." " When Tom Eedworth has had command of the ' dere- lict ' a week, I should like to see her ! " The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours. She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too. What she craved, in the ab- sence of the public whiteness which could have caused her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of en- thusiasm. Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury, and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's bestowal of her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust. The aureole glimmered transiently : she could neither think highly of the woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man ; nor, therefore, rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life. And yet, as she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant: the two latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion. Dan- vers, on the night of the great day for Eedworth, had un- dressed her with trembling fingers, and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been all eye ; and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did not share. But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional NUPTIAL CHAPTER 411 vessel they shoot direct as the arrow of logic. Diana's glance at the years behind lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them. She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart's wild wishes in those days would have lowered her — or frozen. Dacier was a coldly luminous image ; still a toll- ing name ; no longer conceivably her mate. Recollection rocked, not she. The politician and citizen was admired : \ she read the man ; — more to her own discredit than to his, but she read him, and if that is done by the one of two | lovers who was true to love, it is the God of the passion i pronouncing a final release from the shadow of his chains. \ Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her cottage chimneys with Eedworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by Dacier to his constituents. She alluded to it, that she might air her power of speaking of the man coolly to him,' or else for the sake of stirring afresh some sentiment he had roused ; and he repeated his high opinion of the orator's political wis- dom : whereby was revived in her memory a certain rep- rehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish naughtiness — too vile ! — as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear vision the loftiest manliness. What did she do? She was Irish; therefore intuitively decorous in ama- tory challenges and interchanges. But she was an impul- sive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the impulse. It had to be this or a burst of weep- ing : — she put a kiss upon his arm.,/' She had omitted to think that' she was dealing with a lover a man of smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a coat-sleeve. Eedworth had his impulse. He kept it under, — she felt the big breath he drew in. Imagination began busily building a nest for him, and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it. The impulse of each had wedded ; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her of the stronger. She rose on the morning of hei marriage day with his favourite Planxty Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes. Emma drove down to the cottage to breakfast and 412 DIANA OS' THE CEOSSWAYS superintend her bride's adornment, as to which, Diana had spoken slightingly ; as well as of the ceremony, and the institution, and this life itself : — she would be married out of her cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud ; yes, a sober person taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends. The change was marked. She wished to hide it, wished to confide it. Emma was asked : " How is he this morning ? " and at the answer, describing his fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and his fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Eock and iinexpect- ingly informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally. " He has a lovely day." " And bride," said Emma, " If you two think so ! I should like to agree with my dear old lord and bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present rather like a Christmas bon-bon — a piece of sugar in the wrap of a rhymed motto. He is kind to Arthur, you say ? " " Like a cordial elder brother." " Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for her letter. She meant well — and I fear she suffers. And it may have been a bit my fault. Blind that I was ! When you say ' cordial elder brother,' you make him appear beautiful to me. The worst of that is, one becomes aware of the inability to match him." " Eead with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony." The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage with the man of men had a tinge from the hy- m enseal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the compensa- tion coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on this road. " How does he go down to the church ? " said Diana. " He walks down. Lukin and his Chief drive. He walks, with your Arthur and Mr. Sullivan Smith, He is on his way now." NTXPTIAJO CHAPTEK 413 Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill. " That is so like him, to walk to his wedding ! " Emma took the place of Danvers in the oflEice of the robing, for the maid, as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped " in the colour of the occasion " to be exactly- tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive mean- ings : — she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state. After several knockings and enterings of the bed- chamber-door, she came hurriedly to say : ' ' And your pillow, ma'am ? I had almost forgotten it ! " A question that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma, with patience trembling. Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually carried her own about. " Take it," she had to reply. The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage. "And tell me," Emma said, "are not your views of life brighter to-day ? " " Too dazzled to know ! It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance of sun. I hope they are." 'i You are beginning to think hopefully again ? " ^ Who can really think and not think hopefully ? You were in my mind last night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life and the fear of extinc- tion. When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their drudge. I heard you whisper, with your very breath in my ear : ' There is nothing the body suffers that the soul inay not profit hy.' That is Emma's history. With that I sail into the dark ; it is my promise of the immortal : teaches me to I see immortality for us. It comes from you, my Emmy." ' If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts : proof to Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity; therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband. No blushing con- fession of the woman's love of the man would have told her so much as the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling's pellucid little sentence. She revolved it long after the day of the wedding. To Emma, constantly on the dark decline of the unillumined 414 DIANA OP THE CKOSSWATS verge, between the two worlds, those words were a radiance and a nourishment. Had they waned she would hare trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence. They shone to her of their vitality. She was lying along her sofa, facing her South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not with- out celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to deepen ; and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend's departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch, had betrayed her feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children ranged up the garden- path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers ; — and of her murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds : " Old Ireland won't repent it ! " and Tony's rejoinder, at the sight of the bridegroom advanc- ing, beaming : " A singular transformation of Old England ! " — and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and blinked on a moisture of the eyelids. Now the dear woman was really wedded, wedded and mated. Her letters breathed, in their own lively or thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating. | Emma gazed into the depths of the waves of crimson,'^'where brilliancy of colour came out of central heaven preter- naturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant seemed an ebbing away to boundless remoteness. Angelical and mortal mixed, making the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human conditions with the ethereal and psychically divined. { Thence it grew that one thought in her breast became a desire for such extension of days as would give her the blessedness to clasp in her lap — if those kind heavens would grant it! — a child of the marriage of the two noblest of human souls, one the dearest ; and so have proof at heart that her country and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future. She was deeply a woman, dumbly a poet. True poets and ?rue women have the native sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance. ! Emma's exaltation in fervour had not NtrPTIAL CHAPTER 415 subsided when she held her beloved in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness. They sat embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the splendid sky. " You watched it knowing I was on my way to you ? " " Praying, dear." "Forme?" " That I might live long enough to be a godmother." There was no reply : there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's fingers. THE END.