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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4467 ***
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XVIII.    THE AUTHORESS
+XIX.      A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT
+XX.       DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH
+XXI.      THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE
+XXII.     BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER : THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
+XXIII.    RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
+XXIV.     INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
+XXV.      ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
+XXVI.     IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS
+
+
+
+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 PRINCESS 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 "vaporous generalizations," and
+other "tricks" you fear.  Now that you are studying Latin for an
+occupation--how good and wise it was of Mr. Redworth to propose it!--
+I 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 like so solid and
+durable.
+
+'THE PRINCESS EGERIA' 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 puffing, of her frame.  She would be healthier and have a chance of
+living longer if she were reduced by a 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 the 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 celestial into coined gold.
+I sound myself, and ring clear.  Incessant 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 intoxicating with eulogy.
+The signature "Apollonius" appears to be of literary-middle indication.
+He marks passages approved 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.  That must be a good sign.  I do not doubt of
+excelling my PRINCESS; and if she received compliments, 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!  You
+see, my Emmy, I could not house with the "companionable person" you hint
+at.  The poles can never come together till the earth is crushed.  She
+would find my habits intolerable, and I hers contemptible, though we
+might both be companionable persons.  My dear, I could not even live with
+myself.  My blessed little quill, which helps me divinely to live out of
+myself, is and must continue to be my one companion.  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 entire felicity--no step taken to bridge division!
+The thought of it makes me tigrish.
+
+'A new pianist playing his own pieces (at Lady Singleby'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 AEolian 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 settled 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 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 gratification.  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 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.'
+
+The letter had every outward show of sincereness in expression, 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 similarity of her delight in both,
+deluded her uncorrupted conscience 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 projected too far beyond them to see the fore
+finger they stretched at her; and the friend's was not that of a prying
+doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms.  Lady Dunstane 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. Whitmonby, 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
+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 the drawing-room, where we talked
+for another hour, and broke up fresher than we began.'
+
+'That break between the men and the women after dinner was Tony's
+aversion, and I am glad she has instituted a change,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+She heard also from Redworth of the unexampled concert 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.  Redworth 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 enliven 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 syllables, 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!  .  .  .  In either case, she has been
+badly used.  Society is big engine enough to protect 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 business.  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 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 anal 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 suffice 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 will 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 must fawn in society.  What is the meaning of that dread of one
+example of tolerance?  O 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 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 different.'
+
+'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! and while thinking myself 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 spirit 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 Redworth, 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 Redworth'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 Richmond 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 corresponding
+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 Redworth!
+
+Percy Dacier seemed to her the more likely one, in that light, and she
+thought so still, after Sir Lukin had introduced 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, 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 gabbier 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 doesn'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 DRIVE IN 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 oppression of her own that led her to
+imagine her recent placid life the pause before thunder, and to sharp the
+mood of her solitary friend she flew to Copsley, finding Sir Lukin
+absent, as usual.  They drove out immediately after breakfast, 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 grass-blade, and beauty and
+peace are overhead, reflected, if we will.  Rain had fallen in the night.
+Here and there hung a milk-white cloud with folded sail.  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 everywhere, steady sunshine above.
+
+Diana held the reins.  The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers
+to the general officer.  Lady Dunstane's ponies were a present from
+Redworth, 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 gateway 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 Southwest, 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 beyond 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 the Emma of days
+and scenes to me!  It helps me to forget 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 soul.  But I
+am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day 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 happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept
+beauty.  I won't say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a
+trotter in harness.'
+
+Diana caressed the 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 road in the wood wound under great
+beeches, they beheld a 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 possible; 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 distance 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 directions--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 youngest light of day, and
+on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the
+woods, more sustaining, 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 business 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 conduct 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.
+
+Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort
+at her house in London; perhaps a message of farewell from the dying
+lord, now dead.  Mr. Rhodes 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 farewell 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 taken 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 earl.
+
+'She'll come,' said old Lady Dacier.
+
+'If the woman respects herself she'll 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.  From what I've heard of her, she's not a woman to stick at
+trifles.  She'll take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she 'll 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.
+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 'hysterical 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 extraordinary 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.  His 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, 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 strengthening 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 at 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.  The supposition of an absolute loneliness was
+most possible.  He had intended to drive back the next day, when the
+domestic 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 Itchenford to the heath-land rolling on the chalk
+wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of his
+host 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 accessibility 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 passingly 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.  For 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 Rovio, 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 lie bludgeons 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 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 Paynham exposed her to attacks
+where she was deemed vulnerable; Lady Dacier muttered old saws as to the
+flocking of birds; he did not accurately understand it, thought it
+indiscreet, at best.  But in regard to his experience, he could tell
+himself that a woman more guileless of luring never drew breath.  On the
+contrary, 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 acknowledgement 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 eyelids, 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.  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 possibilities.  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 intolerable 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 contrasting 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.  Upstairs, 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 A NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER 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.
+
+'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 gulf 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 piping 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 doubtfuller; Life cowered under the shadow or
+outshone it.  He glanced from her to the figure in the bed, and she
+seemed swallowed.
+
+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 lampshade 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!'
+
+'I 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.'
+
+'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 cheerfuller 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.  'If you must really go by
+the early train, I will drive you.'
+
+'No, I will walk; I prefer it.'
+
+'I will order your breakfast at once.'
+
+He turned on his heel.  She stopped him.  'No, I have no taste for eating
+or drinking.'
+
+'Pray .  .  .'  said he, in visible distress.
+
+She shook her head.  'I could not.  I have twenty minutes longer.  I can
+find my way to the station; it is almost a straight road out of the park-
+gates.'
+
+His heart swelled with anger at the household for they treatment she had
+been subjected to, judging by her resolve not to break bread in the
+house.
+
+They resumed their silent sitting.  The intervals for a word to pass
+between them were long, and the ticking of the time-piece fronting the
+death-bed ruled the chamber, scarcely varied.
+
+The lamp was raised for the final look, the leave-taking.
+
+Dacier buried his face, thinking many things--the common multitude in
+insurrection.
+
+'A servant should be told to come now,' she said.  'I have only to put on
+my bonnet and I am ready.'
+
+'You will take no .  .  . ?'
+
+'Nothing.'
+
+'It is not too late for a carriage to be ordered.'
+
+'No--the walk!'
+
+They separated.
+
+He roused the two women in the dressing-room, asleep with heads against
+the wall.  Thence he sped to his own room for hat and overcoat, and a
+sprinkle of cold water.  Descending the stairs, he beheld his companion
+issuing from the chamber of death.  Her lips were shut, her eyelids
+nervously tremulous.
+
+They were soon in the warm sweet open air, and they walked without an
+interchange of a syllable through the park into the white hawthorn lane,
+glad to breathe.  Her nostrils took long draughts of air, but of the
+change of, scene she appeared scarcely sensible.
+
+At the park-gates, she said: 'There is no necessity four your coming.'
+
+His answer was: 'I think of myself.  I gain something every step I walk
+with you.'
+
+'To-day is Thursday,' said she.  'The funeral is .  .  . ?'
+
+'Monday has been fixed.  According to his directions, he will lie in the
+churchyard of his village--not in the family vault.'
+
+'I know,' she said hastily.  'They are privileged who follow him and see
+the coffin lowered.  He spoke of this quiet little resting-place.'
+
+'Yes, it's a good end.  I do not wonder at his wish for the honour you
+have done him.  I could wish it too.  But more living than dead--that is
+a natural wish.'
+
+'It is not to be called an honour.'
+
+'I should feel it so-an honour to me.'
+
+'It is a friend's duty.  The word is too harsh; it was his friend's
+desire.  He did not ask it so much as he sanctioned it.  For to him what
+has my sitting beside him been!'
+
+'He had the prospective happiness.'
+
+'He knew well that my soul would be with him--as it was last night.
+But he knew it would be my poor human happiness to see him with my eyes,
+touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight.'
+
+Dacier exclaimed: 'How you can love!'
+
+'Is the village church to be seen?' she asked.
+
+'To the right of those elms; that is the spire.  The black spot below is
+a yew.  You love with the whole heart when you love.'
+
+'I love my friends,' she replied.
+
+'You tempt me to envy those who are numbered among them.'
+
+'They are not many.'
+
+'They should be grateful.!
+
+'You have some acquaintance with them all.'
+
+'And an enemy?  Had you ever one?  Do you know of one?'
+
+'Direct and personal designedly?  I think not.  We give that title to
+those who are disinclined to us and add a dash of darker colour to our
+errors.  Foxes have enemies in the dogs; heroines of melodramas have
+their persecuting villains.  I suppose that conditions of life exist
+where one meets the original complexities.  The bad are in every rank.
+The inveterately malignant I have not found.  Circumstances may combine
+to make a whisper as deadly as a blow, though not of such evil design.
+Perhaps if we lived at a Court of a magnificent despot we should learn
+that we are less highly civilized than we imagine ourselves; but that is
+a fire to the passions, and the extreme is not the perfect test.  Our
+civilization counts positive gains--unless you take the melodrama for the
+truer picture of us.  It is always the most popular with the English.--
+And look, what a month June is!  Yesterday morning I was with Lady
+Dunstane on her heights, and I feel double the age.  He was fond of
+this wild country.  We think it a desert, a blank, whither he has gone,
+because we will strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of
+that but the bursting of the eyeballs.'
+
+Dacier assented: 'There's no use in peering beyond the limits.'
+
+'No,' said she; 'the effect is like the explaining of things to a dull
+head--the finishing stroke to the understanding!  Better continue to
+brood.  We get to some unravelment if we are left to our own efforts.
+I quarrel with no priest of any denomination.  That they should quarrel
+among themselves is comprehensible in their wisdom, for each has the
+specific.  But they show us their way of solving the great problem, and
+we ought to thank them, though one or the other abominate us.  You are
+advised to talk with Lady Dunstane on these themes.
+
+She is perpetually in the antechamber of death, and her soul is
+perennially sunshine.--See the pretty cottage under the laburnum curls!
+Who lives there?'
+
+'His gamekeeper, Simon Rofe.'
+
+'And what a playground for the children, that bit of common by their
+garden-palings!  and the pond, and the blue hills over the furzes.  I
+hope those people will not be turned out.'
+
+Dacier could not tell.  He promised to do his best for them.
+
+'But,' said she, 'you are the lord here now.'
+
+'Not likely to be the tenant.  Incomes are wanted to support even small
+estates.'
+
+'The reason is good for courting the income.'
+
+He disliked the remark; and when she said presently:
+
+'Those windmills make the landscape homely,' he rejoined: 'They remind
+one of our wheeling London gamins round the cab from the station.'
+
+'They remind you,' said she, and smiled at the chance discordant trick he
+had, remembering occasions when it had crossed her.
+
+'This is homelier than Rovio,' she said; 'quite as nice in its way.'
+
+'You do not gather flowers here.'
+
+'Because my friend has these at her feet.'
+
+'May one petition without a rival, then, for a souvenir?'
+
+'Certainly, if you care to have a common buttercup.'
+
+They reached the station, five minutes in advance of the train.  His
+coming manoeuvre was early detected, and she drew from her pocket the
+little book he had seen lying unopened on the table, and said: 'I shall
+have two good hours for reading.'
+
+'You will not object?  .  .  .  I must accompany you to town.  Permit it,
+I beg.  You shall not be worried to talk.'
+
+'No; I came alone and return alone.'
+
+'Fasting and unprotected!  Are you determined to take away the worst
+impression of us?  Do not refuse me this favour.'
+
+'As to fasting, I could not eat: and unprotected no woman is in England,
+if she is a third-class traveller.  That is my experience of the class;
+and I shall return among my natural protectors--the most unselfishly
+chivalrous to women in the whole world.'
+
+He had set his heart on going with her, and he attempted eloquence in
+pleading, but that exposed him to her humour; he was tripped.
+
+'It is not denied that you belong to the knightly class,' she said; 'and
+it is not necessary that you should wear armour and plumes to proclaim
+it; and your appearance would be ample protection from the drunken
+sailors travelling, you say, on this line; and I may be deplorably
+mistaken in imagining that I could tame them.  But your knightliness is
+due elsewhere; and I commit myself to the fortune of war.  It is a battle
+for women everywhere; under the most favourable conditions among my dear
+common English.  I have not my maid with me, or else I should not dare.'
+
+She paid for a third-class ticket, amused by Dacier's look of entreaty
+and trouble.
+
+'Of course I obey,' he murmured.
+
+'I have the habit of exacting it in matters concerning my independence,'
+she said; and it arrested some rumbling notions in his head as to a piece
+of audacity on the starting of the train.  They walked up and down the
+platform till the bell rang and the train came rounding beneath an arch.
+
+'Oh, by the way, may I ask?'--he said: 'was it your article in
+Whitmonby's journal on a speech of mine last week?'
+
+'The guilty writer is confessed.'
+
+'Let me thank you.'
+
+'Don't.  But try to believe it written on public grounds--if the task is
+not too great.'
+
+'I may call?'
+
+'You will be welcome.'
+
+'To tell you of the funeral--the last of him.'
+
+'Do not fail to come.'
+
+She could have laughed to see him jumping on the steps of the third-class
+carriages one after another to choose her company for her.  In those pre-
+democratic blissful days before the miry Deluge, the opinion of the
+requirements of poor English travellers entertained by the Seigneur
+Directors of the class above them, was that they differed from cattle in
+stipulating for seats.  With the exception of that provision to suit
+their weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and
+the seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the
+sitter for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a
+higher state.  Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window
+aloof, demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he
+would indulge in views of the passing scenery,--such was the furniture of
+dens where a refinement of castigation was practised on villain poverty
+by denying leathers to the windows, or else buttons to the leathers, so
+that the windows had either to be up or down, but refused to shelter and
+freshen simultaneously.
+
+Dacier selected a compartment occupied by two old women, a mother and
+babe and little maid, and a labouring man.  There he installed her, with
+an eager look that she would not notice.
+
+'You will want the window down,' he said.
+
+She applied to her fellow-travellers for the permission; and struggling
+to get the window down, he was irritated to animadvert on 'these
+carriages' of the benevolent railway Company.
+
+'Do not forget that the wealthy are well treated, or you may be unjust,'
+said she, to pacify him.
+
+His mouth sharpened its line while he tried arts and energies on the
+refractory window.  She told him to leave it.  'You can't breathe this
+atmosphere!' he cried, and called to a porter, who did the work,
+remarking that it was rather stiff.
+
+The door was banged and fastened.  Dacier had to hang on the step to see
+her in the farewell.  From the platform he saw the top of her bonnet; and
+why she should have been guilty of this freak of riding in an unwholesome
+carriage, tasked his power of guessing.  He was too English even to have
+taken the explanation, for he detested the distinguishing of the races in
+his country, and could not therefore have comprehended her peculiar
+tenacity of the sense of injury as long as enthusiasm did not arise to
+obliterate it.  He required a course of lessons in Irish.
+
+Sauntering down the lane, he called at Simon Rofe's cottage, and spoke
+very kindly to the gamekeeper's wife.  That might please Diana.  It was
+all he could do at present.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+'THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE'
+
+Descriptions in the newspapers of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh
+had the effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the
+disused name of Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the
+verdict of the jury was again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained,
+the carpers replying to the champions that they held to their view of it:
+as heads of bull-dogs are expected to do when they have got a grip of
+one.  It is a point of muscular honour with them never to relax their
+hold.  They will tell you why:--they formed that opinion from the first.
+And but for the swearing of a particular witness, upon whom the plaintiff
+had been taught to rely, the verdict would have been different--to prove
+their soundness of judgement.  They could speak from private positive
+information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic
+sources.  Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the
+absence of the husband?  Oh!--The British Lucretia was very properly not
+legally at home to the masculine world of that day.  She plied her
+distaff in pure seclusion, meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair
+proportion of the masculine world, which had not yet, has not yet,
+'doubled Cape Turk,' approved her condemnation to the sack.
+
+There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies.  The
+elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the
+levels where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it
+now, assisting to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and
+lively upper pavement of Society, above its tumbled strata.  She was near
+that distinguished surface, not on it.  Her circle was practically the
+same as it was previous to the coveted nominal rank enabling her to
+trample on those beneath it.  And women like that Mrs. Warwick, a woman
+of no birth, no money, not even honest character, enjoyed the entry
+undisputed, circulated among the highest:--because people took her rattle
+for wit!--and because also our nobility, Lady Wathin feared, had no due
+regard for morality.  Our aristocracy, brilliant and ancient though it
+was, merited rebuke.  She grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof
+were plenty among the frolicsome host just overhead, as vexatious as the
+drawing-room party to the lodger in the floor below, who has not received
+an invitation to partake of the festivities and is required to digest the
+noise.  But if ambition is oversensitive, moral indignation is ever
+consolatory, for it plants us on the Judgement Seat.  There indeed we
+may, sitting with the very Highest, forget our personal disappointments
+in dispensing reprobation for misconduct, however eminent the offenders.
+
+She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon's call to see poor Lady
+Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a
+patroness of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub--an icy check-bow of the
+aristocratic head from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not
+a look; the half-turn of a head devoid of mouth and eyes!  She practised
+that forbidding checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it
+was horrible.  A noli me tangere, her husband termed it, in his
+ridiculous equanimity; and he might term it what he pleased--it was
+insulting.  The solace she had was in hearing that hideous Radical
+Revolutionary things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick's evenings with
+her friends:--impudently named 'the elect of London.'  Pleasing to
+reflect upon Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them
+some day down with a crash!  Her 'elect of London' were a queer
+gathering, by report of them!  And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a
+celebrity, was the right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs.
+Warwick.  Where will not men go to be flattered by a pretty woman!  He
+had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin's table.
+But there of course he would not have had 'the freedom': that is, she
+rejoiced in thinking defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed
+her topics.  The Hon. Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday
+afternoon by.  Mr. Quintin Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and
+he knew Mrs. Warwick--a little, he said.  The opportunity was not lost to
+convey to him, entirely in the interest of sweet Constance Asper, that
+the moral world entertained a settled view of the very clever woman Mrs.
+Warwick certainly was.  He had asked Diana, on their morning walk to the
+station, whether she had an enemy: so prone are men, educated by the
+Drama and Fiction in the belief that the garden of civilized life must be
+at the mercy of the old wild devourers, to fancy 'villain whispers' an
+indication of direct animosity.  Lady Wathin had no sentiment of the
+kind.
+
+But she had become acquainted with the other side of the famous
+Dannisburgh case--the unfortunate plaintiff; and compassion as well as
+morality moved her to put on a speaking air when Mr. Warwick's name was
+mentioned.  She pictured him to the ladies of her circle as 'one of our
+true gentlemen in his deportment and his feelings.'  He was, she would
+venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman.  'But now,' she added
+commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.'
+A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him.  Lady
+Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is
+the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-
+morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.'  Morality had something to
+say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be
+feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband.  Still Mrs.
+Warwick undoubtedly was one of those women (of Satanic construction) who
+have the art of enslaving the men unhappy enough to cross their path.
+The nature of the art was hinted, with the delicacy of dainty feet which
+have to tread in mire to get to safety.  Men, alas!  are snared in this
+way.  Instances too numerous for the good repute of the swinish sex,
+were cited, and the question of how Morality was defensible from their
+grossness passed without a tactical reply.  There is no defence: Those
+women come like the Cholera Morbus--and owing to similar causes.  They
+will prevail until the ideas of men regarding women are purified.
+Nevertheless the husband who could forgive, even propose to forgive, was
+deemed by consent generous, however weak.  Though she might not have been
+wholly guilty, she had bitterly offended.  And he despatched an emissary
+to her?--The theme, one may, in their language, 'fear,' was relished as a
+sugared acid.  It was renewed in the late Autumn of the year, when
+ANTONIA published her new book, entitled THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE.
+The signature of the authoress was now known; and from this resurgence of
+her name in public, suddenly a radiation of tongues from the circle of
+Lady Wathin declared that the repentant Mrs. Warwick had gone back to her
+husband's bosom and forgiveness!  The rumour spread in spite of sturdy
+denials at odd corners, counting the red-hot proposal of Mr. Sullivan
+Smith to eat his head and boots for breakfast if it was proved correct.
+It filled a yawn of the Clubs for the afternoon.  Soon this wanton rumour
+was met and stifled by another of more morbific density, heavily charged
+as that which led the sad Eliza to her pyre.
+
+ANTONIA's hero was easily identified.  THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE could
+be he only who was now at all her parties, always meeting her; had been
+spied walking with her daily in the park near her house, on his march
+down to Westminster during the session; and who positively went to
+concerts and sat under fiddlers to be near her.  It accounted moreover
+for his treatment of Constance Asper.  What effrontery of the authoress,
+to placard herself with him in a book!  The likeness of the hero to Percy
+Dacier once established became striking to glaringness--a proof of her
+ability, and more of her audacity; still more of her intention to flatter
+him up to his perdition.  By the things written of him, one would imagine
+the conversations going on behind the scenes.  She had the wiles of a
+Cleopatra, not without some of the Nilene's experiences.  A youthful
+Antony Dacier would be little likely to escape her toils.  And so
+promising a young man!  The sigh, the tear for weeping over his
+destruction, almost fell, such vivid realizing of the prophesy
+appeared in its pathetic pronouncement.
+
+This low rumour, or malaria, began blowing in the winter, and did not
+travel fast; for strangely, there was hardly a breath of it in the
+atmosphere of Dacier, none in Diana's.  It rose from groups not so
+rapidly and largely mixing, and less quick to kindle; whose crazy
+sincereness battened on the smallest morsel of fact and collected the
+fictitious by slow absorption.  But as guardians of morality, often doing
+good duty in their office, they are persistent.  When Parliament
+assembled, Mr. Quintin Manx, a punctual member of the House, if nothing
+else, arrived in town.  He was invited to dine with Lady Wathin.  After
+dinner she spoke to him of the absent Constance, and heard of her being
+well, and expressed a great rejoicing at that.  Whereupon the burly old
+shipowner frowned and puffed.  Constance, he said, had plunged into these
+new spangle, candle and high singing services; was all for symbols,
+harps, effigies, what not.  Lady Wathin's countenance froze in hearing of
+it.  She led Mr. Quintin to a wall-sofa, and said: 'Surely the dear child
+must have had a disappointment, for her to have taken to those foolish
+displays of religion!  It is generally a sign.'
+
+'Well, ma'am-my lady--I let girls go their ways in such things.  I don't
+interfere.  But it's that fellow, or nobody, with her.  She has fixed her
+girl's mind on him, and if she can't columbine as a bride, she will as a
+nun.  Young people must be at some harlequinade.'
+
+'But it is very shocking.  And he?'
+
+'He plays last and loose, warm and cold.  I'm ready to settle twenty
+times a nobleman's dowry on my niece and she's a fine girl, a handsome
+girl, educated up to the brim, fit to queen it in any drawing-room.  He
+holds her by some arts that don't hold him, it seems.  He's all for
+politics.'
+
+'Constance can scarcely be his dupe so far, I should think.'
+
+'How do you mean?'
+
+'Everything points to one secret of his conduct.'
+
+'A woman?'
+
+Lady Wathin's head shook for her sex's pained affirmative.
+
+Mr. Quintin in the same fashion signified the downright negative.  'The
+fellow's as cold as a fish.'
+
+'Flattery will do anything.  There is, I fear, one.'
+
+'Widow?  wife?  maid?'
+
+'Married, I regret to say.'
+
+'Well, if he'd get over with it,' said Quintin, in whose notions the
+seductiveness of a married woman could be only temporary, for all the
+reasons pertaining to her state.  At the same time his view of Percy
+Dacier was changed in thinking it possible that a woman could divert him
+from his political and social interests.  He looked incredulous.
+
+'You have heard of a Mrs. Warwick?' said Lady Wathin.
+
+'Warwick!  I have.  I've never seen her.  At my broker's in the City
+yesterday I saw the name on a Memorandum of purchase of Shares in a
+concern promising ten per cent., and not likely to carry the per annum
+into the plural.  He told me she was a grand kind of woman, past
+advising.'
+
+'For what amount'
+
+'Some thousands, I think it was.'
+
+'She has no money': Lady Wathin corrected her emphasis: 'or ought to have
+none.'
+
+'She can't have got it from him.'
+
+'Did you notice her Christian name?'
+
+'I don't recollect it, if I did.  I thought the woman a donkey.'
+
+'Would you consider me a busybody were I to try to mitigate this woman's
+evil influence?  I love dear Constance, and should be happy to serve
+her.'
+
+'I want my girl married,' said old Quintin.  'He's one of my
+Parliamentary chiefs, with first-rate prospects; good family, good
+sober fellow--at least I thought so; by nature, I mean; barring your
+incantations.  He suits me, she liking him.'
+
+'She admires him, I am sure.'
+
+'She's dead on end for the fellow!'
+
+Lady Wathin felt herself empowered by Quintin Manx to undertake the
+release of sweet Constance Asper's knight from the toils of his
+enchantress.  For this purpose she had first an interview with Mr.
+Warwick, and next she hurried to Lady Dunstane at Copsley.  There, after
+jumbling Mr. Warwick's connubial dispositions and Mrs. Warwick's last
+book, and Mr. Percy Dacier's engagement to the great heiress in a gossipy
+hotch-potch, she contrived to gather a few items of fact, as that THE
+YOUNG MINISTER was probably modelled upon Mr. Percy Dacier.  Lady
+Dunstane made no concealment of it as soon as she grew sensible of the
+angling.  But she refused her help to any reconciliation between Mr. and
+Mrs. Warwick.  She declined to listen to Lady Wathin's entreaties.  She
+declined to give her reasons.--These bookworm women, whose pride it is to
+fancy that they can think for themselves, have a great deal of the
+heathen in them, as morality discovers when it wears the enlistment
+ribands and applies yo them to win recruits for a service under the
+direct blessing of Providence.
+
+Lady Wathin left some darts behind her, in the form of moral
+exclamations; and really intended morally.  For though she did not like
+Mrs. Warwick, she had no wish to wound, other than by stopping her
+further studies of the Young Minister, and conducting him to the young
+lady loving him, besides restoring a bereft husband to his own.  How
+sadly pale and worn poor Mr. Warwick appeared?  The portrayal of his
+withered visage to Lady Dunstane had quite failed to gain a show of
+sympathy.  And so it is ever with your book-worm women pretending to be
+philosophical!  You sound them vainly for a manifestation of the
+commonest human sensibilities, They turn over the leaves of a Latin book
+on their laps while you are supplicating them to assist in a work of
+charity!
+
+Lady Wathin's interjectory notes haunted Emma's ear.  Yet she had seen
+nothing in Tony to let her suppose that there was trouble of her heart
+below the surface; and her Tony when she came to Copsley shone in the
+mood of the day of Lord Dannisburgh's drive down from London with her.
+She was running on a fresh work; talked of composition as a trifle.
+
+'I suppose the YOUNG MINISTER is Mr. Percy Dacier?' said Emma.
+
+'Between ourselves he is,' Diana replied, smiling at a secret guessed.
+'You know my model and can judge of the likeness.'
+
+'You write admiringly of him, Tony.'
+
+'And I do admire him.  So would you, Emmy, if you knew him as well as I
+do now.  He pairs with Mr. Redworth; he also is the friend of women.  But
+he lifts us to rather a higher level of intellectual friendship.  When
+the ice has melted--and it is thick at first--he pours forth all his
+ideas without reserve; and they are deep and noble.  Ever since Lord
+Dannisburgh's death and our sitting together, we have been warm friends
+--intimate, I would say, if it could be said of one so self-contained.
+In that respect, no young man was ever comparable with him.  And I am
+encouraged to flatter myself that he unbends to me more than to others.'
+
+'He is engaged, or partly, I hear; why does he not marry?'
+
+'I wish he would!' Diana said, with a most brilliant candour of aspect.
+
+Emma read in it, that it would complete her happiness, possibly by
+fortifying her sense of security; and that seemed right.  Her own
+meditations, illumined by the beautiful face in her presence, referred to
+the security of Mr. Dacier.
+
+'So, then, life is going smoothly,' said Emma.
+
+'Yes, at a good pace and smoothly: not a torrent--Thames-like, "without
+o'erflowing full."  It is not Lugano and the Salvatore.  Perhaps it is
+better: as action is better than musing.'
+
+'No troubles whatever?'
+
+'None.  Well, except an "adorer" at times.  I have to take him as my
+portion.  An impassioned Caledonian has a little bothered me.  I met him
+at Lady Pennon's, and have been meeting him, as soon as I put foot out of
+my house, ever since.  If I could impress and impound him to marry Mary
+Paynham, I should be glad.  By the way, I have consented to let her try
+at a portrait of me.  No, I have no troubles.  I have friends, the
+choicest of the nation; I have health, a field for labour, fairish
+success with it; a mind alive, such as it is.  I feel like that midsummer
+morning of our last drive out together, the sun high, clearish, clouded
+enough to be cool.  And still I envy Emmy on her sofa, mastering Latin,
+biting at Greek.  What a wise recommendation that was of Mr. Redworth's!
+He works well in the House.  He spoke excellently the other night.'
+
+'He runs over to Ireland this Easter.'
+
+'He sees for himself, and speaks with authority.  He sees and feels.
+Englishmen mean well, but they require an extremity of misery to waken
+their feelings.'
+
+'It is coming, he says; and absit omen!'
+
+'Mr. Dacier says he is the one Englishman who may always be sure of an
+Irish hearing; and he does not cajole them, you know.  But the English
+defect is really not want of feeling so much as want of foresight.  They
+will not look ahead.  A famine ceasing, a rebellion crushed, they jog on
+as before, with their Dobbin trot and blinker confidence in "Saxon
+energy."  They should study the Irish: I think it was Mr. Redworth who
+compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse: the
+rider should not grow restive when the steed begins to kick: calmer;
+firm, calm, persuasive.'
+
+'Does Mr. Dacier agree?'
+
+'Not always.  He has the inveterate national belief that Celtic blood
+is childish, and the consequently illogical disregard of its hold of
+impressions.  The Irish--for I have them in my heart, though I have not
+been among them for long at a time--must love you to serve you, and will
+hate you if you have done them injury and they have not wiped it out--
+they with a treble revenge, or you with cordial benefits.  I have told
+him so again and again: ventured to suggest measures.'
+
+'He listens to you, Tony?'
+
+'He says I have brains.  It ends in a compliment.'
+
+'You have inspired Mr. Redworth.'
+
+'If I have, I have lived for some good.'
+
+Altogether her Tony's conversation proved to Emma that her perusal of the
+model of THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE was an artist's, free, open, and not
+discoloured by the personal tincture.  Her heart plainly was free and
+undisturbed.  She had the same girl's love of her walks where wildflowers
+grew; if possible, a keener pleasure.  She hummed of her happiness in
+being at Copsley, singing her Planxty Kelly and The Puritani by turns.
+She stood on land: she was not on the seas.  Emma thought so with good
+reason.
+
+She stood on land, it was true, but she stood on a cliff of the land,
+the seas below and about her; and she was enabled to hoodwink her friend
+because the assured sensation of her firm footing deceived her own soul,
+even while it took short flights to the troubled waters.  Of her firm
+footing she was exultingly proud.  She stood high, close to danger,
+without giddiness.  If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning
+from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her),
+the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions
+of the mornings at Lugano--her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these
+reinforced her.  She did not ask herself why she should have to seek
+them for aid.  In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly
+covers, as the fiction of a perfect ignorant innocence combined with
+common intelligence would have us to suppose that the minds of women can
+do.  She was honest as long as she was not directly questioned, pierced
+to the innermost and sanctum of the bosom.  She could honestly summon
+bright light to her eyes in wishing the man were married.  She did not
+ask herself why she called it up.  The remorseless progressive
+interrogations of a Jesuit Father in pursuit of the bosom's verity might
+have transfixed it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as
+to the spirit, far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.
+
+Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that
+her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she
+considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for
+venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the
+literary market.  Her ANTONIA'S last book had been reviewed obediently
+to smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr.
+Whitmonby's choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.
+A Literary Review (Charles Rainer's property) had suggested that perhaps
+'the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly'; and another,
+actuated by the public taste of the period for our 'vigorous homely
+Saxon' in one and two syllable words, had complained of a 'tendency to
+polysyllabic phraseology.'  The remainder, a full majority, had sounded
+eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.
+Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a Queen
+when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are her
+dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and
+reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders,
+whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks.  They
+had fallen upon a little volume of verse, 'like a body of barn-door hens
+on a stranger chick,' Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily for
+letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author's
+behalf.  Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained
+to him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a shivering
+and welted poet.  He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter.  ANTONIA's
+literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and
+so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the
+smooth sailing of her costly household.  A merry-go-round of creditors
+required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.
+
+She felt mercenary, debased by comparison with the well-scourged verse-
+mason, Orpheus of the untenanted city, who had done his publishing
+ingenuously for glory: a good instance of the comic-pathetic.  She wrote
+to Emma, begging her to take him in at Copsley for a few days: 'I told
+you I had no troubles.  I am really troubled about this poor boy.  He has
+very little money and has embarked on literature.  I cannot induce any of
+my friends to lend him a hand.  Mr. Redworth gruffly insists on his going
+back to his law-clerk's office and stool, and Mr. Dacier says that no
+place is vacant.  The reality of Lord Dannisburgh's death is brought
+before me by my helplessness.  He would have made him an assistant
+private Secretary, pending a Government appointment, rather than let me
+plead in vain.'
+
+Mr. Rhodes with his travelling bag was packed off to Copsley, to enjoy a
+change of scene after his run of the gauntlet.  He was very heartily
+welcomed by Lady Dunstane, both for her Tony's sake and his own modest
+worship of that luminary, which could permit of being transparent; but
+chiefly she welcomed him as the living proof of Tony's disengagement
+from anxiety, since he was her one spot of trouble, and could easily be
+comforted by reading with her, and wandering through the Spring woods
+along the heights.  He had a happy time, midway in air between his
+accomplished hostess and his protecting Goddess.  His bruises were soon
+healed.  Each day was radiant to him, whether it rained or shone; and by
+his looks and what he said of himself Lady Dunstane understood that he
+was in the highest temper of the human creature tuned to thrilling accord
+with nature.  It was her generous Tony's work.  She blessed it, and liked
+the youth the better.
+
+During the stay of Mr. Arthur Rhodes at Copsley, Sir Lukin came on a
+visit to his wife.  He mentioned reports in the scandal-papers: one, that
+Mr. P. D.  would shortly lead to the altar the lovely heiress Miss A.,
+Percy Dacier and Constance Asper:--another, that a reconciliation was to
+be expected between the beautiful authoress Mrs. W. and her husband.
+'Perhaps it's the best thing she can do,' Sir Lukin added.
+
+Lady Dunstane pronounced a woman's unforgiving: 'Never.'  The revolt
+of her own sensations assured her of Tony's unconquerable repugnance.
+In conversation subsequently with Arthur Rhodes, she heard that he knew
+the son of Mr. Warwick's attorney, a Mr. Fern; and he had gathered from
+him some information of Mr. Warwick's condition of health.  It had been
+alarming; young Fern said it was confirmed heart-disease.  His father
+frequently saw Mr. Warwick, and said he was fretting himself to death.
+
+It seemed just a possibility that Tony's natural compassionateness had
+wrought on her to immolate herself and nurse to his end the man who had
+wrecked her life.  Lady Dunstane waited for the news.  At last she wrote,
+touching the report incidentally.  There was no reply.  The silence
+ensuing after such a question responded forcibly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER: THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
+
+On the third day of the Easter recess Percy Dacier landed from the Havre
+steamer at Caen and drove straightway for the sandy coast, past fields of
+colza to brine-blown meadows of coarse grass, and then to the low dunes
+and long stretching sands of the ebb in semicircle: a desolate place at
+that season; with a dwarf fishing-village by the shore; an East wind
+driving landward in streamers every object that had a scrap to fly.
+He made head to the inn, where the first person he encountered in the
+passage was Diana's maid Danvers, who relaxed from the dramatic
+exaggeration of her surprise at the sight of a real English gentleman in
+these woebegone regions, to inform him that her mistress might be found
+walking somewhere along the sea-shore, and had her dog to protect her.
+They were to stay here a whole week, Danvers added, for a conveyance of
+her private sentiments.  Second thoughts however whispered to her
+shrewdness that his arrival could only be by appointment.  She had been
+anticipating something of the sort for some time.
+
+Dacier butted against the stringing wind, that kept him at a rocking
+incline to his left for a mile.  He then discerned in what had seemed a
+dredger's dot on the sands, a lady's figure, unmistakably she, without
+the corroborating testimony of Leander paw-deep in the low-tide water.
+She was out at a distance on the ebb-sands, hurtled, gyred, beaten to all
+shapes, in rolls, twists, volumes, like a blown banner-flag, by the
+pressing wind.  A kerchief tied her bonnet under her chin.  Bonnet and
+breast-ribands rattled rapidly as drummer-sticks.  She stood near the
+little running ripple of the flat sea-water, as it hurried from a long
+streaked back to a tiny imitation of spray.  When she turned to the shore
+she saw him advancing, but did not recognize; when they met she merely
+looked with wide parted lips.  This was no appointment.
+
+'I had to see you,' Dacier said.
+
+She coloured to a deeper red than the rose-conjuring wind had whipped in
+her cheeks.  Her quick intuition of the reason of his coming barred a
+mental evasion, and she had no thought of asking either him or herself
+what special urgency had brought him.
+
+'I have been here four days.'
+
+'Lady Esquart spoke of the place.'
+
+'Lady Esquart should not have betrayed me.'
+
+'She did it inadvertently, without an idea of my profiting by it.'
+
+Diana indicated the scene in a glance.  'Dreary country, do you think?'
+
+'Anywhere!'--said he.
+
+They walked up the sand-heap.  The roaring Easter with its shrieks and
+whistles at her ribands was not favourable to speech.  His 'Anywhere!'
+had a penetrating significance, the fuller for the break that left it
+vague.
+
+Speech between them was commanded; he could not be suffered to remain.
+She descended upon a sheltered pathway running along a ditch, the border
+of pastures where cattle cropped, raised heads, and resumed their one
+comforting occupation.
+
+Diana gazed on them, smarting from the buffets of the wind she had met.
+
+'No play of their tails to-day'; she said, as she slackened her steps.
+'You left Lady Esquart well?'
+
+'Lady Esquart .  .  .  I think was well.  I had to see you.  I thought
+you would be with her in Berkshire.  She told me of a little sea-side
+place close to Caen.'
+
+'You had to see me?'
+
+'I miss you now if it's a day!'
+
+'I heard a story in London .  .  .'
+
+'In London there are many stories.  I heard one.  Is there a foundation
+for it?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He breathed relieved.  'I wanted to see you once before .  .  .  if it
+was true.  It would have made a change in my life-a gap.'
+
+'You do me the honour to like my Sunday evenings?'
+
+'Beyond everything London can offer.'
+
+'A letter would have reached me.'
+
+'I should have had to wait for the answer.  There is no truth in it?'
+
+Her choice was to treat the direct assailant frankly or imperil her
+defence by the ordinary feminine evolutions, which might be taken for
+inviting: poor pranks always.
+
+'There have been overtures,' she said.
+
+'Forgive me; I have scarcely the right to ask .  .  .  speak of it.!
+
+'My friends may use their right to take an interest in my fortunes.'
+
+'I thought I might, on my way to Paris, turn aside .  .  .  coming by
+this route.'
+
+'If you determined not to lose much of your time.'
+
+The coolness of her fencing disconcerted a gentleman conscious of his
+madness.  She took instant advantage of any circuitous move; she gave him
+no practicable point.  He was little skilled in the arts of attack, and
+felt that she checked his impetuousness; respected her for it, chafed at
+it, writhed with the fervours precipitating him here, and relapsed on his
+pleasure in seeing her face, hearing her voice.
+
+'Your happiness, I hope, is the chief thought in such a case,' he said.
+
+'I am sure you would consider it.'
+
+'I can't quite forget my own.'
+
+'You compliment an ambitious hostess.'
+
+Dacier glanced across the pastures, 'What was it that tempted you to this
+place?'
+
+'A poet would say it looks like a figure in the shroud.  It has no
+features; it has a sort of grandeur belonging to death.  I heard of it as
+the place where I might be certain of not meeting an acquaintance.'
+
+'And I am the intruder.'
+
+'An hour or two will not give you that title.'
+
+'Am I to count the minutes by my watch?'
+
+'By the sun.  We will supply you an omelette and piquette, and send you
+back sobered and friarly--to Caen for Paris at sunset.'
+
+'Let the fare be Spartan.  I could take my black broth with philosophy
+every day of the year under your auspices.  What I should miss .  .  .'
+
+'You bring no news of the world or the House?'
+
+'None.  You know as much as I know.  The Irish agitation is chronic.
+The Corn-law threatens to be the same.'
+
+'And your Chief--in personal colloquy?'
+
+'He keeps a calm front.  I may tell you: there is nothing I would not
+confide to you: he has let fall some dubious words in private.  I don't
+know what to think of them.'
+
+'But if he should waver?'
+
+'It's not wavering.  It's the openness of his mind.'
+
+'Ah! the mind.  We imagine it free.  The House and the country are the
+sentient frame governing the mind of the politician more than his ideas.
+He cannot think independently of them:--nor I of my natural anatomy.  You
+will test the truth of that after your omelette and piquette, and marvel
+at the quitting of your line of route for Paris.  As soon as the mind
+attempts to think independently, it is like a kite with the cord cut,
+and performs a series of darts and frisks, that have the look of wildest
+liberty till you see it fall flat to earth.  The openness of his mind is
+most honourable to him.'
+
+'Ominous for his party.'
+
+'Likely to be good for his country.'
+
+'That is the question.'
+
+'Prepare to encounter it.  In politics I am with the active minority on
+behalf of the inert but suffering majority.  That is my rule.  It leads,
+unless you have a despotism, to the conquering side.  It is always the
+noblest.  I won't say, listen to me; only do believe my words have some
+weight.  This is a question of bread.'
+
+'It involves many other questions.'
+
+'And how clearly those leaders put their case!  They are admirable
+debaters.  If I were asked to write against them, I should have but to
+quote them to confound my argument.  I tried it once, and wasted a couple
+of my precious hours.'
+
+'They are cogent debaters,' Dacier assented.  'They make me wince now and
+then, without convincing me: I own it to you.  The confession is not
+agreeable, though it's a small matter.'
+
+'One's pride may feel a touch with the foils as keenly as the point of a
+rapier,' said Diana.
+
+The remark drew a sharp look of pleasure from him.
+
+'Does the Princess Egeria propose to dismiss the individual she inspires,
+when he is growing most sensible of her wisdom?'
+
+'A young Minister of State should be gleaning at large when holiday is
+granted him.'
+
+Dacier coloured.  'May I presume on what is currently reported?'
+
+'Parts, parts; a bit here, a bit there,' she rejoined.  'Authors find
+their models where they can, and generally hit on the nearest.'
+
+'Happy the nearest!'
+
+'If you run to interjections I shall cite you a sentence, from your
+latest speech in the House.'
+
+He asked for it, and to school him she consented to flatter with her
+recollection of his commonest words:
+
+'"Dealing with subjects of this nature emotionally does, not advance us a
+calculable inch."'
+
+'I must have said that in relation to hard matter of business.'
+
+'It applies.  There is my hostelry, and the spectral form of Danvers,
+utterly depaysee.  Have you spoken to the poor soul?  I can never
+discover the links of her attachment to my service.'
+
+'She knows a good mistress.--I have but a few minutes, if you are
+relentless.  May I .  .  ., shall I ever be privileged to speak your
+Christian name?'
+
+'My Christian name!  It is Pagan.  In one sphere I am Hecate.  Remember
+that.'
+
+'I am not among the people who so regard you.'
+
+'The time may come.'
+
+'Diana!'
+
+'Constance!'
+
+'I break no tie.  I owe no allegiance whatever to the name.'
+
+'Keep to the formal title with me.  We are Mrs. Warwick and Mr. Dacier.
+I think I am two years younger than you; socially therefore ten in
+seniority; and I know how this flower of friendship is nourished and may
+be withered.  You see already what you have done?  You have cast me on
+the discretion of my maid.  I suppose her trusty, but I am at her mercy,
+and a breath from her to the people beholding me as Hecate queen of
+Witches!  .  .  .  I have a sensation of the scirocco it would blow.'
+
+'In that event, the least I can offer is my whole life.'
+
+'We will not conjecture the event.'
+
+'The best I could hope for!'
+
+'I see I shall have to revise the next edition of THE YOUNG MINISTER, and
+make an emotional curate of him.  Observe Danvers.  The woman is
+wretched; and now she sees me coming she pretends to be using her wits
+in studying the things about her, as I have directed.  She is a riddle.
+I have the idea that any morning she may explode; and yet I trust her and
+sleep soundly.  I must be free, though I vex the world's watchdogs.--So,
+Danvers, you are noticing how thoroughly Frenchwomen do their work.'
+
+Danvers replied with a slight mincing: 'They may, ma'am; but they chatter
+chatter so.'
+
+'The result proves that it is not a waste of energy.  They manage their
+fowls too.'
+
+'They've no such thing as mutton, ma'am.'
+
+Dacier patriotically laughed.
+
+'She strikes the apology for wealthy and leisurely landlords,' Diana
+said.
+
+Danvers remarked that the poor fed meagrely in France.  She was not
+convinced of its being good for them by hearing that they could work on
+it sixteen hours out of the four and twenty.
+
+Mr. Percy Dacier's repast was furnished to him half an hour later.  At
+sunset Diana, taking Danvers beside her, walked with him to the line of
+the country road bearing on Caen.  The wind had sunk.  A large brown disk
+paused rayless on the western hills.
+
+'A Dacier ought to feel at home in Normandy; and you may have sprung from
+this neighbourhood,' said she, simply to chat.  'Here the land is
+poorish, and a mile inland rich enough to bear repeated crops of colza,
+which tries the soil, I hear.  As for beauty, those blue hills you see,
+enfold charming valleys.  I meditate an expedition to Harcourt before I
+return.  An English professor of his native tongue at the Lycee at Caen
+told me on my way here that for twenty shillings a week you may live in
+royal ease round about Harcourt.  So we have our bed and board in
+prospect if fortune fails us, Danvers!
+
+'I would rather die in England, ma'am,' was the maid's reply.
+
+Dacier set foot on his carriage-step.  He drew a long breath to say a
+short farewell, and he and Diana parted.
+
+They parted as the plainest of sincere good friends, each at heart
+respecting the other for the repression of that which their hearts
+craved; any word of which might have carried them headlong, bound
+together on a Mazeppa-race, with scandal for the hounding wolves, and
+social ruin for the rocks and torrents.
+
+Dacier was the thankfuller, the most admiring of the two; at the same
+time the least satisfied.  He saw the abyss she had aided him in
+escaping; and it was refreshful to look abroad after his desperate
+impulse.  Prominent as he stood before the world, he could not think
+without a shudder of behaving like a young frenetic of the passion.
+Those whose aim is at the leadership of the English people know, that
+however truly based the charges of hypocrisy, soundness of moral fibre
+runs throughout the country and is the national integrity, which may
+condone old sins for present service; but will not have present sins to
+flout it.  He was in tune with the English character.  The passion was in
+him nevertheless, and the stronger for a slow growth that confirmed its
+union of the mind and heart.  Her counsel fortified him, her suggestions
+opened springs; her phrases were golden-lettered in his memory; and more,
+she had worked an extraordinary change in his views of life and aptitude
+for social converse: he acknowledged it with genial candour.  Through her
+he was encouraged, led, excited to sparkle with the witty, feel new
+gifts, or a greater breadth of nature; and thanking her, he became
+thirstily susceptible to her dark beauty; he claimed to have found the
+key of her, and he prized it.  She was not passionless: the blood flowed
+warm.  Proud, chaste, she was nobly spirited; having an intellectual
+refuge from the besiegings of the blood; a rockfortress.  The 'wife no
+wife' appeared to him, striking the higher elements of the man, the
+commonly masculine also.--Would he espouse her, had he the chance?--
+to-morrow! this instant!  With her to back him, he would be doubled in
+manhood, doubled in brain and heart-energy.  To call her wife, spring
+from her and return, a man might accept his fate to fight Trojan or
+Greek, sure of his mark on the enemy.
+
+But if, after all, this imputed Helen of a decayed Paris passed,
+submissive to the legitimate solicitor, back to her husband?
+
+The thought shot Dacier on his legs for a look at the blank behind him.
+He vowed she had promised it should not be.  Could it ever be, after
+the ruin the meanly suspicious fellow had brought upon her?--Diana
+voluntarily reunited to the treacherous cur?
+
+He sat, resolving sombrely that if the debate arose he would try what
+force he had to save her from such an ignominy, and dedicate his life to
+her, let the world wag its tongue.  So the knot would be cut.
+
+Men unaccustomed to a knot in their system find the prospect of cutting
+it an extreme relief, even when they know that the cut has an edge to
+wound mortally as well as pacify.  The wound was not heavy payment for
+the rapture of having so incomparable a woman his own.  He reflected
+wonderingly on the husband, as he had previously done, and came again to
+the conclusion that it was a poor creature, abjectly jealous of a wife,
+he could neither master, nor equal, nor attract.  And thinking of
+jealousy, Dacier felt none; none of individuals, only of facts: her
+marriage, her bondage.  Her condemnation to perpetual widowhood angered
+him, as at an unrighteous decree.  The sharp sweet bloom of her beauty,
+fresh in swarthiness, under the whipping Easter, cried out against that
+loathed inhumanity.  Or he made it cry.
+
+Being a stranger to the jealousy of men, he took the soft assurance that
+he was preferred above them all.  Competitors were numerous: not any won
+her eyes as he did.  She revealed nothing of the same pleasures in the
+shining of the others touched by her magical wand.  Would she have
+pardoned one of them the 'Diana!' bursting from his mouth?
+
+She was not a woman for trifling, still less for secresy.  He was as
+little the kind of lover.  Both would be ready to take up their burden,
+if the burden was laid on them.  Diana had thus far impressed him.
+
+Meanwhile he faced the cathedral towers of the ancient Norman city,
+standing up in the smoky hues of the West; and a sentence out of her book
+seemed fitting to the scene and what he felt.  He rolled it over
+luxuriously as the next of delights to having her beside him.--She wrote
+of; 'Thoughts that are bare dark outlines, coloured by some odd passion
+of the soul, like towers of a distant city seen in the funeral waste of
+day.'--His bluff English anti-poetic training would have caused him to
+shrug at the stuff coming from another pen: he might condescendingly have
+criticized it, with a sneer embalmed in humour.  The words were hers; she
+had written them; almost by a sort of anticipation, he imagined; for he
+at once fell into the mood they suggested, and had a full crop of the
+'bare dark outlines' of thoughts coloured by his particular form of
+passion.
+
+Diana had impressed him powerfully when she set him swallowing and
+assimilating a sentence ethereally thin in substance of mere sentimental
+significance, that he would antecedently have read aloud in a drawing-
+room, picking up the book by hazard, as your modern specimen of romantic
+vapouring.  Mr. Dacier however was at the time in observation of the
+towers of Caen, fresh from her presence, animated to some conception of
+her spirit.  He drove into the streets, desiring, half determining, to
+risk a drive back on the morrow.
+
+The cold light of the morrow combined with his fear of distressing her to
+restrain him.  Perhaps he thought it well not to risk his gains.  He was
+a northerner in blood.  He may have thought it well not further to run
+the personal risk immediately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
+
+Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected.  Percy Dacier as
+the model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed.  Could she
+otherwise have dared to sketch him?  She certainly would not have done
+it now.
+
+That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has
+dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where
+caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple self-
+preservation.  How could she have been induced to study and portray him!
+It seemed a form of dementia.
+
+She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her.  When
+she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore,
+that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her
+sex.  Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.
+Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the
+bubbling crystal play.  She believed that a divineness had wakened in her
+there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her
+sex's culprit blushing.
+
+Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the
+excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously
+footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to
+safety.  Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not
+spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights.  But she had
+now to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude.  And watchful of
+herself as well.  That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it
+from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the voluntary-
+acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an individual
+exemption.  'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and unlike
+them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the prudence of
+guarded steps, I am armed.  It is by dissembling, feigning immunity, that
+we are imperilled.'  She would have phrased it so, with some anger at her
+feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on her by
+circumstances.
+
+Besides, her position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into
+remoteness.  The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge;
+and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him
+down for an offence.  She saw their situation as he did.  The course of
+folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded her to
+the reptiles.
+
+This was faced.  Consequently there was no fear of it.
+
+She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to
+keep him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet.  A little
+outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the
+froth of a passing wave.  Men have the trick, infants their fevers.
+
+Diana's days were spent in reasoning.  Her nights were not so tuneable to
+the superior mind.  When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced
+her into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for
+the wise-eyed and anxious morning.  She solved them with the thought that
+in sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her
+tormentors; awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear.  Gradually
+the persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.
+
+A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no
+grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her
+household had resumed its customary round.
+
+She examined her accounts.  The Debit and Credit sides presented much of
+the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization.  They
+matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the
+leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which
+deepened the blush of the comparison.  Her father had noticed the same
+funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for
+a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly
+frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim
+gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with
+her.  'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in
+step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.
+
+Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first
+reckoning.  But his ways were curious.  She grew distrustful of him,
+after dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of
+ambush bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to
+pass as an honourable citizen.  His answer to her reproaches pleaded the
+necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and
+Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen
+the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the
+world's idea of fitness in couples.  She would have costly furniture,
+because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in
+justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners;
+flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the
+rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the
+good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she
+loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings,
+Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and
+desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with
+antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European
+upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time,
+mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors;
+her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in
+aerial draperies.  Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills.
+Credit was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on
+positively: her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The
+Crossways: the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to
+some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud
+of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen,
+at a murmur of dissatisfaction.  His compliments were sincere; they were
+seductive.  He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an
+inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double
+her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of
+success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden.  Behold how it
+sparkles!  Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of
+courage to realize the riches we can command?  Debit was eloquent, he was
+unanswerable.
+
+Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous
+arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing
+of the outlay of Diana's establishment, as to its chances of swamping the
+income.  Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if
+his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages.  He knew nothing
+of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a
+beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader.  He fancied however, in
+his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several
+editions, had come to an El Dorado.  There was the mine.  It required a
+diligent worker.  Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when
+her next book might be expected.  He appeared to have an eagerness in
+hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble
+writer.  His flattering impatience was vexatious.  He admired her work,
+yet he did his utmost to render it little admirable.  His literary taste
+was not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters,
+appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies: she
+suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her
+exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author's lofty mind
+disdained such sordidness: to be excused, possibly, for a failing
+productive energy.  She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.
+With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a
+sentence to muse, and not on the subject.  She slept unevenly at night,
+was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating
+friends.  Redworth's urgency to get her to publish was particularly
+annoying when she felt how greatly THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE would
+have been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish,
+re-write passages, perfect it.  Her musings embraced long dialogues of
+that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory;
+leaving a distaste for her present work: THE CANTATRICE: far more
+poetical than the preceding, in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the
+story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the
+musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles
+Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman.  Diana
+had courted her, studied and liked her.  The picture she was drawing of
+the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of
+the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion;
+but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her
+CANTATRICE would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it.
+No clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-
+breadth 'scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine
+shrieks of the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no
+distinguishable points of social satire--equivalent to a smacking of the
+public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of
+the author's intention.  She did not appeal to the senses nor to a
+superficial discernment.  So she had the anticipatory sense of its
+failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote
+slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the
+downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her
+story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural
+links between our public and an author.  Her feelings were aloof.  They
+flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER.  She could not put
+them into THE CANTATRICE.  And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work
+poetical beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief
+characters were alive and the reader felt their pulses.  He meant
+to say, they were poetical inasmuch as they were creations.
+
+The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings
+necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting
+in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent
+couple.  To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana
+reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was
+to receive, and the act increased her distaste.  An idea came that she
+would soon cease to be able to write at all.  What then?  Perhaps by
+selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have
+enough for her term upon earth.  Necessarily she had to think that short,
+in order to reckon it as nearly enough.  'I am sure,' she said to
+herself, 'I shall not trouble the world very long.'  A strange languor
+beset her; scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of
+life and added to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had
+been left by the stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep
+along and away, while the sun that primed them dried her veins.  At this
+time she was gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit.  Only
+to welcome guests were her evenings ever spent at home.  She had no
+intimate understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman
+with her nature which she was undergoing below the surface.  Perplexities
+she acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness.  'But as I am sure not
+to live very long, we may as well meet.'  Her meetings with Percy Dacier
+were therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to
+discountenance them.  It would have been cruel to exclude him from her
+select little dinners of eight.  Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and
+the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art.
+She heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto
+a mere politician, was wonderfully humanized.  Lady Pennon fell to
+talking of him hopefully.  She declared him to be one of the men who
+unfold tardily, and only await the mastering passion.  If the passion had
+come, it was controlled.  His command of himself melted Diana.  How could
+she forbid his entry to the houses she frequented?  She was glad to see
+him.  He showed his pleasure in seeing her.  Remembering his tentative
+indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been
+easily checked: and the like was not to be said of some others.
+Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts
+touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer.  Her
+'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their
+fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive.  She bore with
+them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the
+contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a
+depth of passion .  .  .  .
+
+She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble 'she experienced,
+without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of
+Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed.  Mary Paynham
+brought her the news.  She had it from a lady who had come across Miss
+Asper at Lady Wathin's assemblies, and considered the great heiress
+extraordinarily handsome.
+
+'A golden miracle,' Diana gave her words to say.  'Good looks and gold
+together are rather superhuman.  The report may be this time true.'
+Next afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant
+her a private interview.
+
+Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy
+cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her
+mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay
+dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity.  They touched
+fingers and sat.  The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were
+brief between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too
+scornful of subterfuges in one another's presence to beat the bush.
+
+Lady Wathin began.  'I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your
+friend Lady Dunstane.'
+
+'You come to me on business?' Diana said.
+
+'It may be so termed.  I have no personal interest in it.  I come to lay
+certain facts before you which I think you should know.  We think it
+better that an acquaintance, and one of your sex, should state the case
+to you, instead of having recourse to formal intermediaries, lawyers--'
+
+'Lawyers?'
+
+'Well, my husband is a lawyer, it is true.  In the course of his
+professional vocations he became acquainted with Mr. Warwick.  We have
+latterly seen a good deal of him.  He is, I regret to say, seriously
+unwell.'
+
+'I have heard of it.'
+
+'He has no female relations, it appears.  He needs more care than he can
+receive from hirelings.'
+
+'Are you empowered by him, Lady Wathin?'
+
+'I am, Mrs. Warwick.  We will not waste time in apologies.  He is most
+anxious for a reconciliation.  It seems to Sir Cramborne and to me the
+most desireable thing for all parties concerned, if you can be induced to
+regard it in that light.  Mr. Warwick may or may not live; but the
+estrangement is quite undoubtedly the cause of his illness.  I touch on
+nothing connected with it.  I simply wish that you should not be in
+ignorance of his proposal and his condition.'
+
+Diana bowed calmly.  'I grieve at his condition.  His proposal has
+already been made and replied to.'
+
+'Oh, but, Mrs. Warwick, an immediate and decisive refusal of a proposal
+so fraught with consequences .  .  .  !'
+
+'Ah, but, Lady Wathin, you are now outstepping the limits prescribed by
+the office you have undertaken.'
+
+'You will not lend ear to an intercession?'
+
+'I will not.'
+
+'Of course, Mrs. Warwick, it is not for me to hint at things that lawyers
+could say on the subject.'
+
+'Your forbearance is creditable, Lady Wathin.'
+
+'Believe me, Mrs. Warwick, the step is--I speak in my husband's name as
+well as my own--strongly to be advised.'
+
+'If I hear one word more of it, I leave the country.'
+
+'I should be sorry indeed at any piece of rashness depriving your
+numerous friends of your society.  We have recently become acquainted
+with Mr. Redworth, and I know the loss you would be to them.  I have not
+attempted an appeal to your feelings, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'I thank you warmly, Lady Wathin, for what you have not done.'
+
+The aristocratic airs of Mrs. Warwick were annoying to Lady Wathin when
+she considered that they were borrowed, and that a pattern morality could
+regard the woman as ostracized: nor was it agreeable to be looked at
+through eyelashes under partially lifted brows.  She had come to appeal
+to the feelings of the wife; at any rate, to discover if she had some and
+was better than a wild adventuress.
+
+'Our life below is short!' she said.  To which Diana tacitly assented.
+
+'We have our little term, Mrs. Warwick.  It is soon over.'
+
+'On the other hand, the platitudes concerning it are eternal.'
+
+Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on
+her ears.  'Ah! they are the truths.  But it is not my business to
+preach.  Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.'
+
+'I am glad of Mr. Warwick's having friends; and they are many, I hope.'
+
+'They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.'
+
+A chasm of silence intervened.  Wifely pity was not sounded in it.
+
+'He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.'
+
+'Would you--it is your husband's most earnest wish; and our house is open
+to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that .  .  .
+indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:--would
+you consent to meet him at my house?'
+
+'It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.'
+
+'But at my house-under our auspices!'
+
+Diana glanced at the clock.  'Nowhere.'
+
+'Is it not--pardon me--a wife's duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?'
+
+'Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.'
+
+'In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present,
+Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife!  It
+may preclude so much.'
+
+Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.
+
+She smiled and said: 'Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission
+that must have been unpleasant to you.'
+
+'But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not?  Give me that
+assurance!'
+
+'I shall not forget it,' said Diana.
+
+Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social
+grimace of cordiality.  A few words of compassion for poor Lady
+Dunstane's invalided state covered Lady Wathin's retreat.
+
+She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any
+husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only
+she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy
+Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not
+quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined,
+it would have soothed her exasperation.
+
+She left a woman the prey of panic.
+
+Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition
+to save her character and keep her bound.  She might now have been free!
+The struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness,
+from which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape;
+an abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her
+refuge, but a hectic place.
+
+Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these
+attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake,
+and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave's name
+she bore, and living free in spirit.  She went so far as to reckon the
+cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an
+exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure.  She had
+but to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut!  One morning on the
+Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and
+entangling her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
+
+The month was August, four days before the closing of Parliament, and
+Diana fancied it good for Arthur Rhodes to run down with her to Copsley.
+He came to her invitation joyfully, reminding her of Lady Dunstane's wish
+to hear some chapters of THE CANTATRICE, and the MS. was packed.  They
+started, taking rail and fly, and winding up the distance on foot.
+August is the month of sober maturity and majestic foliage, songless, but
+a crowned and royal-robed queenly month; and the youngster's appreciation
+of the homely scenery refreshed Diana; his delight in being with her was
+also pleasant.  She had no wish to exchange him for another; and that was
+a strengthening thought.
+
+At Copsley the arrival of their luggage had prepared the welcome.  Warm
+though it was, Diana perceived a change in Emma, an unwonted reserve,
+a doubtfulness of her eyes, in spite of tenderness; and thus thrown back
+on herself, thinking that if she had followed her own counsel (as she
+called her impulse) in old days, there would have been no such present
+misery, she at once, and unconsciously, assumed a guarded look.  Based on
+her knowledge of her honest footing, it was a little defiant.  Secretly
+in her bosom it was sharpened to a slight hostility by the knowledge that
+her mind had been straying.  The guilt and the innocence combined to
+clothe her in mail, the innocence being positive, the guilt so vapoury.
+But she was armed only if necessary, and there was no requirement for
+armour.  Emma did not question at all.  She saw the alteration in her
+Tony: she was too full of the tragic apprehensiveness, overmastering her
+to speak of trifles.  She had never confided to Tony the exact nature and
+the growth of her malady, thinking it mortal, and fearing to alarm her
+dearest.
+
+A portion of the manuscript was read out by Arthur Rhodes in the evening;
+the remainder next morning.  Redworth perceptibly was the model of the
+English hero; and as to his person, no friend could complain of the
+sketch; his clear-eyed heartiness, manliness, wholesomeness--a word of
+Lady Dunstane's regarding him,--and his handsome braced figure, were well
+painted.  Emma forgave the: insistance on a certain bluntness of the
+nose, in consideration of the fond limning of his honest and expressive
+eyes, and the 'light on his temples,' which they had noticed together.
+She could not so easily forgive the realistic picture of the man: an
+exaggeration, she thought, of small foibles, that even if they existed,
+should not have been stressed.  The turn for 'calculating' was shown up
+ridiculously; Mr. Cuthbert Dering was calculating in his impassioned
+moods as well as in his cold.  His head was a long division of ciphers.
+He had statistics for spectacles, and beheld the world through them, and
+the mistress he worshipped.
+
+'I see,' said Emma, during a pause; 'he is a Saxon.  You still affect to
+have the race en grippe, Tony.'
+
+'I give him every credit for what he is,' Diana replied.  'I admire the
+finer qualities of the race as much as any one.  You want to have them
+presented to you in enamel, Emmy.'
+
+But the worst was an indication that the mania for calculating in and
+out of season would lead to the catastrophe destructive of his happiness.
+Emma could not bear that.  Without asking herself whether it could be
+possible that Tony knew the secret, or whether she would have laid it
+bare, her sympathy for Redworth revolted at the exposure.  She was
+chilled.  She let it pass; she merely said: 'I like the writing.'
+
+Diana understood that her story was condemned.
+
+She put on her robes of philosophy to cloak discouragement.  'I am glad
+the writing pleases you.'
+
+'The characters are as true as life!' cried Arthur Rhodes.  'The
+Cantatrice drinking porter from the pewter at the slips after harrowing
+the hearts of her audience, is dearer to me than if she had tottered to a
+sofa declining sustenance; and because her creatrix has infused such
+blood of life into her that you accept naturally whatever she does.  She
+was exhausted, and required the porter, like a labourer in the
+cornfield.'
+
+Emma looked at him, and perceived the poet swamped by the admirer.  Taken
+in conjunction with Mr. Cuthbert Dering's frenzy for calculating, she
+disliked the incident of the porter and the pewter.
+
+'While the Cantatrice swallowed her draught, I suppose Mr. Dering counted
+the cost?' she said.
+
+'It really might be hinted,' said Diana.
+
+The discussion closed with the accustomed pro and con upon the wart of
+Cromwell's nose, Realism rejoicing in it, Idealism objecting.
+
+Arthur Rhodes was bidden to stretch his legs on a walk along the heights
+in the afternoon, and Emma was further vexed by hearing Tony complain of
+Redworth's treatment of the lad, whom he would not assist to any of the
+snug little posts he was notoriously able to dispense.
+
+'He has talked of Mr. Rhodes to me,' said Emma.  'He thinks the
+profession of literature a delusion, and doubts the wisdom of having
+poets for clerks.'
+
+'John-Bullish!' Diana exclaimed.  'He speaks contemptuously of the poor
+boy.'
+
+'Only inasmuch as the foolishness of the young man in throwing up the Law
+provokes his practical mind to speak.'
+
+'He might take my word for the "young man's" ability.  I want him to have
+the means of living, that he may write.  He has genius.'
+
+'He may have it.  I like him, and have said so.  If he were to go back to
+his law-stool, I have no doubt that Redworth would manage to help him.'
+
+'And make a worthy ancient Braddock of a youth of splendid promise!  Have
+I sketched him too Saxon?'
+
+'It is the lens, and hot the tribe, Tony.'
+
+THE CANTATRICE was not alluded to any more; but Emma's disapproval
+blocked the current of composition, already subject to chokings in the
+brain of the author.  Diana stayed three days at Copsley, one longer than
+she had intended, so that Arthur Rhodes might have his fill of country
+air.
+
+'I would keep him, but I should be no companion for him,' Emma said.
+
+'I suspect the gallant squire is only to be satisfied by landing me
+safely,' said Diana, and that small remark grated, though Emma saw the
+simple meaning.  When they parted, she kissed her Tony many times.  Tears
+were in her eyes.  It seemed to Diana that she was anxious to make amends
+for the fit of alienation, and she was kissed in return warmly, quite
+forgiven, notwithstanding the deadly blank she had caused in the
+imagination of the writer for pay, distracted by the squabbles of Debit
+and Credit.
+
+Diana chatted spiritedly to young Rhodes on their drive to the train.
+She was profoundly discouraged by Emma's disapproval of her work.  It
+wanted but that one drop to make a recurrence to the work impossible.
+There it must lie!  And what of the aspects of her household?--Perhaps,
+after all, the Redworths of the world are right, and Literature as a
+profession is a delusive pursuit.  She did not assent to it without
+hostility to the world's Redworths.--'They have no sensitiveness, we have
+too much.  We are made of bubbles that a wind will burst, and as the wind
+is always blowing, your practical Redworths have their crow of us.'
+
+She suggested advice to Arthur Rhodes upon the prudence of his resuming
+the yoke of the Law.
+
+He laughed at such a notion, saying that he had some expectations of
+money to come.
+
+'But I fear,' said he, 'that Lady Dunstane is very very ill.  She begged
+me to keep her informed of your address.'
+
+Diana told him he was one of those who should know it whithersoever she
+went.  She spoke impulsively, her sentiments of friendliness for the
+youth being temporarily brightened by the strangeness of Emma's conduct
+in deputing it to him to fulfil a duty she had never omitted.  'What can
+she think I am going to do!'
+
+On her table at home lay, a letter from Mr. Warwick.  She read it hastily
+in the presence of Arthur Rhodes, having at a glance at the handwriting
+anticipated the proposal it contained and the official phrasing.
+
+Her gallant squire was invited to dine with her that evening, costume
+excused.
+
+They conversed of Literature as a profession, of poets dead and living,
+of politics, which he abhorred and shied at, and of his prospects.  He
+wrote many rejected pages, enjoyed an income of eighty pounds per annum,
+and eked out a subsistence upon the modest sum his pen procured him; a
+sum extremely insignificant; but great Nature was his own, the world was
+tributary to him, the future his bejewelled and expectant bride.  Diana
+envied his youthfulness.  Nothing is more enviable, nothing richer to the
+mind, than the aspect of a cheerful poverty.  How much nobler it was,
+contrasted with Redworth's amassing of wealth!
+
+When alone, she went to her bedroom and tried to write, tried to sleep.
+Mr. Warwick's letter was looked at.  It seemed to indicate a threat; but
+for the moment it did not disturb her so much as the review of her moral
+prostration.  She wrote some lines to her lawyers, quoting one of Mr.
+Warwick's sentences.  That done, his letter was dismissed.  Her
+intolerable languor became alternately a defeating drowsiness and a
+fever.  She succeeded in the effort to smother the absolute cause: it was
+not suffered to show a front; at the cost of her knowledge of a practised
+self-deception.  'I wonder whether the world is as bad as a certain class
+of writers tell us!' she sighed in weariness, and mused on their
+soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts for the
+very bottom truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the
+abominable.  The world imagines those to be at our nature's depths who
+are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows.  She was in the mood
+for such a kind of writing: she could have started on it at once but that
+the theme was wanting; and it may count on popularity, a great repute for
+penetration.  It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is
+the miry form of art.  When it flourishes we may be assured we have been
+overenamelling the higher forms.  She felt, and shuddered to feel, that
+she could draw from dark stores.  Hitherto in her works it had been a
+triumph of the good.  They revealed a gaping deficiency of the subtle
+insight she now possessed.  'Exhibit humanity as it is, wallowing,
+sensual, wicked, behind the mask,' a voice called to her; she was allured
+by the contemplation of the wide-mouthed old dragon Ego, whose portrait,
+decently painted, establishes an instant touch of exchange between author
+and public, the latter detected and confessing.  Next to the pantomime of
+Humour and Pathos, a cynical surgical knife at the human bosom seems the
+surest talisman for this agreeable exchange; and she could cut.  She gave
+herself a taste of her powers.  She cut at herself mercilessly, and had
+to bandage the wound in a hurry to keep in life.
+
+Metaphors were her refuge.  Metaphorically she could allow her mind to
+distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it.  The
+banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the common use of them has
+helped largely to civilize us.  The sluggish in intellect detest them,
+but our civilization is not much indebted to that major faction.
+Especially are they needed by the pedestalled woman in her conflict with
+the natural.  Diana saw herself through the haze she conjured up.  'Am I
+worse than other women?' was a piercing twithought.  Worse, would be
+hideous isolation.  The not worse, abased her sex.  She could afford to
+say that the world was bad: not that women were.
+
+Sinking deeper, an anguish of humiliation smote her to a sense of
+drowning.  For what of the poetic ecstasy on her Salvatore heights had
+not been of origin divine?  had sprung from other than spiritual founts?
+had sprung from the reddened sources she was compelled to conceal?  Could
+it be?  She would not believe it.  But there was matter to clip her
+wings, quench her light, in the doubt.
+
+She fell asleep like the wrecked flung ashore.
+
+Danvers entered her room at an early hour for London to inform her that
+Mr. Percy Dacier was below, and begged permission to wait.
+
+Diana gave orders for breakfast to be proposed to him.  She lay staring
+at the wall until it became too visibly a reflection of her mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
+
+The suspicion of his having come to impart the news of his proximate
+marriage ultimately endowed her with sovereign calmness.  She had need to
+think it, and she did.  Tea was brought to her while she dressed; she
+descended the stairs revolving phrases of happy congratulation and the
+world's ordinary epigrams upon the marriage-tie, neatly mixed.
+
+They read in one another's faces a different meaning from the empty words
+of excuse and welcome.  Dacier's expressed the buckling of a strong set
+purpose; but, grieved by the look of her eyes, he wasted a moment to say:
+'You have not slept.  You have heard .  .  . ?'
+
+'What?' said she, trying to speculate; and that was a sufficient answer.
+
+'I hadn't the courage to call last night; I passed the windows.  Give me
+your hand, I beg.'
+
+She gave her hand in wonderment, and more wonderingly felt it squeezed.
+Her heart began the hammerthump.  She spoke an unintelligible something;
+saw herself melting away to utter weakness-pride, reserve, simple
+prudence, all going; crumbled ruins where had stood a fortress imposing
+to men.  Was it love?  Her heart thumped shiveringly.
+
+He kept her hand, indifferent to the gentle tension.
+
+'This is the point: I cannot live without you: I have gone on .  .  .
+Who was here last night?  Forgive me.'
+
+'You know Arthur Rhodes.'
+
+'I saw him leave the door at eleven.  Why do you torture me?  There's no
+time to lose now.  You will be claimed.  Come, and let us two cut the
+knot.  It is the best thing in the world for me--the only thing.  Be
+brave!  I have your hand.  Give it for good, and for heaven's sake don't
+play the sex.  Be yourself.  Dear soul of a woman!  I never saw the soul
+in one but in you.  I have waited: nothing but the dread of losing you
+sets me speaking now.  And for you to be sacrificed a second time to
+that--!  Oh, no!  You know you can trust me.  On my honour, I take breath
+from you.  You are my better in everything--guide, goddess, dearest
+heart!  Trust me; make me master of your fate.'
+
+'But my friend!' the murmur hung in her throat.  He was marvellously
+transformed; he allowed no space for the arts of defence and evasion.
+
+'I wish I had the trick of courting.  There's not time; and I 'm a
+simpleton at the game.  We can start this evening.  Once away, we leave
+it to them to settle the matter, and then you are free, and mine to the
+death.'
+
+'But speak, speak!  What is it?' Diana said.
+
+'That if we delay, I 'm in danger of losing you altogether.'
+
+Her eyes lightened: 'You mean that you have heard he has determined--?'
+
+'There's a process of the law.  But stop it.  Just this one step, and it
+ends.  Whether intended or not, it hangs over you, and you will be
+perpetually tormented.  Why waste your whole youth?--and mine as well!
+For I am bound to you as much as if we had stood at the altar--where we
+will stand together the instant you are free.'
+
+'But where have you heard .  .  .?
+
+'From an intimate friend.  I will tell you--sufficiently intimate--from
+Lady Wathin.  Nothing of a friend, but I see this woman at times.  She
+chose to speak of it to me it doesn't matter why.  She is in his
+confidence, and pitched me a whimpering tale.  Let those people chatter.
+But it 's exactly for those people that you are hanging in chains, all
+your youth shrivelling.  Let them shout their worst!  It's the bark of a
+day; and you won't hear it; half a year, and it will be over, and I shall
+bring you back--the husband of the noblest bride in Christendom!  You
+don't mistrust me?'
+
+'It is not that,' said she.  'But now drop my hand.  I am imprisoned.'
+
+'It's asking too much.  I've lost you--too many times.  I have the hand
+and I keep it.  I take nothing but the hand.  It's the hand I want.
+I give you mine.  I love you.  Now I know what love is!--and the word
+carries nothing of its weight.  Tell me you do not doubt my honour.'
+
+'Not at all.  But be rational.  I must think, and I cannot while you keep
+my hand.'
+
+He kissed it.  'I keep my own against the world.'
+
+A cry of rebuke swelled to her lips at his conqueror's tone.  It was not
+uttered, for directness was in his character and his wooing loyal--save
+for bitter circumstances, delicious to hear; and so narrow was the ring
+he had wound about her senses, that her loathing of the circumstances
+pushed her to acknowledge within her bell of a heart her love for him.
+
+He was luckless enough to say: 'Diana!'
+
+It rang horridly of her husband.  She drew her hand to loosen it, with
+repulsing brows.  'Not that name!'
+
+Dacier was too full of his honest advocacy of the passionate lover to
+take a rebuff.  There lay his unconscious mastery, where the common arts
+of attack would have tripped him with a quick-witted woman, and where a
+man of passion, not allowing her to succumb in dignity, would have
+alarmed her to the breaking loose from him.
+
+'Lady Dunstane calls you Tony.'
+
+'She is my dearest and oldest friend.'
+
+'You and I don't count by years.  You are the dearest to me on earth,
+Tony!'
+
+She debated as to forbidding that name.
+
+The moment's pause wrapped her in a mental hurricane, out of which she
+came with a heart stopped, her olive cheeks ashen-hued.  She had seen
+that the step was possible.
+
+'Oh!  Percy, Percy, are we mad?'
+
+'Not mad.  We take what is ours.  Tell me, have I ever, ever disrespected
+you?  You were sacred to me; and you are, though now the change has come.
+Look back on it--it is time lost, years that are dust.  But look forward,
+and you cannot imagine our separation.  What I propose is plain sense for
+us two.  Since Rovio, I have been at your feet.  Have I not some just
+claim for recompense?  Tell me! Tony!'
+
+The sweetness of the secret name, the privileged name, in his mouth stole
+through her blood, melting resistance.
+
+She had consented.  The swarthy flaming of her face avowed it even more
+than the surrender of her hand.  He gained much by claiming little: he
+respected her, gave her no touches of fright and shame; and it was her
+glory to fall with pride.  An attempt at a caress would have awakened her
+view of the whitherward: but she was treated as a sovereign lady
+rationally advised.
+
+'Is it since Rovio, Percy?'
+
+'Since the morning when you refused me one little flower.'
+
+'If I had given it, you might have been saved!'
+
+'I fancy I was doomed from the beginning.'
+
+'I was worth a thought?'
+
+'Worth a life! worth ten thousand!'
+
+'You have reckoned it all like a sane man:--family, position, the world,
+the scandal?'
+
+'All.  I have long known that you were the mate for me.  You have to
+weather a gale, Tony.  It won't last.  My dearest!  it won't last many
+months.  I regret the trial for you, but I shall be with you, burning for
+the day to reinstate you and show you the queen you are.'
+
+'Yes, we two can have no covert dealings, Percy,' said Diana.  They would
+be hateful--baseness!  Rejecting any baseness, it seemed to her that she
+stood in some brightness.  The light was of a lurid sort.  She called on
+her heart to glory in it as the light of tried love, the love that defied
+the world.  Her heart rose.  She and he would at a single step give proof
+of their love for one another--and this kingdom of love--how different
+from her recent craven languors!--this kingdom awaited her, was hers for
+one word; and beset with the oceans of enemies, it was unassailable.  If
+only they were true to the love they vowed, no human force could subvert
+it: and she doubted him as little as of herself.  This new kingdom of
+love, never entered by her, acclaiming her, was well-nigh unimaginable,
+in spite of the many hooded messengers it had despatched to her of late.
+She could hardly believe that it had come.
+
+'But see me as I am,' she said; she faltered it through her direct gaze
+on him.
+
+'With chains to strike off?  Certainly; it is done,' he replied.
+
+'Rather heavier than those of the slave-market!  I am the deadest of
+burdens.  It means that your enemies, personal--if you have any, and
+political--you have numbers; will raise a cry .  .  .  .  Realize it.
+You may still be my friend.  I forgive the bit of wildness.'
+
+She provoked a renewed kissing of her hand; for magnammity in love is
+an overflowing danger; and when he said: 'The burden you have to bear
+outweighs mine out of all comparison.  What is it to a man--a public man
+or not!  The woman is always the victim.  That's why I have held myself
+in so long:--her strung frame softened.  She half yielded to the tug on
+her arm.
+
+'Is there no talking for us without foolishness?' she murmured.  The
+foolishness had wafted her to sea, far from sight of land.  'Now sit, and
+speak soberly.  Discuss the matter.--Yes, my hand, but I must have my
+wits.  Leave me free to use them till we choose our path.  Let it be the
+brains between us, as far as it can.  You ask me to join my fate to
+yours.  It signifies a sharp battle for you, dear friend; perhaps the
+blighting of the most promising life in England.  One question is, can I
+countervail the burden I shall be, by such help to you as I can afford?
+Burden, is no word--I rake up a buried fever.  I have partially lived it
+down, and instantly I am covered with spots.  The old false charges and
+this plain offence make a monster of me.'
+
+'And meanwhile you are at the disposal of the man who falsely charged you
+and armed the world against you,' said Dacier.
+
+'I can fly.  The world is wide.'
+
+'Time slips.  Your youth is wasted.  If you escape the man, he will have
+triumphed in keeping you from me.  And I thirst for you; I look to you
+for aid and counsel; I want my mate.  You have not to be told how you
+inspire me?  I am really less than half myself without you.  If I am to
+do anything in the world, it must be with your aid, you beside me.
+Our hands are joined: one leap!  Do you not see that after .  .  .  well,
+it cannot be friendship.  It imposes rather more on me than I can bear.
+You are not the woman to trifle; nor I; Tony, the man for it with a woman
+like you.  You are my spring of wisdom.  You interdict me altogether--can
+you?--or we unite our fates, like these hands now.  Try to get yours
+away!'
+
+Her effort ended in a pressure.  Resistance, nay, to hesitate at the
+joining of her life with his after her submission to what was a scorching
+fire in memory, though it was less than an embrace, accused her of worse
+than foolishness.
+
+'Well, then,' said she, 'wait three days.  Deliberate.  Oh!  try to know
+yourself, for your clear reason to guide you.  Let us be something better
+than the crowd abusing us, not simple creatures of impulse--as we choose
+to call the animal.  What if we had to confess that we took to our heels
+the moment the idea struck us!  Three days.  We may then pretend to a
+philosophical resolve.  Then come to me: or write to me.'
+
+'How long is it since the old Rovio morning, Tony?'
+
+'An age.'
+
+'Date my deliberations from that day.'
+
+The thought of hers having to be dated possibly from an earlier day,
+robbed her of her summit of feminine isolation, and she trembled, chilled
+and flushed; she lost all anchorage.
+
+'So it must be to-morrow,' said he, reading her closely, 'not later.
+Better at once.  But women are not to be hurried.'
+
+'Oh! don't class me, Percy, pray!  I think of you, not of myself.'
+
+'You suppose that in a day or two I might vary?'
+
+She fixed her eyes on him, expressing certainty of his unalterable
+stedfastness.  The look allured.  It changed: her head shook.  She held
+away and said: 'No, leave me; leave me, dear, dear friend.  Percy, my
+dearest!  I will not "play the sex."  I am yours if .  .  .  if it is
+your wish.  It may as well be to-morrow.  Here I am useless; I cannot
+write, not screw a thought from my head.  I dread that "process of the
+Law" a second time.  To-morrow, if it must be.  But no impulses.  Fortune
+is blind; she may be kind to us.  The blindness of Fortune is her one
+merit, and fools accuse her of it, and they profit by it!  I fear we all
+of us have our turn of folly: we throw the stake for good luck.  I hope
+my sin is not very great.  I know my position is desperate.  I feel a
+culprit.  But I am sure I have courage, perhaps brains to help.  At any
+rate, I may say this: I bring no burden to my lover that he does not know
+of.'
+
+Dacier pressed her hand.  'Money we shall have enough.  My uncle has left
+me fairly supplied.'
+
+'What would he think?' said Diana, half in a glimpse of meditation.
+
+'Think me the luckiest of the breeched.  I fancy I hear him thanking you
+for "making a man" of me.'
+
+She blushed.  Some such phrase might have been spoken by Lord
+Dannisburgh.
+
+'I have but a poor sum of money,' she said.  'I may be able to write
+abroad.  Here I cannot--if I am to be persecuted.'
+
+'You shall write, with a new pen!' said Dacier.  'You shall live, my
+darling Tony.  You have been held too long in this miserable suspension,
+neither maid nor wife, neither woman nor stockfish.  Ah!  shameful.  But
+we 'll right it.  The step, for us, is the most reasonable that could be
+considered.  You shake your head.  But the circumstances make it so.
+Courage, and we come to happiness!  And that, for you and me, means work.
+Look at the case of Lord and Lady Dulac.  It's identical, except that she
+is no match beside you: and I do not compare her antecedents with yours.
+But she braved the leap, and forced the world to swallow it, and now, you
+see, she's perfectly honoured.  I know a place on a peak of the Maritime
+Alps, exquisite in summer, cool, perfectly solitary, no English, snow
+round us, pastures at our feet, and the Mediterranean below.  There! my
+Tony.  To-morrow night we start.  You will meet me-shall I call here?--
+well, then at the railway station, the South-Eastern, for Paris: say,
+twenty minutes to eight.  I have your pledge?  You will come?'
+
+She sighed it, then said it firmly, to be worthy of him.  Kind Fortune,
+peeping under the edge of her bandaged eyes, appeared willing to bestow
+the beginning of happiness upon one who thought she had a claim to a
+small taste of it before she died.  It seemed distinguishingly done, to
+give a bite of happiness to the starving!
+
+'I fancied when you were announced that you came for congratulations upon
+your approaching marriage, Percy.'
+
+'I shall expect to hear them from you to-morrow evening at the station,
+dear Tony,' said he.
+
+The time was again stated, the pledge repeated.  He forbore entreaties
+for privileges, and won her gratitude.
+
+They named once more the place of meeting and the hour: more significant
+to them than phrases of intensest love and passion.  Pressing hands
+sharply for pledge of good faith, they sundered.
+
+She still had him in her eyes when he had gone.  Her old world lay
+shattered; her new world was up without a dawn, with but one figure, the
+sun of it, to light the swinging strangeness.
+
+Was ever man more marvellously transformed?  or woman more wildly swept
+from earth into the clouds?  So she mused in the hum of her tempest of
+heart and brain, forgetful of the years and the conditions preparing both
+of them for this explosion.
+
+She had much to do: the arrangements to dismiss her servants, write to
+house-agents and her lawyer, and write fully to Emma, write the enigmatic
+farewell to the Esquarts and Lady Pennon, Mary Paynham, Arthur Rhodes,
+Whitmonby (stanch in friendship, but requiring friendly touches), Henry
+Wilmers, and Redworth.  He was reserved to the last, for very enigmatical
+adieux: he would hear the whole story from Emma; must be left to think as
+he liked.
+
+The vague letters were excellently well composed: she was going abroad,
+and knew not when she would return; bade her friends think the best they
+could of her in the meantime.  Whitmonby was favoured with an anecdote,
+to be read as an apologue by the light of subsequent events.  But the
+letter to Emma tasked Diana.  Intending to write fully, her pen committed
+the briefest sentences: the tenderness she felt for Emma wakening her
+heart to sing that she was loved, loved, and knew love at last; and
+Emma's foreseen antagonism to the love and the step it involved rendered
+her pleadings in exculpation a stammered confession of guiltiness,
+ignominious, unworthy of the pride she felt in her lover.  'I am like a
+cartridge rammed into a gun, to be discharged at a certain hour
+tomorrow,' she wrote; and she sealed a letter so frigid that she could
+not decide to post it.  All day she imagined hearing a distant cannonade.
+The light of the day following was not like earthly light.  Danvers
+assured her there was no fog in London.
+
+'London is insupportable; I am going to Paris, and shall send for you in
+a week or two,' said Diana.
+
+'Allow me to say, ma'am, that you had better take me with you,' said
+Danvers.
+
+'Are you afraid of travelling by yourself, you foolish creature?'
+
+'No, ma'am, but I don't like any hands to undress and dress my mistress
+but my own.'
+
+'I have not lost the art,' said Diana, chafing for a magic spell to
+extinguish the woman, to whom, immediately pitying her, she said: 'You
+are a good faithful soul.  I think you have never kissed me.  Kiss me on
+the forehead.'
+
+Danvers put her lips to her mistress's forehead, and was asked: 'You
+still consider yourself attached to my fortunes?'
+
+'I do, ma'am, at home or abroad; and if you will take me with you .  .  '
+
+'Not for a week or so.'
+
+'I shall not be in the way, ma'am.'
+
+They played at shutting eyes.  The petition of Danvers was declined;
+which taught her the more; and she was emboldened to say: 'Wherever my
+mistress goes, she ought to have her attendant with her.'  There was no
+answer to it but the refusal.
+
+The hours crumbled slowly, each with a blow at the passages of retreat.
+Diana thought of herself as another person, whom she observed, not
+counselling her, because it was a creature visibly pushed by the Fates.
+In her own mind she could not perceive a stone of solidity anywhere, nor
+a face that had the appearance of our common life.  She heard the cannon
+at intervals.  The things she said set Danvers laughing, and she wondered
+at the woman's mingled mirth and stiffness.  Five o'clock struck.  Her
+letters were sent to the post.  Her boxes were piled from stairs to door.
+She read the labels, for her good-bye to the hated name of Warwick:--why
+ever adopted!  Emma might well have questioned why!  Women are guilty of
+such unreasoning acts!  But this was the close to that chapter.  The hour
+of six went by.  Between six and seven came a sound of knocker and bell
+at the street-door.  Danvers rushed into the sitting-room to announce
+that it was Mr. Redworth.  Before a word could be mustered, Redworth was
+in the room.  He said: 'You must come with me at once!'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS
+
+Dacier welted at the station, a good figure of a sentinel over his
+luggage and a spy for one among the inpouring passengers.  Tickets had
+been confidently taken, the private division of the carriages happily
+secured.  On board the boat she would be veiled.  Landed on French soil,
+they threw off disguises, breasted the facts.  And those?  They
+lightened.  He smarted with his eagerness.
+
+He had come well in advance of the appointed time, for he would not have
+had her hang about there one minute alone.
+
+Strange as this adventure was to a man of prominent station before the
+world, and electrical as the turning-point of a destiny that he was given
+to weigh deliberately and far-sightedly, Diana's image strung him to the
+pitch of it.  He looked nowhere but ahead, like an archer putting hand
+for his arrow.
+
+Presently he compared his watch and the terminus clock.  She should now
+be arriving.  He went out to meet her and do service.  Many cabs and
+carriages were peered into, couples inspected, ladies and their maids,
+wives and their husbands--an August exodus to the Continent.  Nowhere the
+starry she.  But he had a fund of patience.  She was now in some block of
+the streets.  He was sure of her, sure of her courage.  Tony and
+recreancy could not go together.  Now that he called her Tony, she was
+his close comrade, known; the name was a caress and a promise, breathing
+of her, as the rose of sweetest earth.  He counted it to be a month ere
+his family would have wind of the altered position of his affairs,
+possibly a year to the day of his making the dear woman his own in the
+eyes of the world.  She was dear past computation, womanly, yet quite
+unlike the womanish woman, unlike the semi-males courteously called
+dashing, unlike the sentimental.  His present passion for her lineaments,
+declared her surpassingly beautiful, though his critical taste was rather
+for the white statue that gave no warmth.  She had brains and ardour, she
+had grace and sweetness, a playful petulancy enlivening our atmosphere,
+and withal a refinement, a distinction, not to be classed; and justly
+might she dislike the being classed.  Her humour was a perennial
+refreshment, a running well, that caught all the colours of light; her
+wit studded the heavens of the recollection of her.  In his heart he felt
+that it was a stepping down for the brilliant woman to give him her hand;
+a condescension and an act of valour.  She who always led or prompted
+when they conversed, had now in her generosity abandoned the lead and
+herself to him, and she deserved his utmost honouring.
+
+But where was she?  He looked at his watch, looked at the clock.  They
+said the same: ten minutes to the moment of the train's departure.
+
+A man may still afford to dwell on the charms and merits of his heart's
+mistress while he has ten minutes to spare.  The dropping minutes,
+however, detract one by one from her individuality and threaten to sink
+her in her sex entirely.  It is the inexorable clock that says she is as
+other women.  Dacier began to chafe.  He was unaccustomed to the part he
+was performing:--and if she failed him?  She would not.  She would be
+late, though.  No, she was in time!  His long legs crossed the platform
+to overtake a tall lady veiled and dressed in black.  He lifted his hat;
+he heard an alarmed little cry and retired.  The clock said, Five
+minutes: a secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word
+Fool.  An odd word to be cast at him!  It rocked the icy pillar of pride
+in the background of his nature.  Certainly standing solos at the hour of
+eight P.M., he would stand for a fool.  Hitherto he had never allowed a
+woman to chance to posture him in that character.  He strode out,
+returned, scanned every lady's shape, and for a distraction watched the
+veiled lady whom he had accosted.  Her figure suggested pleasant
+features.  Either she was disappointed or she was an adept.  At the
+shutting of the gates she glided through, not without a fearful look
+around and at him.  She disappeared.  Dacier shrugged.  His novel
+assimilation to the rat-rabble of amatory intriguers tapped him on the
+shoulder unpleasantly.  A luckless member of the fraternity too!  The
+bell, the clock and the train gave him his title.  'And I was ready to
+fling down everything for the woman!'  The trial of a superb London
+gentleman's resources in the love-passion could not have been much
+keener.  No sign of her.
+
+He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of
+his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that he
+heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself.  The sole
+consolation he has is to revile the sex.  Women!  women!  Whom have they
+not made a fool of!  His uncle as much as any--and professing to know
+them.  Him also!  the man proud of escaping their wiles.  'For this woman
+.  .  .  !' he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex's
+trickeries.  The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the
+arrant coquette was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling
+of the man popularly supposed invincible.  If it were known of him!
+The idea of his being a puppet fixed for derision was madly distempering.
+He had only to ask the affirmative of Constance Asper to-morrow!
+A vision of his determination to do it, somewhat comforted him.
+
+Dacier walked up and down the platform, passing his pile of luggage,
+solitary and eloquent on the barrow.  Never in his life having been made
+to look a fool, he felt the red heat of the thing, as a man who has not
+blessedly become acquainted with the swish in boyhood finds his
+untempered blood turn to poison at a blow; he cannot healthily take a
+licking.  But then it had been so splendid an insanity when he urged
+Diana to fly with him.  Any one but a woman would have appreciated the
+sacrifice.
+
+His luggage had to be removed.  He dropped his porter a lordly fee and
+drove home.  From that astonished solitude he strolled to his Club.
+Curiosity mastering the wrath it was mixed with, he left his Club and
+crossed the park southward in the direction of Diana's house, abusing her
+for her inveterate attachment to the regions of Westminster.  There she
+used to receive Lord Dannisburgh; innocently, no doubt-assuredly quite
+innocently; and her husband had quitted the district.  Still it was
+rather childish for a woman to-be always haunting the seats of
+Parliament.  Her disposition to imagine that she was able to inspire
+statesmen came in for a share of ridicule; for when we know ourselves
+to be ridiculous, a retort in kind, unjust upon consideration, is balm.
+The woman dragged him down to the level of common men; that was the
+peculiar injury, and it swept her undistinguished into the stream of
+women.  In appearance, as he had proved to the fellows at his Club, he
+was perfectly self-possessed, mentally distracted and bitter, hating
+himself for it, snapping at the cause of it.  She had not merely
+disappointed, she had slashed his high conceit of himself, curbed him at
+the first animal dash forward, and he champed the bit with the fury of a
+thwarted racer.
+
+Twice he passed her house.  Of course no light was shown at her windows.
+They were scanned malignly.
+
+He held it due to her to call and inquire whether there was any truth in
+the report of Mrs. Warwick's illness.  Mrs. Warwick!  She meant to keep
+the name.
+
+A maid-servant came to the door with a candle in her hand revealing red
+eyelids.  She was not aware that her mistress was unwell.  Her mistress
+had left home some time after six o'clock with a gentleman.  She was
+unable to tell him the gentleman's name.  William, the footman, had
+opened the door to him.  Her mistress's maid Mrs. Danvers had gone to the
+Play--with William.  She thought that Mrs. Danvers might know who the
+gentleman was.  The girl's eyelids blinked, and she turned aside.  Dacier
+consoled her with a piece of gold, saying he would come and see Mrs.
+Danvers in the morning.
+
+His wrath was partially quieted by the new speculations offered up to it.
+He could not conjure a suspicion of treachery in Diana Warwick; and a
+treachery so foully cynical!  She had gone with a gentleman.  He guessed
+on all sides; he struck at walls, as in complete obscurity.
+
+The mystery of her conduct troubling his wits for the many hours was
+explained by Danvers.  With a sympathy that she was at pains to show, she
+informed him that her mistress was not at all unwell, and related of how
+Mr. Redworth had arrived just when her mistress was on the point of
+starting for Paris and the Continent; because poor Lady Dunstane was
+this very day to undergo an operation under the surgeons at Copsley, and
+she did not wish her mistress to be present, but Mr. Redworth thought her
+mistress ought to be there, and he had gone down thinking she was there,
+and then came back in hot haste to fetch her, and was just in time, as it
+happened, by two or three minutes.
+
+Dacier rewarded the sympathetic woman for her intelligence, which
+appeared to him to have shot so far as to require a bribe.  Gratitude to
+the person soothing his unwontedly ruffled temper was the cause of the
+indiscretion in the amount he gave.
+
+It appeared to him that he ought to proceed to Copsley for tidings of
+Lady Dunstane.  Thither he sped by the handy railway and a timely train.
+He reached the parkgates at three in the afternoon, telling his flyman to
+wait.  As he advanced by short cuts over the grass, he studied the look
+of the rows of windows.  She was within, and strangely to his clouded
+senses she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in
+justice abuse.  He and she, so close to union, were divided.  A hand
+resembling the palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder.
+Having the poorest right--not any--to reproach her, he was disarmed, he
+felt himself a miserable intruder; he summoned his passion to excuse him,
+and gained some unsatisfied repose of mind by contemplating its devoted
+sincerity; which roused an effort to feel for the sufferer--Diana
+Warwick's friend.  With the pair of surgeons named, the most eminent of
+their day, in attendance, the case must be serious.  To vindicate the
+breaker of her pledge, his present plight likewise assured him of that,
+and nearing the house he adopted instinctively the funeral step and mood,
+just sensible of a novel smallness.  For the fortifying testimony of his
+passion had to be put aside, he was obliged to disavow it for a simpler
+motive if he applied at the door.  He stressed the motive, produced the
+sentiment, and passed thus naturally into hypocrisy, as lovers
+precipitated by their blood among the crises of human conditions are
+often forced to do.  He had come to inquire after Lady Dunstane.  He
+remembered that it had struck him as a duty, on hearing of her dangerous
+illness.
+
+The door opened before he touched the bell.  Sir Lukin knocked against
+him and stared.
+
+'Ah!--who--?--you?' he said, and took him by the arm and pressed him on
+along the gravel.  'Dacier, are you?  Redworth's in there.  Come on a
+step, come!  It's the time for us to pray.  Good God!  There's mercy for
+sinners.  If ever there was a man!  .  .  .  But, oh, good God!  she's in
+their hands this minute.  My saint is under the knife.'
+
+Dacier was hurried forward by a powerful hand.  'They say it lasts about
+five minutes, four and a half--or more!  My God!  When they turned me out
+of her room, she smiled to keep me calm.  She said: "Dear husband": the
+veriest wretch and brutallest husband ever poor woman .  .  .  and a
+saint!  a saint on earth!  Emmy!' Tears burst from him.
+
+He pulled forth his watch and asked Dacier for the time.
+
+'A minute's gone in a minute.  It's three minutes and a half.  Come
+faster.  They're at their work!  It's life or death.  I've had death
+about me.  But for a woman! and your wife! and that brave soul!  She
+bears it so.  Women are the bravest creatures afloat.  If they make her
+shriek, it'll be only if she thinks I 'm out of hearing.  No: I see her.
+She bears it!--They mayn't have begun yet.  It may all be over!  Come
+into the wood.  I must pray.  I must go on my knees.'
+
+Two or three steps in the wood, at the mossed roots of a beech, he fell
+kneeling, muttering, exclaiming.
+
+The tempest of penitence closed with a blind look at his watch, which he
+left dangling.  He had to talk to drug his thoughts.
+
+'And mind you,' said he, when he had rejoined Dacier and was pushing his
+arm again, rounding beneath the trees to a view of the house, 'for a man
+steeped in damnable iniquity!  She bears it all for me, because I begged
+her, for the chance of her living.  It's my doing--this knife!
+Macpherson swears there is a chance.  Thomson backs him.  But they're at
+her, cutting!  .  .  .  The pain must be awful--the mere pain!  The
+gentlest creature ever drew breath!  And women fear blood--and her own!
+And a head!  She ought to have married the best man alive, not a--!  I
+can't remember her once complaining of me--not once.  A common donkey
+compared to her!  All I can do is to pray.  And she knows the beast I am,
+and has forgiven me.  There isn't a blessed text of Scripture that
+doesn't cry out in praise of her.  And they cut and hack .  .  .  !' He
+dropped his head.  The vehement big man heaved, shuddering.  His lips
+worked fast.
+
+'She is not alone with them, unsupported?' said Dacier.
+
+Sir Lukin moaned for relief.  He caught his watch swinging and stared at
+it.  'What a good fellow you were to come!  Now 's the time to know your
+friends.  There's Diana Warwick, true as steel.  Redworth came on her
+tiptoe for the Continent; he had only to mention .  .  .  Emmy wanted
+to spare her.  She would not have sent--wanted to spare her the sight.
+I offered to stand by .  .  .  Chased me out.  Diana Warwick's there:--
+worth fifty of me!  Dacier, I've had my sword-blade tried by Indian
+horsemen, and I know what true as steel means.  She's there.  And I know
+she shrinks from the sight of blood.  My oath on it, she won't quiver a
+muscle!  Next to my wife, you may take my word for it, Dacier, Diana
+Warwick is the pick of living women.  I could prove it.  They go
+together.  I could prove it over and over.  She 's the loyallest woman
+anywhere.  Her one error was that marriage of hers, and how she ever
+pitched herself into it, none of us can guess.'  After a while, he said:
+'Look at your watch.'
+
+'Nearly twenty minutes gone.'
+
+'Are they afraid to send out word?  It's that window !' He covered his
+eyes, and muttered, sighed.  He became abruptly composed in appearance.
+'The worst of a black sheep like me is, I'm such an infernal sinner, that
+Providence!  .  .  .  But both surgeons gave me their word of honour that
+there was a chance.  A chance!  But it's the end of me if Emmy . . . .
+Good God! no! the knife's enough; don't let her be killed!  It would be
+murder.  Here am I talking!  I ought to be praying.  I should have sent
+for the parson to help me; I can't get the proper words--bellow like a
+rascal trooper strung up for the cat.  It must be twenty-five minutes
+now.  Who's alive now!'
+
+Dacier thought of the Persian Queen crying for news of the slaughtered,
+with her mind on her lord and husband: 'Who is not dead?' Diana exalted
+poets, and here was an example of the truth of one to nature, and of the
+poor husband's depth of feeling.  They said not the same thing, but it
+was the same cry de profundis.
+
+He saw Redworth coming at a quick pace.
+
+Redworth raised his hand.  Sir Lukin stopped.  'He's waving!'
+
+'It's good,' said Dacier.
+
+'Speak!  are you sure?'
+
+'I judge by the look.'
+
+Redworth stepped unfalteringly.
+
+'It's over, all well,' he said.  He brushed his forehead and looked
+sharply cheerful.
+
+'My dear fellow! my dear fellow!' Sir Lukin grasped his hand.  'It's more
+than I deserve.  Over?  She has borne it!  She would have gone to heaven
+and left me!
+
+Is she safe?'
+
+'Doing well.'
+
+'Have you seen the surgeons?'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'What did she say?'
+
+'A nod of the head.'
+
+'You saw her?'
+
+'She came to the stairs.'
+
+'Diana Warwick never lies.  She wouldn't lie, not with a nod!  They've
+saved Emmy--do you think?'
+
+'It looks well.'
+
+My girl has passed the worst of it?'
+
+'That's over.'
+
+Sir Lukin gazed glassily.  The necessity of his agony was to lean to the
+belief, at a beckoning, that Providence pardoned him, in tenderness for
+what would have been his loss.  He realized it, and experienced a sudden
+calm: testifying to the positive pardon.
+
+'Now, look here, you two fellows, listen half a moment,' he addressed
+Redworth and Dacier; 'I've been the biggest scoundrel of a husband
+unhung, and married to a saint; and if she's only saved to me; I'll swear
+to serve her faithfully, or may a thunderbolt knock me to perdition!
+and thank God for his justice!  Prayers are answered, mind you, though
+a fellow may be as black as a sweep.  Take a warning from me.  I've had
+my lesson.'
+
+Dacier soon after talked of going.  The hope of seeing Diana had
+abandoned him, the desire was almost extinct.
+
+Sir Lukin could not let him go.  He yearned to preach to him or any one
+from his personal text of the sinner honourably remorseful on account of
+and notwithstanding the forgiveness of Providence, and he implored Dacier
+and Redworth by turns to be careful when they married of how they behaved
+to--the sainted women their wives; never to lend ear to the devil, nor to
+believe, as he had done, that there is no such thing as a devil, for he
+had been the victim of him, and he knew.  The devil, he loudly
+proclaimed, has a multiplicity of lures, and none more deadly than when
+he baits with a petticoat.  He had been hooked, and had found the devil
+in person.  He begged them urgently to keep his example in memory.  By
+following this and that wildfire he had stuck himself in a bog--a common
+result with those who would not see the devil at work upon them; and it
+required his dear suffering saint to be at death's doors, cut to pieces
+and gasping, to open his eyes.  But, thank heaven, they were opened at
+last!  Now he saw the beast he was: a filthy beast!  unworthy of tying
+his wife's shoestring.  No confessions could expose to them the beast he
+was.  But let them not fancy there was no such thing as an active DEVIL
+about the world.
+
+Redworth divined that the simply sensational man abased himself before
+Providence and heaped his gratitude on the awful Power in order to render
+it difficult for the promise of the safety of his wife to be withdrawn.
+
+He said: 'There is good hope'; and drew an admonition upon himself.
+
+'Ah! my dear good Redworth,' Sir Lukin sighed from his elevation of
+outspoken penitence: 'you will see as I do some day.  It is the devil,
+think as you like of it.  When you have pulled down all the Institutions
+of the Country, what do you expect but ruins?  That Radicalism of yours
+has its day.  You have to go through a wrestle like mine to understand
+it.  You say, the day is fine, let's have our game.  Old England pays for
+it!  Then you'll find how you love the old land of your birth--the
+noblest ever called a nation!--with your Corn Law Repeals!--eh, Dacier?
+--You 'll own it was the devil tempted you.  I hear you apologizing.
+Pray God, it mayn't be too late!'
+
+He looked up at the windows.  'She may be sinking!'
+
+'Have no fears,' Redworth said; 'Mrs. Warwick would send for you.'
+
+'She would.  Diana Warwick would be sure to send.  Next to my wife, Diana
+Warwick's .  .  .  she'd send, never fear.  I dread that room.  I'd
+rather go through a regiment of sabres--though it 's over now.  And Diana
+Warwick stood it.  The worst is over, you told me.  By heaven! women are
+wonderful creatures.  But she hasn't a peer for courage.  I could trust
+her--most extraordinary thing; that marriage of hers!--not a soul has
+ever been able to explain it:--trust her to the death.'
+
+Redworth left them, and Sir Lukin ejaculated on the merits of Diana
+Warwick to Dacier.  He laughed scornfully: 'And that's the woman the
+world attacks for want of virtue!  Why, a fellow hasn't a chance with
+her, not a chance.  She comes out in blazing armour if you unmask a
+battery.  I don't know how it might be if she were in love with a fellow.
+I doubt her thinking men worth the trouble.  I never met the man.  But if
+she were to take fire, Troy 'd be nothing to it.  I wonder whether we
+might go in: I dread the house.'
+
+Dacier spoke of departing.
+
+'No, no, wait,' Sir Lukin begged him.  'I was talking about women.  They
+are the devil--or he makes most use of them: and you must learn to see
+the cloven foot under their petticoats, if you're to escape them.
+There's no protection in being in love with your wife; I married for
+love; I am, I always have been, in love with her; and I went to the
+deuce.  The music struck up and away I waltzed.  A woman like Diana
+Warwick might keep a fellow straight, because she,'s all round you; she's
+man and woman in brains; and legged like a deer, and breasted like a
+swan, and a regular sheaf of arrows--in her eyes.  Dark women--ah!
+But she has a contempt for us, you know.  That's the secret of her.--
+Redworth 's at the door.  Bad?  Is it bad?  I never was particularly fond
+of that house--hated it.  I love it now for Emmy's sake.  I couldn't live
+in another--though I should be haunted.  Rather her ghost than nothing--
+though I'm an infernal coward about the next world.  But if you're right
+with religion you needn't fear.  What I can't comprehend in Redworth is
+his Radicalism, and getting richer and richer.'
+
+'It's not a vow of poverty,' said Dacier.
+
+'He'll find they don't coalesce, or his children will.  Once the masses
+are uppermost!  It's a bad day, Dacier, when we 've no more gentlemen in
+the land.  Emmy backs him, so I hold my tongue.  To-morrow's a Sunday.
+I wish you were staying here; I 'd take you to church with me-we shirk
+it when we haven't a care.  It couldn't do you harm.  I've heard capital
+sermons.  I've always had the good habit of going to church, Dacier.
+Now 's the time for remembering them.  Ah, my dear fellow, I 'm not a
+parson.  It would have been better for me if I had been.'
+
+And for you too!  his look added plainly.  He longed to preach; he was
+impelled to chatter.
+
+Redworth reported the patient perfectly quiet, breathing calmly.
+
+'Laudanum?' asked Sir Lukin.  'Now there's a poison we've got to bless!
+And we set up in our wisdom for knowing what is good for us!'
+
+He had talked his hearers into a stupefied assent to anything he uttered.
+
+'Mrs. Warwick would like to see you in two or three minutes; she will
+come down,' Redworth said to Dacier.
+
+'That looks well, eh?  That looks bravely,' Sir Lukin cried.  'Diana,
+Warwick wouldn't leave the room without a certainty.  I dread the look of
+those men; I shall have to shake their hands!  And so I do, with all my
+heart: only--But God bless them!  But we must go in, if she's coming
+down.'
+
+They entered the house, and sat in the drawing-room, where Sir Lukin took
+up from the table one of his wife's Latin books, a Persius, bearing her
+marginal notes.  He dropped his head on it, with sobs.
+
+The voice of Diana recalled him to the present.  She counselled him to
+control himself; in that case he might for one moment go to the chamber-
+door and assure himself by the silence that his wife was resting.  She
+brought permission from the surgeons and doctor, on his promise to be
+still.
+
+Redworth supported Sir Lukin tottering out.
+
+Dacier had risen.  He was petrified by Diana's face, and thought of her
+as whirled from him in a storm, bearing the marks of it.  Her underlip
+hung for short breaths; the big drops of her recent anguish still
+gathered on her brows; her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked
+ancient in youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the
+vaults, issuing white-ringed, not of our light.
+
+She shut her mouth for strength to speak to him.
+
+He said: 'You are not ill?  You are strong?'
+
+'I?  Oh, strong.  I will sit.  I cannot be absent longer than two
+minutes.  The trial of her strength is to come.  If it were courage,
+we might be sure.  The day is fine?'
+
+'A perfect August day.'
+
+'I held her through it.  I am thankful to heaven it was no other hand
+than mine.  She wished to spare me.  She was glad of her Tony when the
+time came.  I thought I was a coward--I could have changed with her to
+save her; I am a strong woman, fit to submit to that work.  I should not
+have borne it as she did.  She expected to sink under it.  All her
+dispositions were made for death-bequests to servants and to .  .  .  to
+friends: every secret liking they had, thought of!'
+
+Diana clenched her hands.
+
+'I hope!' Dacier said.
+
+'You shall hear regularly.  Call at Sir William's house to-morrow.  He
+sleeps here to-night.  The suspense must last for days.  It is a question
+of vital power to bear the shock.  She has a mind so like a flying spirit
+that, just before the moment, she made Mr. Lanyan Thomson smile by
+quoting some saying of her Tony's.'
+
+'Try by-and-by to recollect it,' said Dacier.
+
+'And you were with that poor man!  How did he pass the terrible time?  I
+pitied him.'
+
+'He suffered; he prayed.'
+
+'It was the best he could do.  Mr. Redworth was as he always is at the
+trial, a pillar.  Happy the friend who knows him for one!  He never
+thinks of himself in a crisis.  He is sheer strength to comfort and aid.
+They will drive you to the station with Mr. Thomson.  He returns to
+relieve Sir William to-morrow.  I have learnt to admire the men of the
+knife!  No profession equals theirs in self-command and beneficence.
+Dr. Bridgenorth is permanent here.'
+
+'I have a fly, and go back immediately,' said Dacier.
+
+'She shall hear of your coming.  Adieu.'
+
+Diana gave him her hand.  It was gently pressed.
+
+A wonderment at the utter change of circumstances took Dacier passingly
+at the sight of her vanishing figure.
+
+He left the house, feeling he dared have no personal wishes.  It had
+ceased to be the lover's hypocrisy with him.
+
+The crisis of mortal peril in that house enveloped its inmates, and so
+wrought in him as to enshroud the stripped outcrying husband, of whom he
+had no clear recollection, save of the man's agony.  The two women,
+striving against death, devoted in friendship, were the sole living
+images he brought away; they were a new vision of the world and our life.
+
+He hoped with Diana, bled with her.  She rose above him high, beyond his
+transient human claims.  He envied Redworth the common friendly right to
+be near her.  In reflection, long after, her simplicity of speech, washed
+pure of the blood-emotions, for token of her great nature, during those
+two minutes of their sitting together, was, dearer, sweeter to the lover
+than if she had shown by touch or word that a faint allusion to their
+severance was in her mind; and this despite a certain vacancy it created.
+
+He received formal information of Lady Dunstane's progress to
+convalescence.  By degrees the simply official tone of Diana's letters
+combined with the ceasing of them and the absence of her personal charm
+to make a gentleman not remarkable for violence in the passion so calmly
+reasonable as to think the dangerous presence best avoided for a time.
+Subject to fits of the passion, he certainly was, but his position in the
+world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name.  He did not
+regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if
+taken.  On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look
+to his cool blood.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness
+Capricious potentate whom they worship
+Circumstances may combine to make a whisper as deadly as a blow
+Compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse
+Could have designed this gabbler for the mate
+Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable
+Explaining of things to a dull head
+Happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept beauty
+He gained much by claiming little
+Her peculiar tenacity of the sense of injury
+His ridiculous equanimity
+Keep passion sober, a trotter in harness
+Moral indignation is ever consolatory
+Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves
+Strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that
+Tendency to polysyllabic phraseology
+The blindness of Fortune is her one merit
+They have no sensitiveness, we have too much
+Top and bottom sin is cowardice
+Touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight
+We must fawn in society
+We never see peace but in the features of the dead
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4467 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Diana of the Crossways, v3,
+by George Meredith
+#73 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: Diana of the Crossways, v3
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
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+*********This file should be named 4467.txt or 4467.zip*********
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+
+
+DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XVIII.    THE AUTHORESS
+XIX.      A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT
+XX.       DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH
+XXI.      THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE
+XXII.     BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER : THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
+XXIII.    RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
+XXIV.     INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
+XXV.      ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
+XXVI.     IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS
+
+
+
+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 PRINCESS 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 "vaporous generalizations," and
+other "tricks" you fear.  Now that you are studying Latin for an
+occupation--how good and wise it was of Mr. Redworth to propose it!--
+I 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 like so solid and
+durable.
+
+'THE PRINCESS EGERIA' 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 puffing, of her frame.  She would be healthier and have a chance of
+living longer if she were reduced by a 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 the 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 celestial into coined gold.
+I sound myself, and ring clear.  Incessant 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 intoxicating with eulogy.
+The signature "Apollonius" appears to be of literary-middle indication.
+He marks passages approved 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.  That must be a good sign.  I do not doubt of
+excelling my PRINCESS; and if she received compliments, 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!  You
+see, my Emmy, I could not house with the "companionable person" you hint
+at.  The poles can never come together till the earth is crushed.  She
+would find my habits intolerable, and I hers contemptible, though we
+might both be companionable persons.  My dear, I could not even live with
+myself.  My blessed little quill, which helps me divinely to live out of
+myself, is and must continue to be my one companion.  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 entire felicity--no step taken to bridge division!
+The thought of it makes me tigrish.
+
+'A new pianist playing his own pieces (at Lady Singleby'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 AEolian 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 settled 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 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 gratification.  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 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.'
+
+The letter had every outward show of sincereness in expression, 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 similarity of her delight in both,
+deluded her uncorrupted conscience 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 projected too far beyond them to see the fore
+finger they stretched at her; and the friend's was not that of a prying
+doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms.  Lady Dunstane 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. Whitmonby, 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
+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 the drawing-room, where we talked
+for another hour, and broke up fresher than we began.'
+
+'That break between the men and the women after dinner was Tony's
+aversion, and I am glad she has instituted a change,' said Lady Dunstane.
+
+She heard also from Redworth of the unexampled concert 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.  Redworth 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 enliven 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 syllables, 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!  .  .  .  In either case, she has been
+badly used.  Society is big engine enough to protect 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 business.  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 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 anal 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 suffice 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 will 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 must fawn in society.  What is the meaning of that dread of one
+example of tolerance?  O 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 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 different.'
+
+'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! and while thinking myself 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 spirit 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 Redworth, 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 Redworth'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 Richmond 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 corresponding
+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 Redworth!
+
+Percy Dacier seemed to her the more likely one, in that light, and she
+thought so still, after Sir Lukin had introduced 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, 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 gabbier 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 doesn'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 DRIVE IN 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 oppression of her own that led her to
+imagine her recent placid life the pause before thunder, and to sharp the
+mood of her solitary friend she flew to Copsley, finding Sir Lukin
+absent, as usual.  They drove out immediately after breakfast, 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 grass-blade, and beauty and
+peace are overhead, reflected, if we will.  Rain had fallen in the night.
+Here and there hung a milk-white cloud with folded sail.  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 everywhere, steady sunshine above.
+
+Diana held the reins.  The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers
+to the general officer.  Lady Dunstane's ponies were a present from
+Redworth, 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 gateway 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 Southwest, 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 beyond 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 the Emma of days
+and scenes to me!  It helps me to forget 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 soul.  But I
+am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day 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 happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept
+beauty.  I won't say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a
+trotter in harness.'
+
+Diana caressed the 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 road in the wood wound under great
+beeches, they beheld a 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 possible; 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 distance 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 directions--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 youngest light of day, and
+on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the
+woods, more sustaining, 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 business 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 conduct 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.
+
+Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort
+at her house in London; perhaps a message of farewell from the dying
+lord, now dead.  Mr. Rhodes 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 farewell 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 taken 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 earl.
+
+'She'll come,' said old Lady Dacier.
+
+'If the woman respects herself she'll 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.  From what I've heard of her, she's not a woman to stick at
+trifles.  She'll take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she 'll 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.
+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 'hysterical 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 extraordinary 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.  His 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, 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 strengthening 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 at 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.  The supposition of an absolute loneliness was
+most possible.  He had intended to drive back the next day, when the
+domestic 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 Itchenford to the heath-land rolling on the chalk
+wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of his
+host 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 accessibility 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 passingly 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.  For 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 Rovio, 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 lie bludgeons 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 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 Paynham exposed her to attacks
+where she was deemed vulnerable; Lady Dacier muttered old saws as to the
+flocking of birds; he did not accurately understand it, thought it
+indiscreet, at best.  But in regard to his experience, he could tell
+himself that a woman more guileless of luring never drew breath.  On the
+contrary, 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 acknowledgement 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 eyelids, 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.  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 possibilities.  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 intolerable 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 contrasting 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.  Upstairs, 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 A NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER 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.
+
+'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 gulf 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 piping 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 doubtfuller; Life cowered under the shadow or
+outshone it.  He glanced from her to the figure in the bed, and she
+seemed swallowed.
+
+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 lampshade 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!'
+
+'I 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.'
+
+'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 cheerfuller 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.  'If you must really go by
+the early train, I will drive you.'
+
+'No, I will walk; I prefer it.'
+
+'I will order your breakfast at once.'
+
+He turned on his heel.  She stopped him.  'No, I have no taste for eating
+or drinking.'
+
+'Pray .  .  .'  said he, in visible distress.
+
+She shook her head.  'I could not.  I have twenty minutes longer.  I can
+find my way to the station; it is almost a straight road out of the park-
+gates.'
+
+His heart swelled with anger at the household for they treatment she had
+been subjected to, judging by her resolve not to break bread in the
+house.
+
+They resumed their silent sitting.  The intervals for a word to pass
+between them were long, and the ticking of the time-piece fronting the
+death-bed ruled the chamber, scarcely varied.
+
+The lamp was raised for the final look, the leave-taking.
+
+Dacier buried his face, thinking many things--the common multitude in
+insurrection.
+
+'A servant should be told to come now,' she said.  'I have only to put on
+my bonnet and I am ready.'
+
+'You will take no .  .  . ?'
+
+'Nothing.'
+
+'It is not too late for a carriage to be ordered.'
+
+'No--the walk!'
+
+They separated.
+
+He roused the two women in the dressing-room, asleep with heads against
+the wall.  Thence he sped to his own room for hat and overcoat, and a
+sprinkle of cold water.  Descending the stairs, he beheld his companion
+issuing from the chamber of death.  Her lips were shut, her eyelids
+nervously tremulous.
+
+They were soon in the warm sweet open air, and they walked without an
+interchange of a syllable through the park into the white hawthorn lane,
+glad to breathe.  Her nostrils took long draughts of air, but of the
+change of, scene she appeared scarcely sensible.
+
+At the park-gates, she said: 'There is no necessity four your coming.'
+
+His answer was: 'I think of myself.  I gain something every step I walk
+with you.'
+
+'To-day is Thursday,' said she.  'The funeral is .  .  . ?'
+
+'Monday has been fixed.  According to his directions, he will lie in the
+churchyard of his village--not in the family vault.'
+
+'I know,' she said hastily.  'They are privileged who follow him and see
+the coffin lowered.  He spoke of this quiet little resting-place.'
+
+'Yes, it's a good end.  I do not wonder at his wish for the honour you
+have done him.  I could wish it too.  But more living than dead--that is
+a natural wish.'
+
+'It is not to be called an honour.'
+
+'I should feel it so-an honour to me.'
+
+'It is a friend's duty.  The word is too harsh; it was his friend's
+desire.  He did not ask it so much as he sanctioned it.  For to him what
+has my sitting beside him been!'
+
+'He had the prospective happiness.'
+
+'He knew well that my soul would be with him--as it was last night.
+But he knew it would be my poor human happiness to see him with my eyes,
+touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight.'
+
+Dacier exclaimed: 'How you can love!'
+
+'Is the village church to be seen?' she asked.
+
+'To the right of those elms; that is the spire.  The black spot below is
+a yew.  You love with the whole heart when you love.'
+
+'I love my friends,' she replied.
+
+'You tempt me to envy those who are numbered among them.'
+
+'They are not many.'
+
+'They should be grateful.!
+
+'You have some acquaintance with them all.'
+
+'And an enemy?  Had you ever one?  Do you know of one?'
+
+'Direct and personal designedly?  I think not.  We give that title to
+those who are disinclined to us and add a dash of darker colour to our
+errors.  Foxes have enemies in the dogs; heroines of melodramas have
+their persecuting villains.  I suppose that conditions of life exist
+where one meets the original complexities.  The bad are in every rank.
+The inveterately malignant I have not found.  Circumstances may combine
+to make a whisper as deadly as a blow, though not of such evil design.
+Perhaps if we lived at a Court of a magnificent despot we should learn
+that we are less highly civilized than we imagine ourselves; but that is
+a fire to the passions, and the extreme is not the perfect test.  Our
+civilization counts positive gains--unless you take the melodrama for the
+truer picture of us.  It is always the most popular with the English.--
+And look, what a month June is!  Yesterday morning I was with Lady
+Dunstane on her heights, and I feel double the age.  He was fond of
+this wild country.  We think it a desert, a blank, whither he has gone,
+because we will strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of
+that but the bursting of the eyeballs.'
+
+Dacier assented: 'There's no use in peering beyond the limits.'
+
+'No,' said she; 'the effect is like the explaining of things to a dull
+head--the finishing stroke to the understanding!  Better continue to
+brood.  We get to some unravelment if we are left to our own efforts.
+I quarrel with no priest of any denomination.  That they should quarrel
+among themselves is comprehensible in their wisdom, for each has the
+specific.  But they show us their way of solving the great problem, and
+we ought to thank them, though one or the other abominate us.  You are
+advised to talk with Lady Dunstane on these themes.
+
+She is perpetually in the antechamber of death, and her soul is
+perennially sunshine.--See the pretty cottage under the laburnum curls!
+Who lives there?'
+
+'His gamekeeper, Simon Rofe.'
+
+'And what a playground for the children, that bit of common by their
+garden-palings!  and the pond, and the blue hills over the furzes.  I
+hope those people will not be turned out.'
+
+Dacier could not tell.  He promised to do his best for them.
+
+'But,' said she, 'you are the lord here now.'
+
+'Not likely to be the tenant.  Incomes are wanted to support even small
+estates.'
+
+'The reason is good for courting the income.'
+
+He disliked the remark; and when she said presently:
+
+'Those windmills make the landscape homely,' he rejoined: 'They remind
+one of our wheeling London gamins round the cab from the station.'
+
+'They remind you,' said she, and smiled at the chance discordant trick he
+had, remembering occasions when it had crossed her.
+
+'This is homelier than Rovio,' she said; 'quite as nice in its way.'
+
+'You do not gather flowers here.'
+
+'Because my friend has these at her feet.'
+
+'May one petition without a rival, then, for a souvenir?'
+
+'Certainly, if you care to have a common buttercup.'
+
+They reached the station, five minutes in advance of the train.  His
+coming manoeuvre was early detected, and she drew from her pocket the
+little book he had seen lying unopened on the table, and said: 'I shall
+have two good hours for reading.'
+
+'You will not object?  .  .  .  I must accompany you to town.  Permit it,
+I beg.  You shall not be worried to talk.'
+
+'No; I came alone and return alone.'
+
+'Fasting and unprotected!  Are you determined to take away the worst
+impression of us?  Do not refuse me this favour.'
+
+'As to fasting, I could not eat: and unprotected no woman is in England,
+if she is a third-class traveller.  That is my experience of the class;
+and I shall return among my natural protectors--the most unselfishly
+chivalrous to women in the whole world.'
+
+He had set his heart on going with her, and he attempted eloquence in
+pleading, but that exposed him to her humour; he was tripped.
+
+'It is not denied that you belong to the knightly class,' she said; 'and
+it is not necessary that you should wear armour and plumes to proclaim
+it; and your appearance would be ample protection from the drunken
+sailors travelling, you say, on this line; and I may be deplorably
+mistaken in imagining that I could tame them.  But your knightliness is
+due elsewhere; and I commit myself to the fortune of war.  It is a battle
+for women everywhere; under the most favourable conditions among my dear
+common English.  I have not my maid with me, or else I should not dare.'
+
+She paid for a third-class ticket, amused by Dacier's look of entreaty
+and trouble.
+
+'Of course I obey,' he murmured.
+
+'I have the habit of exacting it in matters concerning my independence,'
+she said; and it arrested some rumbling notions in his head as to a piece
+of audacity on the starting of the train.  They walked up and down the
+platform till the bell rang and the train came rounding beneath an arch.
+
+'Oh, by the way, may I ask?'--he said: 'was it your article in
+Whitmonby's journal on a speech of mine last week?'
+
+'The guilty writer is confessed.'
+
+'Let me thank you.'
+
+'Don't.  But try to believe it written on public grounds--if the task is
+not too great.'
+
+'I may call?'
+
+'You will be welcome.'
+
+'To tell you of the funeral--the last of him.'
+
+'Do not fail to come.'
+
+She could have laughed to see him jumping on the steps of the third-class
+carriages one after another to choose her company for her.  In those pre-
+democratic blissful days before the miry Deluge, the opinion of the
+requirements of poor English travellers entertained by the Seigneur
+Directors of the class above them, was that they differed from cattle in
+stipulating for seats.  With the exception of that provision to suit
+their weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and
+the seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the
+sitter for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a
+higher state.  Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window
+aloof, demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he
+would indulge in views of the passing scenery,--such was the furniture of
+dens where a refinement of castigation was practised on villain poverty
+by denying leathers to the windows, or else buttons to the leathers, so
+that the windows had either to be up or down, but refused to shelter and
+freshen simultaneously.
+
+Dacier selected a compartment occupied by two old women, a mother and
+babe and little maid, and a labouring man.  There he installed her, with
+an eager look that she would not notice.
+
+'You will want the window down,' he said.
+
+She applied to her fellow-travellers for the permission; and struggling
+to get the window down, he was irritated to animadvert on 'these
+carriages' of the benevolent railway Company.
+
+'Do not forget that the wealthy are well treated, or you may be unjust,'
+said she, to pacify him.
+
+His mouth sharpened its line while he tried arts and energies on the
+refractory window.  She told him to leave it.  'You can't breathe this
+atmosphere!' he cried, and called to a porter, who did the work,
+remarking that it was rather stiff.
+
+The door was banged and fastened.  Dacier had to hang on the step to see
+her in the farewell.  From the platform he saw the top of her bonnet; and
+why she should have been guilty of this freak of riding in an unwholesome
+carriage, tasked his power of guessing.  He was too English even to have
+taken the explanation, for he detested the distinguishing of the races in
+his country, and could not therefore have comprehended her peculiar
+tenacity of the sense of injury as long as enthusiasm did not arise to
+obliterate it.  He required a course of lessons in Irish.
+
+Sauntering down the lane, he called at Simon Rofe's cottage, and spoke
+very kindly to the gamekeeper's wife.  That might please Diana.  It was
+all he could do at present.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+'THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE'
+
+Descriptions in the newspapers of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh
+had the effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the
+disused name of Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the
+verdict of the jury was again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained,
+the carpers replying to the champions that they held to their view of it:
+as heads of bull-dogs are expected to do when they have got a grip of
+one.  It is a point of muscular honour with them never to relax their
+hold.  They will tell you why:--they formed that opinion from the first.
+And but for the swearing of a particular witness, upon whom the plaintiff
+had been taught to rely, the verdict would have been different--to prove
+their soundness of judgement.  They could speak from private positive
+information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic
+sources.  Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the
+absence of the husband?  Oh!--The British Lucretia was very properly not
+legally at home to the masculine world of that day.  She plied her
+distaff in pure seclusion, meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair
+proportion of the masculine world, which had not yet, has not yet,
+'doubled Cape Turk,' approved her condemnation to the sack.
+
+There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies.  The
+elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the
+levels where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it
+now, assisting to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and
+lively upper pavement of Society, above its tumbled strata.  She was near
+that distinguished surface, not on it.  Her circle was practically the
+same as it was previous to the coveted nominal rank enabling her to
+trample on those beneath it.  And women like that Mrs. Warwick, a woman
+of no birth, no money, not even honest character, enjoyed the entry
+undisputed, circulated among the highest:--because people took her rattle
+for wit!--and because also our nobility, Lady Wathin feared, had no due
+regard for morality.  Our aristocracy, brilliant and ancient though it
+was, merited rebuke.  She grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof
+were plenty among the frolicsome host just overhead, as vexatious as the
+drawing-room party to the lodger in the floor below, who has not received
+an invitation to partake of the festivities and is required to digest the
+noise.  But if ambition is oversensitive, moral indignation is ever
+consolatory, for it plants us on the Judgement Seat.  There indeed we
+may, sitting with the very Highest, forget our personal disappointments
+in dispensing reprobation for misconduct, however eminent the offenders.
+
+She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon's call to see poor Lady
+Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a
+patroness of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub--an icy check-bow of the
+aristocratic head from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not
+a look; the half-turn of a head devoid of mouth and eyes!  She practised
+that forbidding checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it
+was horrible.  A noli me tangere, her husband termed it, in his
+ridiculous equanimity; and he might term it what he pleased--it was
+insulting.  The solace she had was in hearing that hideous Radical
+Revolutionary things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick's evenings with
+her friends:--impudently named 'the elect of London.'  Pleasing to
+reflect upon Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them
+some day down with a crash!  Her 'elect of London' were a queer
+gathering, by report of them!  And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a
+celebrity, was the right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs.
+Warwick.  Where will not men go to be flattered by a pretty woman!  He
+had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin's table.
+But there of course he would not have had 'the freedom': that is, she
+rejoiced in thinking defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed
+her topics.  The Hon. Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday
+afternoon by.  Mr. Quintin Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and
+he knew Mrs. Warwick--a little, he said.  The opportunity was not lost to
+convey to him, entirely in the interest of sweet Constance Asper, that
+the moral world entertained a settled view of the very clever woman Mrs.
+Warwick certainly was.  He had asked Diana, on their morning walk to the
+station, whether she had an enemy: so prone are men, educated by the
+Drama and Fiction in the belief that the garden of civilized life must be
+at the mercy of the old wild devourers, to fancy 'villain whispers' an
+indication of direct animosity.  Lady Wathin had no sentiment of the
+kind.
+
+But she had become acquainted with the other side of the famous
+Dannisburgh case--the unfortunate plaintiff; and compassion as well as
+morality moved her to put on a speaking air when Mr. Warwick's name was
+mentioned.  She pictured him to the ladies of her circle as 'one of our
+true gentlemen in his deportment and his feelings.'  He was, she would
+venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman.  'But now,' she added
+commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.'
+A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him.  Lady
+Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is
+the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-
+morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.'  Morality had something to
+say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be
+feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband.  Still Mrs.
+Warwick undoubtedly was one of those women (of Satanic construction) who
+have the art of enslaving the men unhappy enough to cross their path.
+The nature of the art was hinted, with the delicacy of dainty feet which
+have to tread in mire to get to safety.  Men, alas!  are snared in this
+way.  Instances too numerous for the good repute of the swinish sex,
+were cited, and the question of how Morality was defensible from their
+grossness passed without a tactical reply.  There is no defence: Those
+women come like the Cholera Morbus--and owing to similar causes.  They
+will prevail until the ideas of men regarding women are purified.
+Nevertheless the husband who could forgive, even propose to forgive, was
+deemed by consent generous, however weak.  Though she might not have been
+wholly guilty, she had bitterly offended.  And he despatched an emissary
+to her?--The theme, one may, in their language, 'fear,' was relished as a
+sugared acid.  It was renewed in the late Autumn of the year, when
+ANTONIA published her new book, entitled THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE.
+The signature of the authoress was now known; and from this resurgence of
+her name in public, suddenly a radiation of tongues from the circle of
+Lady Wathin declared that the repentant Mrs. Warwick had gone back to her
+husband's bosom and forgiveness!  The rumour spread in spite of sturdy
+denials at odd corners, counting the red-hot proposal of Mr. Sullivan
+Smith to eat his head and boots for breakfast if it was proved correct.
+It filled a yawn of the Clubs for the afternoon.  Soon this wanton rumour
+was met and stifled by another of more morbific density, heavily charged
+as that which led the sad Eliza to her pyre.
+
+ANTONIA's hero was easily identified.  THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE could
+be he only who was now at all her parties, always meeting her; had been
+spied walking with her daily in the park near her house, on his march
+down to Westminster during the session; and who positively went to
+concerts and sat under fiddlers to be near her.  It accounted moreover
+for his treatment of Constance Asper.  What effrontery of the authoress,
+to placard herself with him in a book!  The likeness of the hero to Percy
+Dacier once established became striking to glaringness--a proof of her
+ability, and more of her audacity; still more of her intention to flatter
+him up to his perdition.  By the things written of him, one would imagine
+the conversations going on behind the scenes.  She had the wiles of a
+Cleopatra, not without some of the Nilene's experiences.  A youthful
+Antony Dacier would be little likely to escape her toils.  And so
+promising a young man!  The sigh, the tear for weeping over his
+destruction, almost fell, such vivid realizing of the prophesy
+appeared in its pathetic pronouncement.
+
+This low rumour, or malaria, began blowing in the winter, and did not
+travel fast; for strangely, there was hardly a breath of it in the
+atmosphere of Dacier, none in Diana's.  It rose from groups not so
+rapidly and largely mixing, and less quick to kindle; whose crazy
+sincereness battened on the smallest morsel of fact and collected the
+fictitious by slow absorption.  But as guardians of morality, often doing
+good duty in their office, they are persistent.  When Parliament
+assembled, Mr. Quintin Manx, a punctual member of the House, if nothing
+else, arrived in town.  He was invited to dine with Lady Wathin.  After
+dinner she spoke to him of the absent Constance, and heard of her being
+well, and expressed a great rejoicing at that.  Whereupon the burly old
+shipowner frowned and puffed.  Constance, he said, had plunged into these
+new spangle, candle and high singing services; was all for symbols,
+harps, effigies, what not.  Lady Wathin's countenance froze in hearing of
+it.  She led Mr. Quintin to a wall-sofa, and said: 'Surely the dear child
+must have had a disappointment, for her to have taken to those foolish
+displays of religion!  It is generally a sign.'
+
+'Well, ma'am-my lady--I let girls go their ways in such things.  I don't
+interfere.  But it's that fellow, or nobody, with her.  She has fixed her
+girl's mind on him, and if she can't columbine as a bride, she will as a
+nun.  Young people must be at some harlequinade.'
+
+'But it is very shocking.  And he?'
+
+'He plays last and loose, warm and cold.  I'm ready to settle twenty
+times a nobleman's dowry on my niece and she's a fine girl, a handsome
+girl, educated up to the brim, fit to queen it in any drawing-room.  He
+holds her by some arts that don't hold him, it seems.  He's all for
+politics.'
+
+'Constance can scarcely be his dupe so far, I should think.'
+
+'How do you mean?'
+
+'Everything points to one secret of his conduct.'
+
+'A woman?'
+
+Lady Wathin's head shook for her sex's pained affirmative.
+
+Mr. Quintin in the same fashion signified the downright negative.  'The
+fellow's as cold as a fish.'
+
+'Flattery will do anything.  There is, I fear, one.'
+
+'Widow?  wife?  maid?'
+
+'Married, I regret to say.'
+
+'Well, if he'd get over with it,' said Quintin, in whose notions the
+seductiveness of a married woman could be only temporary, for all the
+reasons pertaining to her state.  At the same time his view of Percy
+Dacier was changed in thinking it possible that a woman could divert him
+from his political and social interests.  He looked incredulous.
+
+'You have heard of a Mrs. Warwick?' said Lady Wathin.
+
+'Warwick!  I have.  I've never seen her.  At my broker's in the City
+yesterday I saw the name on a Memorandum of purchase of Shares in a
+concern promising ten per cent., and not likely to carry the per annum
+into the plural.  He told me she was a grand kind of woman, past
+advising.'
+
+'For what amount'
+
+'Some thousands, I think it was.'
+
+'She has no money': Lady Wathin corrected her emphasis: 'or ought to have
+none.'
+
+'She can't have got it from him.'
+
+'Did you notice her Christian name?'
+
+'I don't recollect it, if I did.  I thought the woman a donkey.'
+
+'Would you consider me a busybody were I to try to mitigate this woman's
+evil influence?  I love dear Constance, and should be happy to serve
+her.'
+
+'I want my girl married,' said old Quintin.  'He's one of my
+Parliamentary chiefs, with first-rate prospects; good family, good
+sober fellow--at least I thought so; by nature, I mean; barring your
+incantations.  He suits me, she liking him.'
+
+'She admires him, I am sure.'
+
+'She's dead on end for the fellow!'
+
+Lady Wathin felt herself empowered by Quintin Manx to undertake the
+release of sweet Constance Asper's knight from the toils of his
+enchantress.  For this purpose she had first an interview with Mr.
+Warwick, and next she hurried to Lady Dunstane at Copsley.  There, after
+jumbling Mr. Warwick's connubial dispositions and Mrs. Warwick's last
+book, and Mr. Percy Dacier's engagement to the great heiress in a gossipy
+hotch-potch, she contrived to gather a few items of fact, as that THE
+YOUNG MINISTER was probably modelled upon Mr. Percy Dacier.  Lady
+Dunstane made no concealment of it as soon as she grew sensible of the
+angling.  But she refused her help to any reconciliation between Mr. and
+Mrs. Warwick.  She declined to listen to Lady Wathin's entreaties.  She
+declined to give her reasons.--These bookworm women, whose pride it is to
+fancy that they can think for themselves, have a great deal of the
+heathen in them, as morality discovers when it wears the enlistment
+ribands and applies yo them to win recruits for a service under the
+direct blessing of Providence.
+
+Lady Wathin left some darts behind her, in the form of moral
+exclamations; and really intended morally.  For though she did not like
+Mrs. Warwick, she had no wish to wound, other than by stopping her
+further studies of the Young Minister, and conducting him to the young
+lady loving him, besides restoring a bereft husband to his own.  How
+sadly pale and worn poor Mr. Warwick appeared?  The portrayal of his
+withered visage to Lady Dunstane had quite failed to gain a show of
+sympathy.  And so it is ever with your book-worm women pretending to be
+philosophical!  You sound them vainly for a manifestation of the
+commonest human sensibilities, They turn over the leaves of a Latin book
+on their laps while you are supplicating them to assist in a work of
+charity!
+
+Lady Wathin's interjectory notes haunted Emma's ear.  Yet she had seen
+nothing in Tony to let her suppose that there was trouble of her heart
+below the surface; and her Tony when she came to Copsley shone in the
+mood of the day of Lord Dannisburgh's drive down from London with her.
+She was running on a fresh work; talked of composition as a trifle.
+
+'I suppose the YOUNG MINISTER is Mr. Percy Dacier?' said Emma.
+
+'Between ourselves he is,' Diana replied, smiling at a secret guessed.
+'You know my model and can judge of the likeness.'
+
+'You write admiringly of him, Tony.'
+
+'And I do admire him.  So would you, Emmy, if you knew him as well as I
+do now.  He pairs with Mr. Redworth; he also is the friend of women.  But
+he lifts us to rather a higher level of intellectual friendship.  When
+the ice has melted--and it is thick at first--he pours forth all his
+ideas without reserve; and they are deep and noble.  Ever since Lord
+Dannisburgh's death and our sitting together, we have been warm friends
+--intimate, I would say, if it could be said of one so self-contained.
+In that respect, no young man was ever comparable with him.  And I am
+encouraged to flatter myself that he unbends to me more than to others.'
+
+'He is engaged, or partly, I hear; why does he not marry?'
+
+'I wish he would!' Diana said, with a most brilliant candour of aspect.
+
+Emma read in it, that it would complete her happiness, possibly by
+fortifying her sense of security; and that seemed right.  Her own
+meditations, illumined by the beautiful face in her presence, referred to
+the security of Mr. Dacier.
+
+'So, then, life is going smoothly,' said Emma.
+
+'Yes, at a good pace and smoothly: not a torrent--Thames-like, "without
+o'erflowing full."  It is not Lugano and the Salvatore.  Perhaps it is
+better: as action is better than musing.'
+
+'No troubles whatever?'
+
+'None.  Well, except an "adorer" at times.  I have to take him as my
+portion.  An impassioned Caledonian has a little bothered me.  I met him
+at Lady Pennon's, and have been meeting him, as soon as I put foot out of
+my house, ever since.  If I could impress and impound him to marry Mary
+Paynham, I should be glad.  By the way, I have consented to let her try
+at a portrait of me.  No, I have no troubles.  I have friends, the
+choicest of the nation; I have health, a field for labour, fairish
+success with it; a mind alive, such as it is.  I feel like that midsummer
+morning of our last drive out together, the sun high, clearish, clouded
+enough to be cool.  And still I envy Emmy on her sofa, mastering Latin,
+biting at Greek.  What a wise recommendation that was of Mr. Redworth's!
+He works well in the House.  He spoke excellently the other night.'
+
+'He runs over to Ireland this Easter.'
+
+'He sees for himself, and speaks with authority.  He sees and feels.
+Englishmen mean well, but they require an extremity of misery to waken
+their feelings.'
+
+'It is coming, he says; and absit omen!'
+
+'Mr. Dacier says he is the one Englishman who may always be sure of an
+Irish hearing; and he does not cajole them, you know.  But the English
+defect is really not want of feeling so much as want of foresight.  They
+will not look ahead.  A famine ceasing, a rebellion crushed, they jog on
+as before, with their Dobbin trot and blinker confidence in "Saxon
+energy."  They should study the Irish: I think it was Mr. Redworth who
+compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse: the
+rider should not grow restive when the steed begins to kick: calmer;
+firm, calm, persuasive.'
+
+'Does Mr. Dacier agree?'
+
+'Not always.  He has the inveterate national belief that Celtic blood
+is childish, and the consequently illogical disregard of its hold of
+impressions.  The Irish--for I have them in my heart, though I have not
+been among them for long at a time--must love you to serve you, and will
+hate you if you have done them injury and they have not wiped it out--
+they with a treble revenge, or you with cordial benefits.  I have told
+him so again and again: ventured to suggest measures.'
+
+'He listens to you, Tony?'
+
+'He says I have brains.  It ends in a compliment.'
+
+'You have inspired Mr. Redworth.'
+
+'If I have, I have lived for some good.'
+
+Altogether her Tony's conversation proved to Emma that her perusal of the
+model of THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE was an artist's, free, open, and not
+discoloured by the personal tincture.  Her heart plainly was free and
+undisturbed.  She had the same girl's love of her walks where wildflowers
+grew; if possible, a keener pleasure.  She hummed of her happiness in
+being at Copsley, singing her Planxty Kelly and The Puritani by turns.
+She stood on land: she was not on the seas.  Emma thought so with good
+reason.
+
+She stood on land, it was true, but she stood on a cliff of the land,
+the seas below and about her; and she was enabled to hoodwink her friend
+because the assured sensation of her firm footing deceived her own soul,
+even while it took short flights to the troubled waters.  Of her firm
+footing she was exultingly proud.  She stood high, close to danger,
+without giddiness.  If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning
+from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her),
+the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions
+of the mornings at Lugano--her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these
+reinforced her.  She did not ask herself why she should have to seek
+them for aid.  In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly
+covers, as the fiction of a perfect ignorant innocence combined with
+common intelligence would have us to suppose that the minds of women can
+do.  She was honest as long as she was not directly questioned, pierced
+to the innermost and sanctum of the bosom.  She could honestly summon
+bright light to her eyes in wishing the man were married.  She did not
+ask herself why she called it up.  The remorseless progressive
+interrogations of a Jesuit Father in pursuit of the bosom's verity might
+have transfixed it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as
+to the spirit, far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.
+
+Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that
+her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she
+considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for
+venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the
+literary market.  Her ANTONIA'S last book had been reviewed obediently
+to smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr.
+Whitmonby's choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.
+A Literary Review (Charles Rainer's property) had suggested that perhaps
+'the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly'; and another,
+actuated by the public taste of the period for our 'vigorous homely
+Saxon' in one and two syllable words, had complained of a 'tendency to
+polysyllabic phraseology.'  The remainder, a full majority, had sounded
+eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.
+Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a Queen
+when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are her
+dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and
+reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders,
+whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks.  They
+had fallen upon a little volume of verse, 'like a body of barn-door hens
+on a stranger chick,' Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily for
+letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author's
+behalf.  Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained
+to him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a shivering
+and welted poet.  He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter.  ANTONIA's
+literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and
+so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the
+smooth sailing of her costly household.  A merry-go-round of creditors
+required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.
+
+She felt mercenary, debased by comparison with the well-scourged verse-
+mason, Orpheus of the untenanted city, who had done his publishing
+ingenuously for glory: a good instance of the comic-pathetic.  She wrote
+to Emma, begging her to take him in at Copsley for a few days: 'I told
+you I had no troubles.  I am really troubled about this poor boy.  He has
+very little money and has embarked on literature.  I cannot induce any of
+my friends to lend him a hand.  Mr. Redworth gruffly insists on his going
+back to his law-clerk's office and stool, and Mr. Dacier says that no
+place is vacant.  The reality of Lord Dannisburgh's death is brought
+before me by my helplessness.  He would have made him an assistant
+private Secretary, pending a Government appointment, rather than let me
+plead in vain.'
+
+Mr. Rhodes with his travelling bag was packed off to Copsley, to enjoy a
+change of scene after his run of the gauntlet.  He was very heartily
+welcomed by Lady Dunstane, both for her Tony's sake and his own modest
+worship of that luminary, which could permit of being transparent; but
+chiefly she welcomed him as the living proof of Tony's disengagement
+from anxiety, since he was her one spot of trouble, and could easily be
+comforted by reading with her, and wandering through the Spring woods
+along the heights.  He had a happy time, midway in air between his
+accomplished hostess and his protecting Goddess.  His bruises were soon
+healed.  Each day was radiant to him, whether it rained or shone; and by
+his looks and what he said of himself Lady Dunstane understood that he
+was in the highest temper of the human creature tuned to thrilling accord
+with nature.  It was her generous Tony's work.  She blessed it, and liked
+the youth the better.
+
+During the stay of Mr. Arthur Rhodes at Copsley, Sir Lukin came on a
+visit to his wife.  He mentioned reports in the scandal-papers: one, that
+Mr. P. D.  would shortly lead to the altar the lovely heiress Miss A.,
+Percy Dacier and Constance Asper:--another, that a reconciliation was to
+be expected between the beautiful authoress Mrs. W. and her husband.
+'Perhaps it's the best thing she can do,' Sir Lukin added.
+
+Lady Dunstane pronounced a woman's unforgiving: 'Never.'  The revolt
+of her own sensations assured her of Tony's unconquerable repugnance.
+In conversation subsequently with Arthur Rhodes, she heard that he knew
+the son of Mr. Warwick's attorney, a Mr. Fern; and he had gathered from
+him some information of Mr. Warwick's condition of health.  It had been
+alarming; young Fern said it was confirmed heart-disease.  His father
+frequently saw Mr. Warwick, and said he was fretting himself to death.
+
+It seemed just a possibility that Tony's natural compassionateness had
+wrought on her to immolate herself and nurse to his end the man who had
+wrecked her life.  Lady Dunstane waited for the news.  At last she wrote,
+touching the report incidentally.  There was no reply.  The silence
+ensuing after such a question responded forcibly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER: THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
+
+On the third day of the Easter recess Percy Dacier landed from the Havre
+steamer at Caen and drove straightway for the sandy coast, past fields of
+colza to brine-blown meadows of coarse grass, and then to the low dunes
+and long stretching sands of the ebb in semicircle: a desolate place at
+that season; with a dwarf fishing-village by the shore; an East wind
+driving landward in streamers every object that had a scrap to fly.
+He made head to the inn, where the first person he encountered in the
+passage was Diana's maid Danvers, who relaxed from the dramatic
+exaggeration of her surprise at the sight of a real English gentleman in
+these woebegone regions, to inform him that her mistress might be found
+walking somewhere along the sea-shore, and had her dog to protect her.
+They were to stay here a whole week, Danvers added, for a conveyance of
+her private sentiments.  Second thoughts however whispered to her
+shrewdness that his arrival could only be by appointment.  She had been
+anticipating something of the sort for some time.
+
+Dacier butted against the stringing wind, that kept him at a rocking
+incline to his left for a mile.  He then discerned in what had seemed a
+dredger's dot on the sands, a lady's figure, unmistakably she, without
+the corroborating testimony of Leander paw-deep in the low-tide water.
+She was out at a distance on the ebb-sands, hurtled, gyred, beaten to all
+shapes, in rolls, twists, volumes, like a blown banner-flag, by the
+pressing wind.  A kerchief tied her bonnet under her chin.  Bonnet and
+breast-ribands rattled rapidly as drummer-sticks.  She stood near the
+little running ripple of the flat sea-water, as it hurried from a long
+streaked back to a tiny imitation of spray.  When she turned to the shore
+she saw him advancing, but did not recognize; when they met she merely
+looked with wide parted lips.  This was no appointment.
+
+'I had to see you,' Dacier said.
+
+She coloured to a deeper red than the rose-conjuring wind had whipped in
+her cheeks.  Her quick intuition of the reason of his coming barred a
+mental evasion, and she had no thought of asking either him or herself
+what special urgency had brought him.
+
+'I have been here four days.'
+
+'Lady Esquart spoke of the place.'
+
+'Lady Esquart should not have betrayed me.'
+
+'She did it inadvertently, without an idea of my profiting by it.'
+
+Diana indicated the scene in a glance.  'Dreary country, do you think?'
+
+'Anywhere!'--said he.
+
+They walked up the sand-heap.  The roaring Easter with its shrieks and
+whistles at her ribands was not favourable to speech.  His 'Anywhere!'
+had a penetrating significance, the fuller for the break that left it
+vague.
+
+Speech between them was commanded; he could not be suffered to remain.
+She descended upon a sheltered pathway running along a ditch, the border
+of pastures where cattle cropped, raised heads, and resumed their one
+comforting occupation.
+
+Diana gazed on them, smarting from the buffets of the wind she had met.
+
+'No play of their tails to-day'; she said, as she slackened her steps.
+'You left Lady Esquart well?'
+
+'Lady Esquart .  .  .  I think was well.  I had to see you.  I thought
+you would be with her in Berkshire.  She told me of a little sea-side
+place close to Caen.'
+
+'You had to see me?'
+
+'I miss you now if it's a day!'
+
+'I heard a story in London .  .  .'
+
+'In London there are many stories.  I heard one.  Is there a foundation
+for it?'
+
+'No.'
+
+He breathed relieved.  'I wanted to see you once before .  .  .  if it
+was true.  It would have made a change in my life-a gap.'
+
+'You do me the honour to like my Sunday evenings?'
+
+'Beyond everything London can offer.'
+
+'A letter would have reached me.'
+
+'I should have had to wait for the answer.  There is no truth in it?'
+
+Her choice was to treat the direct assailant frankly or imperil her
+defence by the ordinary feminine evolutions, which might be taken for
+inviting: poor pranks always.
+
+'There have been overtures,' she said.
+
+'Forgive me; I have scarcely the right to ask .  .  .  speak of it.!
+
+'My friends may use their right to take an interest in my fortunes.'
+
+'I thought I might, on my way to Paris, turn aside .  .  .  coming by
+this route.'
+
+'If you determined not to lose much of your time.'
+
+The coolness of her fencing disconcerted a gentleman conscious of his
+madness.  She took instant advantage of any circuitous move; she gave him
+no practicable point.  He was little skilled in the arts of attack, and
+felt that she checked his impetuousness; respected her for it, chafed at
+it, writhed with the fervours precipitating him here, and relapsed on his
+pleasure in seeing her face, hearing her voice.
+
+'Your happiness, I hope, is the chief thought in such a case,' he said.
+
+'I am sure you would consider it.'
+
+'I can't quite forget my own.'
+
+'You compliment an ambitious hostess.'
+
+Dacier glanced across the pastures, 'What was it that tempted you to this
+place?'
+
+'A poet would say it looks like a figure in the shroud.  It has no
+features; it has a sort of grandeur belonging to death.  I heard of it as
+the place where I might be certain of not meeting an acquaintance.'
+
+'And I am the intruder.'
+
+'An hour or two will not give you that title.'
+
+'Am I to count the minutes by my watch?'
+
+'By the sun.  We will supply you an omelette and piquette, and send you
+back sobered and friarly--to Caen for Paris at sunset.'
+
+'Let the fare be Spartan.  I could take my black broth with philosophy
+every day of the year under your auspices.  What I should miss .  .  .'
+
+'You bring no news of the world or the House?'
+
+'None.  You know as much as I know.  The Irish agitation is chronic.
+The Corn-law threatens to be the same.'
+
+'And your Chief--in personal colloquy?'
+
+'He keeps a calm front.  I may tell you: there is nothing I would not
+confide to you: he has let fall some dubious words in private.  I don't
+know what to think of them.'
+
+'But if he should waver?'
+
+'It's not wavering.  It's the openness of his mind.'
+
+'Ah! the mind.  We imagine it free.  The House and the country are the
+sentient frame governing the mind of the politician more than his ideas.
+He cannot think independently of them:--nor I of my natural anatomy.  You
+will test the truth of that after your omelette and piquette, and marvel
+at the quitting of your line of route for Paris.  As soon as the mind
+attempts to think independently, it is like a kite with the cord cut,
+and performs a series of darts and frisks, that have the look of wildest
+liberty till you see it fall flat to earth.  The openness of his mind is
+most honourable to him.'
+
+'Ominous for his party.'
+
+'Likely to be good for his country.'
+
+'That is the question.'
+
+'Prepare to encounter it.  In politics I am with the active minority on
+behalf of the inert but suffering majority.  That is my rule.  It leads,
+unless you have a despotism, to the conquering side.  It is always the
+noblest.  I won't say, listen to me; only do believe my words have some
+weight.  This is a question of bread.'
+
+'It involves many other questions.'
+
+'And how clearly those leaders put their case!  They are admirable
+debaters.  If I were asked to write against them, I should have but to
+quote them to confound my argument.  I tried it once, and wasted a couple
+of my precious hours.'
+
+'They are cogent debaters,' Dacier assented.  'They make me wince now and
+then, without convincing me: I own it to you.  The confession is not
+agreeable, though it's a small matter.'
+
+'One's pride may feel a touch with the foils as keenly as the point of a
+rapier,' said Diana.
+
+The remark drew a sharp look of pleasure from him.
+
+'Does the Princess Egeria propose to dismiss the individual she inspires,
+when he is growing most sensible of her wisdom?'
+
+'A young Minister of State should be gleaning at large when holiday is
+granted him.'
+
+Dacier coloured.  'May I presume on what is currently reported?'
+
+'Parts, parts; a bit here, a bit there,' she rejoined.  'Authors find
+their models where they can, and generally hit on the nearest.'
+
+'Happy the nearest!'
+
+'If you run to interjections I shall cite you a sentence, from your
+latest speech in the House.'
+
+He asked for it, and to school him she consented to flatter with her
+recollection of his commonest words:
+
+'"Dealing with subjects of this nature emotionally does, not advance us a
+calculable inch."'
+
+'I must have said that in relation to hard matter of business.'
+
+'It applies.  There is my hostelry, and the spectral form of Danvers,
+utterly depaysee.  Have you spoken to the poor soul?  I can never
+discover the links of her attachment to my service.'
+
+'She knows a good mistress.--I have but a few minutes, if you are
+relentless.  May I .  .  ., shall I ever be privileged to speak your
+Christian name?'
+
+'My Christian name!  It is Pagan.  In one sphere I am Hecate.  Remember
+that.'
+
+'I am not among the people who so regard you.'
+
+'The time may come.'
+
+'Diana!'
+
+'Constance!'
+
+'I break no tie.  I owe no allegiance whatever to the name.'
+
+'Keep to the formal title with me.  We are Mrs. Warwick and Mr. Dacier.
+I think I am two years younger than you; socially therefore ten in
+seniority; and I know how this flower of friendship is nourished and may
+be withered.  You see already what you have done?  You have cast me on
+the discretion of my maid.  I suppose her trusty, but I am at her mercy,
+and a breath from her to the people beholding me as Hecate queen of
+Witches!  .  .  .  I have a sensation of the scirocco it would blow.'
+
+'In that event, the least I can offer is my whole life.'
+
+'We will not conjecture the event.'
+
+'The best I could hope for!'
+
+'I see I shall have to revise the next edition of THE YOUNG MINISTER, and
+make an emotional curate of him.  Observe Danvers.  The woman is
+wretched; and now she sees me coming she pretends to be using her wits
+in studying the things about her, as I have directed.  She is a riddle.
+I have the idea that any morning she may explode; and yet I trust her and
+sleep soundly.  I must be free, though I vex the world's watchdogs.--So,
+Danvers, you are noticing how thoroughly Frenchwomen do their work.'
+
+Danvers replied with a slight mincing: 'They may, ma'am; but they chatter
+chatter so.'
+
+'The result proves that it is not a waste of energy.  They manage their
+fowls too.'
+
+'They've no such thing as mutton, ma'am.'
+
+Dacier patriotically laughed.
+
+'She strikes the apology for wealthy and leisurely landlords,' Diana
+said.
+
+Danvers remarked that the poor fed meagrely in France.  She was not
+convinced of its being good for them by hearing that they could work on
+it sixteen hours out of the four and twenty.
+
+Mr. Percy Dacier's repast was furnished to him half an hour later.  At
+sunset Diana, taking Danvers beside her, walked with him to the line of
+the country road bearing on Caen.  The wind had sunk.  A large brown disk
+paused rayless on the western hills.
+
+'A Dacier ought to feel at home in Normandy; and you may have sprung from
+this neighbourhood,' said she, simply to chat.  'Here the land is
+poorish, and a mile inland rich enough to bear repeated crops of colza,
+which tries the soil, I hear.  As for beauty, those blue hills you see,
+enfold charming valleys.  I meditate an expedition to Harcourt before I
+return.  An English professor of his native tongue at the Lycee at Caen
+told me on my way here that for twenty shillings a week you may live in
+royal ease round about Harcourt.  So we have our bed and board in
+prospect if fortune fails us, Danvers!
+
+'I would rather die in England, ma'am,' was the maid's reply.
+
+Dacier set foot on his carriage-step.  He drew a long breath to say a
+short farewell, and he and Diana parted.
+
+They parted as the plainest of sincere good friends, each at heart
+respecting the other for the repression of that which their hearts
+craved; any word of which might have carried them headlong, bound
+together on a Mazeppa-race, with scandal for the hounding wolves, and
+social ruin for the rocks and torrents.
+
+Dacier was the thankfuller, the most admiring of the two; at the same
+time the least satisfied.  He saw the abyss she had aided him in
+escaping; and it was refreshful to look abroad after his desperate
+impulse.  Prominent as he stood before the world, he could not think
+without a shudder of behaving like a young frenetic of the passion.
+Those whose aim is at the leadership of the English people know, that
+however truly based the charges of hypocrisy, soundness of moral fibre
+runs throughout the country and is the national integrity, which may
+condone old sins for present service; but will not have present sins to
+flout it.  He was in tune with the English character.  The passion was in
+him nevertheless, and the stronger for a slow growth that confirmed its
+union of the mind and heart.  Her counsel fortified him, her suggestions
+opened springs; her phrases were golden-lettered in his memory; and more,
+she had worked an extraordinary change in his views of life and aptitude
+for social converse: he acknowledged it with genial candour.  Through her
+he was encouraged, led, excited to sparkle with the witty, feel new
+gifts, or a greater breadth of nature; and thanking her, he became
+thirstily susceptible to her dark beauty; he claimed to have found the
+key of her, and he prized it.  She was not passionless: the blood flowed
+warm.  Proud, chaste, she was nobly spirited; having an intellectual
+refuge from the besiegings of the blood; a rockfortress.  The 'wife no
+wife' appeared to him, striking the higher elements of the man, the
+commonly masculine also.--Would he espouse her, had he the chance?--
+to-morrow! this instant!  With her to back him, he would be doubled in
+manhood, doubled in brain and heart-energy.  To call her wife, spring
+from her and return, a man might accept his fate to fight Trojan or
+Greek, sure of his mark on the enemy.
+
+But if, after all, this imputed Helen of a decayed Paris passed,
+submissive to the legitimate solicitor, back to her husband?
+
+The thought shot Dacier on his legs for a look at the blank behind him.
+He vowed she had promised it should not be.  Could it ever be, after
+the ruin the meanly suspicious fellow had brought upon her?--Diana
+voluntarily reunited to the treacherous cur?
+
+He sat, resolving sombrely that if the debate arose he would try what
+force he had to save her from such an ignominy, and dedicate his life to
+her, let the world wag its tongue.  So the knot would be cut.
+
+Men unaccustomed to a knot in their system find the prospect of cutting
+it an extreme relief, even when they know that the cut has an edge to
+wound mortally as well as pacify.  The wound was not heavy payment for
+the rapture of having so incomparable a woman his own.  He reflected
+wonderingly on the husband, as he had previously done, and came again to
+the conclusion that it was a poor creature, abjectly jealous of a wife,
+he could neither master, nor equal, nor attract.  And thinking of
+jealousy, Dacier felt none; none of individuals, only of facts: her
+marriage, her bondage.  Her condemnation to perpetual widowhood angered
+him, as at an unrighteous decree.  The sharp sweet bloom of her beauty,
+fresh in swarthiness, under the whipping Easter, cried out against that
+loathed inhumanity.  Or he made it cry.
+
+Being a stranger to the jealousy of men, he took the soft assurance that
+he was preferred above them all.  Competitors were numerous: not any won
+her eyes as he did.  She revealed nothing of the same pleasures in the
+shining of the others touched by her magical wand.  Would she have
+pardoned one of them the 'Diana!' bursting from his mouth?
+
+She was not a woman for trifling, still less for secresy.  He was as
+little the kind of lover.  Both would be ready to take up their burden,
+if the burden was laid on them.  Diana had thus far impressed him.
+
+Meanwhile he faced the cathedral towers of the ancient Norman city,
+standing up in the smoky hues of the West; and a sentence out of her book
+seemed fitting to the scene and what he felt.  He rolled it over
+luxuriously as the next of delights to having her beside him.--She wrote
+of; 'Thoughts that are bare dark outlines, coloured by some odd passion
+of the soul, like towers of a distant city seen in the funeral waste of
+day.'--His bluff English anti-poetic training would have caused him to
+shrug at the stuff coming from another pen: he might condescendingly have
+criticized it, with a sneer embalmed in humour.  The words were hers; she
+had written them; almost by a sort of anticipation, he imagined; for he
+at once fell into the mood they suggested, and had a full crop of the
+'bare dark outlines' of thoughts coloured by his particular form of
+passion.
+
+Diana had impressed him powerfully when she set him swallowing and
+assimilating a sentence ethereally thin in substance of mere sentimental
+significance, that he would antecedently have read aloud in a drawing-
+room, picking up the book by hazard, as your modern specimen of romantic
+vapouring.  Mr. Dacier however was at the time in observation of the
+towers of Caen, fresh from her presence, animated to some conception of
+her spirit.  He drove into the streets, desiring, half determining, to
+risk a drive back on the morrow.
+
+The cold light of the morrow combined with his fear of distressing her to
+restrain him.  Perhaps he thought it well not to risk his gains.  He was
+a northerner in blood.  He may have thought it well not further to run
+the personal risk immediately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
+
+Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected.  Percy Dacier as
+the model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed.  Could she
+otherwise have dared to sketch him?  She certainly would not have done
+it now.
+
+That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has
+dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where
+caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple self-
+preservation.  How could she have been induced to study and portray him!
+It seemed a form of dementia.
+
+She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her.  When
+she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore,
+that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her
+sex.  Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.
+Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the
+bubbling crystal play.  She believed that a divineness had wakened in her
+there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her
+sex's culprit blushing.
+
+Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the
+excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously
+footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to
+safety.  Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not
+spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights.  But she had
+now to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude.  And watchful of
+herself as well.  That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it
+from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the voluntary-
+acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an individual
+exemption.  'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and unlike
+them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the prudence of
+guarded steps, I am armed.  It is by dissembling, feigning immunity, that
+we are imperilled.'  She would have phrased it so, with some anger at her
+feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on her by
+circumstances.
+
+Besides, her position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into
+remoteness.  The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge;
+and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him
+down for an offence.  She saw their situation as he did.  The course of
+folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded her to
+the reptiles.
+
+This was faced.  Consequently there was no fear of it.
+
+She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to
+keep him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet.  A little
+outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the
+froth of a passing wave.  Men have the trick, infants their fevers.
+
+Diana's days were spent in reasoning.  Her nights were not so tuneable to
+the superior mind.  When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced
+her into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for
+the wise-eyed and anxious morning.  She solved them with the thought that
+in sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her
+tormentors; awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear.  Gradually
+the persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.
+
+A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no
+grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her
+household had resumed its customary round.
+
+She examined her accounts.  The Debit and Credit sides presented much of
+the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization.  They
+matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the
+leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which
+deepened the blush of the comparison.  Her father had noticed the same
+funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for
+a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly
+frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim
+gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with
+her.  'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in
+step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.
+
+Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first
+reckoning.  But his ways were curious.  She grew distrustful of him,
+after dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of
+ambush bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to
+pass as an honourable citizen.  His answer to her reproaches pleaded the
+necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and
+Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen
+the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the
+world's idea of fitness in couples.  She would have costly furniture,
+because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in
+justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners;
+flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the
+rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the
+good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she
+loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings,
+Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and
+desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with
+antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European
+upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time,
+mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors;
+her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in
+aerial draperies.  Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills.
+Credit was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on
+positively: her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The
+Crossways: the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to
+some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud
+of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen,
+at a murmur of dissatisfaction.  His compliments were sincere; they were
+seductive.  He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an
+inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double
+her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of
+success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden.  Behold how it
+sparkles!  Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of
+courage to realize the riches we can command?  Debit was eloquent, he was
+unanswerable.
+
+Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous
+arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing
+of the outlay of Diana's establishment, as to its chances of swamping the
+income.  Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if
+his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages.  He knew nothing
+of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a
+beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader.  He fancied however, in
+his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several
+editions, had come to an El Dorado.  There was the mine.  It required a
+diligent worker.  Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when
+her next book might be expected.  He appeared to have an eagerness in
+hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble
+writer.  His flattering impatience was vexatious.  He admired her work,
+yet he did his utmost to render it little admirable.  His literary taste
+was not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters,
+appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies: she
+suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her
+exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author's lofty mind
+disdained such sordidness: to be excused, possibly, for a failing
+productive energy.  She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.
+With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a
+sentence to muse, and not on the subject.  She slept unevenly at night,
+was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating
+friends.  Redworth's urgency to get her to publish was particularly
+annoying when she felt how greatly THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE would
+have been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish,
+re-write passages, perfect it.  Her musings embraced long dialogues of
+that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory;
+leaving a distaste for her present work: THE CANTATRICE: far more
+poetical than the preceding, in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the
+story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the
+musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles
+Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman.  Diana
+had courted her, studied and liked her.  The picture she was drawing of
+the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of
+the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion;
+but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her
+CANTATRICE would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it.
+No clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-
+breadth 'scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine
+shrieks of the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no
+distinguishable points of social satire--equivalent to a smacking of the
+public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of
+the author's intention.  She did not appeal to the senses nor to a
+superficial discernment.  So she had the anticipatory sense of its
+failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote
+slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the
+downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her
+story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural
+links between our public and an author.  Her feelings were aloof.  They
+flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER.  She could not put
+them into THE CANTATRICE.  And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work
+poetical beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief
+characters were alive and the reader felt their pulses.  He meant
+to say, they were poetical inasmuch as they were creations.
+
+The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings
+necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting
+in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent
+couple.  To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana
+reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was
+to receive, and the act increased her distaste.  An idea came that she
+would soon cease to be able to write at all.  What then?  Perhaps by
+selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have
+enough for her term upon earth.  Necessarily she had to think that short,
+in order to reckon it as nearly enough.  'I am sure,' she said to
+herself, 'I shall not trouble the world very long.'  A strange languor
+beset her; scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of
+life and added to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had
+been left by the stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep
+along and away, while the sun that primed them dried her veins.  At this
+time she was gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit.  Only
+to welcome guests were her evenings ever spent at home.  She had no
+intimate understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman
+with her nature which she was undergoing below the surface.  Perplexities
+she acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness.  'But as I am sure not
+to live very long, we may as well meet.'  Her meetings with Percy Dacier
+were therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to
+discountenance them.  It would have been cruel to exclude him from her
+select little dinners of eight.  Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and
+the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art.
+She heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto
+a mere politician, was wonderfully humanized.  Lady Pennon fell to
+talking of him hopefully.  She declared him to be one of the men who
+unfold tardily, and only await the mastering passion.  If the passion had
+come, it was controlled.  His command of himself melted Diana.  How could
+she forbid his entry to the houses she frequented?  She was glad to see
+him.  He showed his pleasure in seeing her.  Remembering his tentative
+indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been
+easily checked: and the like was not to be said of some others.
+Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts
+touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer.  Her
+'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their
+fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive.  She bore with
+them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the
+contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a
+depth of passion .  .  .  .
+
+She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble 'she experienced,
+without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of
+Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed.  Mary Paynham
+brought her the news.  She had it from a lady who had come across Miss
+Asper at Lady Wathin's assemblies, and considered the great heiress
+extraordinarily handsome.
+
+'A golden miracle,' Diana gave her words to say.  'Good looks and gold
+together are rather superhuman.  The report may be this time true.'
+Next afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant
+her a private interview.
+
+Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy
+cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her
+mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay
+dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity.  They touched
+fingers and sat.  The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were
+brief between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too
+scornful of subterfuges in one another's presence to beat the bush.
+
+Lady Wathin began.  'I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your
+friend Lady Dunstane.'
+
+'You come to me on business?' Diana said.
+
+'It may be so termed.  I have no personal interest in it.  I come to lay
+certain facts before you which I think you should know.  We think it
+better that an acquaintance, and one of your sex, should state the case
+to you, instead of having recourse to formal intermediaries, lawyers--'
+
+'Lawyers?'
+
+'Well, my husband is a lawyer, it is true.  In the course of his
+professional vocations he became acquainted with Mr. Warwick.  We have
+latterly seen a good deal of him.  He is, I regret to say, seriously
+unwell.'
+
+'I have heard of it.'
+
+'He has no female relations, it appears.  He needs more care than he can
+receive from hirelings.'
+
+'Are you empowered by him, Lady Wathin?'
+
+'I am, Mrs. Warwick.  We will not waste time in apologies.  He is most
+anxious for a reconciliation.  It seems to Sir Cramborne and to me the
+most desireable thing for all parties concerned, if you can be induced to
+regard it in that light.  Mr. Warwick may or may not live; but the
+estrangement is quite undoubtedly the cause of his illness.  I touch on
+nothing connected with it.  I simply wish that you should not be in
+ignorance of his proposal and his condition.'
+
+Diana bowed calmly.  'I grieve at his condition.  His proposal has
+already been made and replied to.'
+
+'Oh, but, Mrs. Warwick, an immediate and decisive refusal of a proposal
+so fraught with consequences .  .  .  !'
+
+'Ah, but, Lady Wathin, you are now outstepping the limits prescribed by
+the office you have undertaken.'
+
+'You will not lend ear to an intercession?'
+
+'I will not.'
+
+'Of course, Mrs. Warwick, it is not for me to hint at things that lawyers
+could say on the subject.'
+
+'Your forbearance is creditable, Lady Wathin.'
+
+'Believe me, Mrs. Warwick, the step is--I speak in my husband's name as
+well as my own--strongly to be advised.'
+
+'If I hear one word more of it, I leave the country.'
+
+'I should be sorry indeed at any piece of rashness depriving your
+numerous friends of your society.  We have recently become acquainted
+with Mr. Redworth, and I know the loss you would be to them.  I have not
+attempted an appeal to your feelings, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'I thank you warmly, Lady Wathin, for what you have not done.'
+
+The aristocratic airs of Mrs. Warwick were annoying to Lady Wathin when
+she considered that they were borrowed, and that a pattern morality could
+regard the woman as ostracized: nor was it agreeable to be looked at
+through eyelashes under partially lifted brows.  She had come to appeal
+to the feelings of the wife; at any rate, to discover if she had some and
+was better than a wild adventuress.
+
+'Our life below is short!' she said.  To which Diana tacitly assented.
+
+'We have our little term, Mrs. Warwick.  It is soon over.'
+
+'On the other hand, the platitudes concerning it are eternal.'
+
+Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on
+her ears.  'Ah! they are the truths.  But it is not my business to
+preach.  Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.'
+
+'I am glad of Mr. Warwick's having friends; and they are many, I hope.'
+
+'They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.'
+
+A chasm of silence intervened.  Wifely pity was not sounded in it.
+
+'He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.'
+
+'Would you--it is your husband's most earnest wish; and our house is open
+to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that .  .  .
+indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:--would
+you consent to meet him at my house?'
+
+'It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.'
+
+'But at my house-under our auspices!'
+
+Diana glanced at the clock.  'Nowhere.'
+
+'Is it not--pardon me--a wife's duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?'
+
+'Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.'
+
+'In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present,
+Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife!  It
+may preclude so much.'
+
+Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.
+
+She smiled and said: 'Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission
+that must have been unpleasant to you.'
+
+'But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not?  Give me that
+assurance!'
+
+'I shall not forget it,' said Diana.
+
+Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social
+grimace of cordiality.  A few words of compassion for poor Lady
+Dunstane's invalided state covered Lady Wathin's retreat.
+
+She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any
+husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only
+she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy
+Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not
+quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined,
+it would have soothed her exasperation.
+
+She left a woman the prey of panic.
+
+Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition
+to save her character and keep her bound.  She might now have been free!
+The struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness,
+from which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape;
+an abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her
+refuge, but a hectic place.
+
+Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these
+attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake,
+and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave's name
+she bore, and living free in spirit.  She went so far as to reckon the
+cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an
+exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure.  She had
+but to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut!  One morning on the
+Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and
+entangling her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
+
+The month was August, four days before the closing of Parliament, and
+Diana fancied it good for Arthur Rhodes to run down with her to Copsley.
+He came to her invitation joyfully, reminding her of Lady Dunstane's wish
+to hear some chapters of THE CANTATRICE, and the MS. was packed.  They
+started, taking rail and fly, and winding up the distance on foot.
+August is the month of sober maturity and majestic foliage, songless, but
+a crowned and royal-robed queenly month; and the youngster's appreciation
+of the homely scenery refreshed Diana; his delight in being with her was
+also pleasant.  She had no wish to exchange him for another; and that was
+a strengthening thought.
+
+At Copsley the arrival of their luggage had prepared the welcome.  Warm
+though it was, Diana perceived a change in Emma, an unwonted reserve,
+a doubtfulness of her eyes, in spite of tenderness; and thus thrown back
+on herself, thinking that if she had followed her own counsel (as she
+called her impulse) in old days, there would have been no such present
+misery, she at once, and unconsciously, assumed a guarded look.  Based on
+her knowledge of her honest footing, it was a little defiant.  Secretly
+in her bosom it was sharpened to a slight hostility by the knowledge that
+her mind had been straying.  The guilt and the innocence combined to
+clothe her in mail, the innocence being positive, the guilt so vapoury.
+But she was armed only if necessary, and there was no requirement for
+armour.  Emma did not question at all.  She saw the alteration in her
+Tony: she was too full of the tragic apprehensiveness, overmastering her
+to speak of trifles.  She had never confided to Tony the exact nature and
+the growth of her malady, thinking it mortal, and fearing to alarm her
+dearest.
+
+A portion of the manuscript was read out by Arthur Rhodes in the evening;
+the remainder next morning.  Redworth perceptibly was the model of the
+English hero; and as to his person, no friend could complain of the
+sketch; his clear-eyed heartiness, manliness, wholesomeness--a word of
+Lady Dunstane's regarding him,--and his handsome braced figure, were well
+painted.  Emma forgave the: insistance on a certain bluntness of the
+nose, in consideration of the fond limning of his honest and expressive
+eyes, and the 'light on his temples,' which they had noticed together.
+She could not so easily forgive the realistic picture of the man: an
+exaggeration, she thought, of small foibles, that even if they existed,
+should not have been stressed.  The turn for 'calculating' was shown up
+ridiculously; Mr. Cuthbert Dering was calculating in his impassioned
+moods as well as in his cold.  His head was a long division of ciphers.
+He had statistics for spectacles, and beheld the world through them, and
+the mistress he worshipped.
+
+'I see,' said Emma, during a pause; 'he is a Saxon.  You still affect to
+have the race en grippe, Tony.'
+
+'I give him every credit for what he is,' Diana replied.  'I admire the
+finer qualities of the race as much as any one.  You want to have them
+presented to you in enamel, Emmy.'
+
+But the worst was an indication that the mania for calculating in and
+out of season would lead to the catastrophe destructive of his happiness.
+Emma could not bear that.  Without asking herself whether it could be
+possible that Tony knew the secret, or whether she would have laid it
+bare, her sympathy for Redworth revolted at the exposure.  She was
+chilled.  She let it pass; she merely said: 'I like the writing.'
+
+Diana understood that her story was condemned.
+
+She put on her robes of philosophy to cloak discouragement.  'I am glad
+the writing pleases you.'
+
+'The characters are as true as life!' cried Arthur Rhodes.  'The
+Cantatrice drinking porter from the pewter at the slips after harrowing
+the hearts of her audience, is dearer to me than if she had tottered to a
+sofa declining sustenance; and because her creatrix has infused such
+blood of life into her that you accept naturally whatever she does.  She
+was exhausted, and required the porter, like a labourer in the
+cornfield.'
+
+Emma looked at him, and perceived the poet swamped by the admirer.  Taken
+in conjunction with Mr. Cuthbert Dering's frenzy for calculating, she
+disliked the incident of the porter and the pewter.
+
+'While the Cantatrice swallowed her draught, I suppose Mr. Dering counted
+the cost?' she said.
+
+'It really might be hinted,' said Diana.
+
+The discussion closed with the accustomed pro and con upon the wart of
+Cromwell's nose, Realism rejoicing in it, Idealism objecting.
+
+Arthur Rhodes was bidden to stretch his legs on a walk along the heights
+in the afternoon, and Emma was further vexed by hearing Tony complain of
+Redworth's treatment of the lad, whom he would not assist to any of the
+snug little posts he was notoriously able to dispense.
+
+'He has talked of Mr. Rhodes to me,' said Emma.  'He thinks the
+profession of literature a delusion, and doubts the wisdom of having
+poets for clerks.'
+
+'John-Bullish!' Diana exclaimed.  'He speaks contemptuously of the poor
+boy.'
+
+'Only inasmuch as the foolishness of the young man in throwing up the Law
+provokes his practical mind to speak.'
+
+'He might take my word for the "young man's" ability.  I want him to have
+the means of living, that he may write.  He has genius.'
+
+'He may have it.  I like him, and have said so.  If he were to go back to
+his law-stool, I have no doubt that Redworth would manage to help him.'
+
+'And make a worthy ancient Braddock of a youth of splendid promise!  Have
+I sketched him too Saxon?'
+
+'It is the lens, and hot the tribe, Tony.'
+
+THE CANTATRICE was not alluded to any more; but Emma's disapproval
+blocked the current of composition, already subject to chokings in the
+brain of the author.  Diana stayed three days at Copsley, one longer than
+she had intended, so that Arthur Rhodes might have his fill of country
+air.
+
+'I would keep him, but I should be no companion for him,' Emma said.
+
+'I suspect the gallant squire is only to be satisfied by landing me
+safely,' said Diana, and that small remark grated, though Emma saw the
+simple meaning.  When they parted, she kissed her Tony many times.  Tears
+were in her eyes.  It seemed to Diana that she was anxious to make amends
+for the fit of alienation, and she was kissed in return warmly, quite
+forgiven, notwithstanding the deadly blank she had caused in the
+imagination of the writer for pay, distracted by the squabbles of Debit
+and Credit.
+
+Diana chatted spiritedly to young Rhodes on their drive to the train.
+She was profoundly discouraged by Emma's disapproval of her work.  It
+wanted but that one drop to make a recurrence to the work impossible.
+There it must lie!  And what of the aspects of her household?--Perhaps,
+after all, the Redworths of the world are right, and Literature as a
+profession is a delusive pursuit.  She did not assent to it without
+hostility to the world's Redworths.--'They have no sensitiveness, we have
+too much.  We are made of bubbles that a wind will burst, and as the wind
+is always blowing, your practical Redworths have their crow of us.'
+
+She suggested advice to Arthur Rhodes upon the prudence of his resuming
+the yoke of the Law.
+
+He laughed at such a notion, saying that he had some expectations of
+money to come.
+
+'But I fear,' said he, 'that Lady Dunstane is very very ill.  She begged
+me to keep her informed of your address.'
+
+Diana told him he was one of those who should know it whithersoever she
+went.  She spoke impulsively, her sentiments of friendliness for the
+youth being temporarily brightened by the strangeness of Emma's conduct
+in deputing it to him to fulfil a duty she had never omitted.  'What can
+she think I am going to do!'
+
+On her table at home lay, a letter from Mr. Warwick.  She read it hastily
+in the presence of Arthur Rhodes, having at a glance at the handwriting
+anticipated the proposal it contained and the official phrasing.
+
+Her gallant squire was invited to dine with her that evening, costume
+excused.
+
+They conversed of Literature as a profession, of poets dead and living,
+of politics, which he abhorred and shied at, and of his prospects.  He
+wrote many rejected pages, enjoyed an income of eighty pounds per annum,
+and eked out a subsistence upon the modest sum his pen procured him; a
+sum extremely insignificant; but great Nature was his own, the world was
+tributary to him, the future his bejewelled and expectant bride.  Diana
+envied his youthfulness.  Nothing is more enviable, nothing richer to the
+mind, than the aspect of a cheerful poverty.  How much nobler it was,
+contrasted with Redworth's amassing of wealth!
+
+When alone, she went to her bedroom and tried to write, tried to sleep.
+Mr. Warwick's letter was looked at.  It seemed to indicate a threat; but
+for the moment it did not disturb her so much as the review of her moral
+prostration.  She wrote some lines to her lawyers, quoting one of Mr.
+Warwick's sentences.  That done, his letter was dismissed.  Her
+intolerable languor became alternately a defeating drowsiness and a
+fever.  She succeeded in the effort to smother the absolute cause: it was
+not suffered to show a front; at the cost of her knowledge of a practised
+self-deception.  'I wonder whether the world is as bad as a certain class
+of writers tell us!' she sighed in weariness, and mused on their
+soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts for the
+very bottom truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the
+abominable.  The world imagines those to be at our nature's depths who
+are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows.  She was in the mood
+for such a kind of writing: she could have started on it at once but that
+the theme was wanting; and it may count on popularity, a great repute for
+penetration.  It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is
+the miry form of art.  When it flourishes we may be assured we have been
+overenamelling the higher forms.  She felt, and shuddered to feel, that
+she could draw from dark stores.  Hitherto in her works it had been a
+triumph of the good.  They revealed a gaping deficiency of the subtle
+insight she now possessed.  'Exhibit humanity as it is, wallowing,
+sensual, wicked, behind the mask,' a voice called to her; she was allured
+by the contemplation of the wide-mouthed old dragon Ego, whose portrait,
+decently painted, establishes an instant touch of exchange between author
+and public, the latter detected and confessing.  Next to the pantomime of
+Humour and Pathos, a cynical surgical knife at the human bosom seems the
+surest talisman for this agreeable exchange; and she could cut.  She gave
+herself a taste of her powers.  She cut at herself mercilessly, and had
+to bandage the wound in a hurry to keep in life.
+
+Metaphors were her refuge.  Metaphorically she could allow her mind to
+distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it.  The
+banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the common use of them has
+helped largely to civilize us.  The sluggish in intellect detest them,
+but our civilization is not much indebted to that major faction.
+Especially are they needed by the pedestalled woman in her conflict with
+the natural.  Diana saw herself through the haze she conjured up.  'Am I
+worse than other women?' was a piercing twithought.  Worse, would be
+hideous isolation.  The not worse, abased her sex.  She could afford to
+say that the world was bad: not that women were.
+
+Sinking deeper, an anguish of humiliation smote her to a sense of
+drowning.  For what of the poetic ecstasy on her Salvatore heights had
+not been of origin divine?  had sprung from other than spiritual founts?
+had sprung from the reddened sources she was compelled to conceal?  Could
+it be?  She would not believe it.  But there was matter to clip her
+wings, quench her light, in the doubt.
+
+She fell asleep like the wrecked flung ashore.
+
+Danvers entered her room at an early hour for London to inform her that
+Mr. Percy Dacier was below, and begged permission to wait.
+
+Diana gave orders for breakfast to be proposed to him.  She lay staring
+at the wall until it became too visibly a reflection of her mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
+
+The suspicion of his having come to impart the news of his proximate
+marriage ultimately endowed her with sovereign calmness.  She had need to
+think it, and she did.  Tea was brought to her while she dressed; she
+descended the stairs revolving phrases of happy congratulation and the
+world's ordinary epigrams upon the marriage-tie, neatly mixed.
+
+They read in one another's faces a different meaning from the empty words
+of excuse and welcome.  Dacier's expressed the buckling of a strong set
+purpose; but, grieved by the look of her eyes, he wasted a moment to say:
+'You have not slept.  You have heard .  .  . ?'
+
+'What?' said she, trying to speculate; and that was a sufficient answer.
+
+'I hadn't the courage to call last night; I passed the windows.  Give me
+your hand, I beg.'
+
+She gave her hand in wonderment, and more wonderingly felt it squeezed.
+Her heart began the hammerthump.  She spoke an unintelligible something;
+saw herself melting away to utter weakness-pride, reserve, simple
+prudence, all going; crumbled ruins where had stood a fortress imposing
+to men.  Was it love?  Her heart thumped shiveringly.
+
+He kept her hand, indifferent to the gentle tension.
+
+'This is the point: I cannot live without you: I have gone on .  .  .
+Who was here last night?  Forgive me.'
+
+'You know Arthur Rhodes.'
+
+'I saw him leave the door at eleven.  Why do you torture me?  There's no
+time to lose now.  You will be claimed.  Come, and let us two cut the
+knot.  It is the best thing in the world for me--the only thing.  Be
+brave!  I have your hand.  Give it for good, and for heaven's sake don't
+play the sex.  Be yourself.  Dear soul of a woman!  I never saw the soul
+in one but in you.  I have waited: nothing but the dread of losing you
+sets me speaking now.  And for you to be sacrificed a second time to
+that--!  Oh, no!  You know you can trust me.  On my honour, I take breath
+from you.  You are my better in everything--guide, goddess, dearest
+heart!  Trust me; make me master of your fate.'
+
+'But my friend!' the murmur hung in her throat.  He was marvellously
+transformed; he allowed no space for the arts of defence and evasion.
+
+'I wish I had the trick of courting.  There's not time; and I 'm a
+simpleton at the game.  We can start this evening.  Once away, we leave
+it to them to settle the matter, and then you are free, and mine to the
+death.'
+
+'But speak, speak!  What is it?' Diana said.
+
+'That if we delay, I 'm in danger of losing you altogether.'
+
+Her eyes lightened: 'You mean that you have heard he has determined--?'
+
+'There's a process of the law.  But stop it.  Just this one step, and it
+ends.  Whether intended or not, it hangs over you, and you will be
+perpetually tormented.  Why waste your whole youth?--and mine as well!
+For I am bound to you as much as if we had stood at the altar--where we
+will stand together the instant you are free.'
+
+'But where have you heard .  .  .?
+
+'From an intimate friend.  I will tell you--sufficiently intimate--from
+Lady Wathin.  Nothing of a friend, but I see this woman at times.  She
+chose to speak of it to me it doesn't matter why.  She is in his
+confidence, and pitched me a whimpering tale.  Let those people chatter.
+But it 's exactly for those people that you are hanging in chains, all
+your youth shrivelling.  Let them shout their worst!  It's the bark of a
+day; and you won't hear it; half a year, and it will be over, and I shall
+bring you back--the husband of the noblest bride in Christendom!  You
+don't mistrust me?'
+
+'It is not that,' said she.  'But now drop my hand.  I am imprisoned.'
+
+'It's asking too much.  I've lost you--too many times.  I have the hand
+and I keep it.  I take nothing but the hand.  It's the hand I want.
+I give you mine.  I love you.  Now I know what love is!--and the word
+carries nothing of its weight.  Tell me you do not doubt my honour.'
+
+'Not at all.  But be rational.  I must think, and I cannot while you keep
+my hand.'
+
+He kissed it.  'I keep my own against the world.'
+
+A cry of rebuke swelled to her lips at his conqueror's tone.  It was not
+uttered, for directness was in his character and his wooing loyal--save
+for bitter circumstances, delicious to hear; and so narrow was the ring
+he had wound about her senses, that her loathing of the circumstances
+pushed her to acknowledge within her bell of a heart her love for him.
+
+He was luckless enough to say: 'Diana!'
+
+It rang horridly of her husband.  She drew her hand to loosen it, with
+repulsing brows.  'Not that name!'
+
+Dacier was too full of his honest advocacy of the passionate lover to
+take a rebuff.  There lay his unconscious mastery, where the common arts
+of attack would have tripped him with a quick-witted woman, and where a
+man of passion, not allowing her to succumb in dignity, would have
+alarmed her to the breaking loose from him.
+
+'Lady Dunstane calls you Tony.'
+
+'She is my dearest and oldest friend.'
+
+'You and I don't count by years.  You are the dearest to me on earth,
+Tony!'
+
+She debated as to forbidding that name.
+
+The moment's pause wrapped her in a mental hurricane, out of which she
+came with a heart stopped, her olive cheeks ashen-hued.  She had seen
+that the step was possible.
+
+'Oh!  Percy, Percy, are we mad?'
+
+'Not mad.  We take what is ours.  Tell me, have I ever, ever disrespected
+you?  You were sacred to me; and you are, though now the change has come.
+Look back on it--it is time lost, years that are dust.  But look forward,
+and you cannot imagine our separation.  What I propose is plain sense for
+us two.  Since Rovio, I have been at your feet.  Have I not some just
+claim for recompense?  Tell me! Tony!'
+
+The sweetness of the secret name, the privileged name, in his mouth stole
+through her blood, melting resistance.
+
+She had consented.  The swarthy flaming of her face avowed it even more
+than the surrender of her hand.  He gained much by claiming little: he
+respected her, gave her no touches of fright and shame; and it was her
+glory to fall with pride.  An attempt at a caress would have awakened her
+view of the whitherward: but she was treated as a sovereign lady
+rationally advised.
+
+'Is it since Rovio, Percy?'
+
+'Since the morning when you refused me one little flower.'
+
+'If I had given it, you might have been saved!'
+
+'I fancy I was doomed from the beginning.'
+
+'I was worth a thought?'
+
+'Worth a life! worth ten thousand!'
+
+'You have reckoned it all like a sane man:--family, position, the world,
+the scandal?'
+
+'All.  I have long known that you were the mate for me.  You have to
+weather a gale, Tony.  It won't last.  My dearest!  it won't last many
+months.  I regret the trial for you, but I shall be with you, burning for
+the day to reinstate you and show you the queen you are.'
+
+'Yes, we two can have no covert dealings, Percy,' said Diana.  They would
+be hateful--baseness!  Rejecting any baseness, it seemed to her that she
+stood in some brightness.  The light was of a lurid sort.  She called on
+her heart to glory in it as the light of tried love, the love that defied
+the world.  Her heart rose.  She and he would at a single step give proof
+of their love for one another--and this kingdom of love--how different
+from her recent craven languors!--this kingdom awaited her, was hers for
+one word; and beset with the oceans of enemies, it was unassailable.  If
+only they were true to the love they vowed, no human force could subvert
+it: and she doubted him as little as of herself.  This new kingdom of
+love, never entered by her, acclaiming her, was well-nigh unimaginable,
+in spite of the many hooded messengers it had despatched to her of late.
+She could hardly believe that it had come.
+
+'But see me as I am,' she said; she faltered it through her direct gaze
+on him.
+
+'With chains to strike off?  Certainly; it is done,' he replied.
+
+'Rather heavier than those of the slave-market!  I am the deadest of
+burdens.  It means that your enemies, personal--if you have any, and
+political--you have numbers; will raise a cry .  .  .  .  Realize it.
+You may still be my friend.  I forgive the bit of wildness.'
+
+She provoked a renewed kissing of her hand; for magnammity in love is
+an overflowing danger; and when he said: 'The burden you have to bear
+outweighs mine out of all comparison.  What is it to a man--a public man
+or not!  The woman is always the victim.  That's why I have held myself
+in so long:--her strung frame softened.  She half yielded to the tug on
+her arm.
+
+'Is there no talking for us without foolishness?' she murmured.  The
+foolishness had wafted her to sea, far from sight of land.  'Now sit, and
+speak soberly.  Discuss the matter.--Yes, my hand, but I must have my
+wits.  Leave me free to use them till we choose our path.  Let it be the
+brains between us, as far as it can.  You ask me to join my fate to
+yours.  It signifies a sharp battle for you, dear friend; perhaps the
+blighting of the most promising life in England.  One question is, can I
+countervail the burden I shall be, by such help to you as I can afford?
+Burden, is no word--I rake up a buried fever.  I have partially lived it
+down, and instantly I am covered with spots.  The old false charges and
+this plain offence make a monster of me.'
+
+'And meanwhile you are at the disposal of the man who falsely charged you
+and armed the world against you,' said Dacier.
+
+'I can fly.  The world is wide.'
+
+'Time slips.  Your youth is wasted.  If you escape the man, he will have
+triumphed in keeping you from me.  And I thirst for you; I look to you
+for aid and counsel; I want my mate.  You have not to be told how you
+inspire me?  I am really less than half myself without you.  If I am to
+do anything in the world, it must be with your aid, you beside me.
+Our hands are joined: one leap!  Do you not see that after .  .  .  well,
+it cannot be friendship.  It imposes rather more on me than I can bear.
+You are not the woman to trifle; nor I; Tony, the man for it with a woman
+like you.  You are my spring of wisdom.  You interdict me altogether--can
+you?--or we unite our fates, like these hands now.  Try to get yours
+away!'
+
+Her effort ended in a pressure.  Resistance, nay, to hesitate at the
+joining of her life with his after her submission to what was a scorching
+fire in memory, though it was less than an embrace, accused her of worse
+than foolishness.
+
+'Well, then,' said she, 'wait three days.  Deliberate.  Oh!  try to know
+yourself, for your clear reason to guide you.  Let us be something better
+than the crowd abusing us, not simple creatures of impulse--as we choose
+to call the animal.  What if we had to confess that we took to our heels
+the moment the idea struck us!  Three days.  We may then pretend to a
+philosophical resolve.  Then come to me: or write to me.'
+
+'How long is it since the old Rovio morning, Tony?'
+
+'An age.'
+
+'Date my deliberations from that day.'
+
+The thought of hers having to be dated possibly from an earlier day,
+robbed her of her summit of feminine isolation, and she trembled, chilled
+and flushed; she lost all anchorage.
+
+'So it must be to-morrow,' said he, reading her closely, 'not later.
+Better at once.  But women are not to be hurried.'
+
+'Oh! don't class me, Percy, pray!  I think of you, not of myself.'
+
+'You suppose that in a day or two I might vary?'
+
+She fixed her eyes on him, expressing certainty of his unalterable
+stedfastness.  The look allured.  It changed: her head shook.  She held
+away and said: 'No, leave me; leave me, dear, dear friend.  Percy, my
+dearest!  I will not "play the sex."  I am yours if .  .  .  if it is
+your wish.  It may as well be to-morrow.  Here I am useless; I cannot
+write, not screw a thought from my head.  I dread that "process of the
+Law" a second time.  To-morrow, if it must be.  But no impulses.  Fortune
+is blind; she may be kind to us.  The blindness of Fortune is her one
+merit, and fools accuse her of it, and they profit by it!  I fear we all
+of us have our turn of folly: we throw the stake for good luck.  I hope
+my sin is not very great.  I know my position is desperate.  I feel a
+culprit.  But I am sure I have courage, perhaps brains to help.  At any
+rate, I may say this: I bring no burden to my lover that he does not know
+of.'
+
+Dacier pressed her hand.  'Money we shall have enough.  My uncle has left
+me fairly supplied.'
+
+'What would he think?' said Diana, half in a glimpse of meditation.
+
+'Think me the luckiest of the breeched.  I fancy I hear him thanking you
+for "making a man" of me.'
+
+She blushed.  Some such phrase might have been spoken by Lord
+Dannisburgh.
+
+'I have but a poor sum of money,' she said.  'I may be able to write
+abroad.  Here I cannot--if I am to be persecuted.'
+
+'You shall write, with a new pen!' said Dacier.  'You shall live, my
+darling Tony.  You have been held too long in this miserable suspension,
+neither maid nor wife, neither woman nor stockfish.  Ah!  shameful.  But
+we 'll right it.  The step, for us, is the most reasonable that could be
+considered.  You shake your head.  But the circumstances make it so.
+Courage, and we come to happiness!  And that, for you and me, means work.
+Look at the case of Lord and Lady Dulac.  It's identical, except that she
+is no match beside you: and I do not compare her antecedents with yours.
+But she braved the leap, and forced the world to swallow it, and now, you
+see, she's perfectly honoured.  I know a place on a peak of the Maritime
+Alps, exquisite in summer, cool, perfectly solitary, no English, snow
+round us, pastures at our feet, and the Mediterranean below.  There! my
+Tony.  To-morrow night we start.  You will meet me-shall I call here?--
+well, then at the railway station, the South-Eastern, for Paris: say,
+twenty minutes to eight.  I have your pledge?  You will come?'
+
+She sighed it, then said it firmly, to be worthy of him.  Kind Fortune,
+peeping under the edge of her bandaged eyes, appeared willing to bestow
+the beginning of happiness upon one who thought she had a claim to a
+small taste of it before she died.  It seemed distinguishingly done, to
+give a bite of happiness to the starving!
+
+'I fancied when you were announced that you came for congratulations upon
+your approaching marriage, Percy.'
+
+'I shall expect to hear them from you to-morrow evening at the station,
+dear Tony,' said he.
+
+The time was again stated, the pledge repeated.  He forbore entreaties
+for privileges, and won her gratitude.
+
+They named once more the place of meeting and the hour: more significant
+to them than phrases of intensest love and passion.  Pressing hands
+sharply for pledge of good faith, they sundered.
+
+She still had him in her eyes when he had gone.  Her old world lay
+shattered; her new world was up without a dawn, with but one figure, the
+sun of it, to light the swinging strangeness.
+
+Was ever man more marvellously transformed?  or woman more wildly swept
+from earth into the clouds?  So she mused in the hum of her tempest of
+heart and brain, forgetful of the years and the conditions preparing both
+of them for this explosion.
+
+She had much to do: the arrangements to dismiss her servants, write to
+house-agents and her lawyer, and write fully to Emma, write the enigmatic
+farewell to the Esquarts and Lady Pennon, Mary Paynham, Arthur Rhodes,
+Whitmonby (stanch in friendship, but requiring friendly touches), Henry
+Wilmers, and Redworth.  He was reserved to the last, for very enigmatical
+adieux: he would hear the whole story from Emma; must be left to think as
+he liked.
+
+The vague letters were excellently well composed: she was going abroad,
+and knew not when she would return; bade her friends think the best they
+could of her in the meantime.  Whitmonby was favoured with an anecdote,
+to be read as an apologue by the light of subsequent events.  But the
+letter to Emma tasked Diana.  Intending to write fully, her pen committed
+the briefest sentences: the tenderness she felt for Emma wakening her
+heart to sing that she was loved, loved, and knew love at last; and
+Emma's foreseen antagonism to the love and the step it involved rendered
+her pleadings in exculpation a stammered confession of guiltiness,
+ignominious, unworthy of the pride she felt in her lover.  'I am like a
+cartridge rammed into a gun, to be discharged at a certain hour
+tomorrow,' she wrote; and she sealed a letter so frigid that she could
+not decide to post it.  All day she imagined hearing a distant cannonade.
+The light of the day following was not like earthly light.  Danvers
+assured her there was no fog in London.
+
+'London is insupportable; I am going to Paris, and shall send for you in
+a week or two,' said Diana.
+
+'Allow me to say, ma'am, that you had better take me with you,' said
+Danvers.
+
+'Are you afraid of travelling by yourself, you foolish creature?'
+
+'No, ma'am, but I don't like any hands to undress and dress my mistress
+but my own.'
+
+'I have not lost the art,' said Diana, chafing for a magic spell to
+extinguish the woman, to whom, immediately pitying her, she said: 'You
+are a good faithful soul.  I think you have never kissed me.  Kiss me on
+the forehead.'
+
+Danvers put her lips to her mistress's forehead, and was asked: 'You
+still consider yourself attached to my fortunes?'
+
+'I do, ma'am, at home or abroad; and if you will take me with you .  .  '
+
+'Not for a week or so.'
+
+'I shall not be in the way, ma'am.'
+
+They played at shutting eyes.  The petition of Danvers was declined;
+which taught her the more; and she was emboldened to say: 'Wherever my
+mistress goes, she ought to have her attendant with her.'  There was no
+answer to it but the refusal.
+
+The hours crumbled slowly, each with a blow at the passages of retreat.
+Diana thought of herself as another person, whom she observed, not
+counselling her, because it was a creature visibly pushed by the Fates.
+In her own mind she could not perceive a stone of solidity anywhere, nor
+a face that had the appearance of our common life.  She heard the cannon
+at intervals.  The things she said set Danvers laughing, and she wondered
+at the woman's mingled mirth and stiffness.  Five o'clock struck.  Her
+letters were sent to the post.  Her boxes were piled from stairs to door.
+She read the labels, for her good-bye to the hated name of Warwick:--why
+ever adopted!  Emma might well have questioned why!  Women are guilty of
+such unreasoning acts!  But this was the close to that chapter.  The hour
+of six went by.  Between six and seven came a sound of knocker and bell
+at the street-door.  Danvers rushed into the sitting-room to announce
+that it was Mr. Redworth.  Before a word could be mustered, Redworth was
+in the room.  He said: 'You must come with me at once!'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS
+
+Dacier welted at the station, a good figure of a sentinel over his
+luggage and a spy for one among the inpouring passengers.  Tickets had
+been confidently taken, the private division of the carriages happily
+secured.  On board the boat she would be veiled.  Landed on French soil,
+they threw off disguises, breasted the facts.  And those?  They
+lightened.  He smarted with his eagerness.
+
+He had come well in advance of the appointed time, for he would not have
+had her hang about there one minute alone.
+
+Strange as this adventure was to a man of prominent station before the
+world, and electrical as the turning-point of a destiny that he was given
+to weigh deliberately and far-sightedly, Diana's image strung him to the
+pitch of it.  He looked nowhere but ahead, like an archer putting hand
+for his arrow.
+
+Presently he compared his watch and the terminus clock.  She should now
+be arriving.  He went out to meet her and do service.  Many cabs and
+carriages were peered into, couples inspected, ladies and their maids,
+wives and their husbands--an August exodus to the Continent.  Nowhere the
+starry she.  But he had a fund of patience.  She was now in some block of
+the streets.  He was sure of her, sure of her courage.  Tony and
+recreancy could not go together.  Now that he called her Tony, she was
+his close comrade, known; the name was a caress and a promise, breathing
+of her, as the rose of sweetest earth.  He counted it to be a month ere
+his family would have wind of the altered position of his affairs,
+possibly a year to the day of his making the dear woman his own in the
+eyes of the world.  She was dear past computation, womanly, yet quite
+unlike the womanish woman, unlike the semi-males courteously called
+dashing, unlike the sentimental.  His present passion for her lineaments,
+declared her surpassingly beautiful, though his critical taste was rather
+for the white statue that gave no warmth.  She had brains and ardour, she
+had grace and sweetness, a playful petulancy enlivening our atmosphere,
+and withal a refinement, a distinction, not to be classed; and justly
+might she dislike the being classed.  Her humour was a perennial
+refreshment, a running well, that caught all the colours of light; her
+wit studded the heavens of the recollection of her.  In his heart he felt
+that it was a stepping down for the brilliant woman to give him her hand;
+a condescension and an act of valour.  She who always led or prompted
+when they conversed, had now in her generosity abandoned the lead and
+herself to him, and she deserved his utmost honouring.
+
+But where was she?  He looked at his watch, looked at the clock.  They
+said the same: ten minutes to the moment of the train's departure.
+
+A man may still afford to dwell on the charms and merits of his heart's
+mistress while he has ten minutes to spare.  The dropping minutes,
+however, detract one by one from her individuality and threaten to sink
+her in her sex entirely.  It is the inexorable clock that says she is as
+other women.  Dacier began to chafe.  He was unaccustomed to the part he
+was performing:--and if she failed him?  She would not.  She would be
+late, though.  No, she was in time!  His long legs crossed the platform
+to overtake a tall lady veiled and dressed in black.  He lifted his hat;
+he heard an alarmed little cry and retired.  The clock said, Five
+minutes: a secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word
+Fool.  An odd word to be cast at him!  It rocked the icy pillar of pride
+in the background of his nature.  Certainly standing solos at the hour of
+eight P.M., he would stand for a fool.  Hitherto he had never allowed a
+woman to chance to posture him in that character.  He strode out,
+returned, scanned every lady's shape, and for a distraction watched the
+veiled lady whom he had accosted.  Her figure suggested pleasant
+features.  Either she was disappointed or she was an adept.  At the
+shutting of the gates she glided through, not without a fearful look
+around and at him.  She disappeared.  Dacier shrugged.  His novel
+assimilation to the rat-rabble of amatory intriguers tapped him on the
+shoulder unpleasantly.  A luckless member of the fraternity too!  The
+bell, the clock and the train gave him his title.  'And I was ready to
+fling down everything for the woman!'  The trial of a superb London
+gentleman's resources in the love-passion could not have been much
+keener.  No sign of her.
+
+He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of
+his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that he
+heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself.  The sole
+consolation he has is to revile the sex.  Women!  women!  Whom have they
+not made a fool of!  His uncle as much as any--and professing to know
+them.  Him also!  the man proud of escaping their wiles.  'For this woman
+.  .  .  !' he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex's
+trickeries.  The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the
+arrant coquette was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling
+of the man popularly supposed invincible.  If it were known of him!
+The idea of his being a puppet fixed for derision was madly distempering.
+He had only to ask the affirmative of Constance Asper to-morrow!
+A vision of his determination to do it, somewhat comforted him.
+
+Dacier walked up and down the platform, passing his pile of luggage,
+solitary and eloquent on the barrow.  Never in his life having been made
+to look a fool, he felt the red heat of the thing, as a man who has not
+blessedly become acquainted with the swish in boyhood finds his
+untempered blood turn to poison at a blow; he cannot healthily take a
+licking.  But then it had been so splendid an insanity when he urged
+Diana to fly with him.  Any one but a woman would have appreciated the
+sacrifice.
+
+His luggage had to be removed.  He dropped his porter a lordly fee and
+drove home.  From that astonished solitude he strolled to his Club.
+Curiosity mastering the wrath it was mixed with, he left his Club and
+crossed the park southward in the direction of Diana's house, abusing her
+for her inveterate attachment to the regions of Westminster.  There she
+used to receive Lord Dannisburgh; innocently, no doubt-assuredly quite
+innocently; and her husband had quitted the district.  Still it was
+rather childish for a woman to-be always haunting the seats of
+Parliament.  Her disposition to imagine that she was able to inspire
+statesmen came in for a share of ridicule; for when we know ourselves
+to be ridiculous, a retort in kind, unjust upon consideration, is balm.
+The woman dragged him down to the level of common men; that was the
+peculiar injury, and it swept her undistinguished into the stream of
+women.  In appearance, as he had proved to the fellows at his Club, he
+was perfectly self-possessed, mentally distracted and bitter, hating
+himself for it, snapping at the cause of it.  She had not merely
+disappointed, she had slashed his high conceit of himself, curbed him at
+the first animal dash forward, and he champed the bit with the fury of a
+thwarted racer.
+
+Twice he passed her house.  Of course no light was shown at her windows.
+They were scanned malignly.
+
+He held it due to her to call and inquire whether there was any truth in
+the report of Mrs. Warwick's illness.  Mrs. Warwick!  She meant to keep
+the name.
+
+A maid-servant came to the door with a candle in her hand revealing red
+eyelids.  She was not aware that her mistress was unwell.  Her mistress
+had left home some time after six o'clock with a gentleman.  She was
+unable to tell him the gentleman's name.  William, the footman, had
+opened the door to him.  Her mistress's maid Mrs. Danvers had gone to the
+Play--with William.  She thought that Mrs. Danvers might know who the
+gentleman was.  The girl's eyelids blinked, and she turned aside.  Dacier
+consoled her with a piece of gold, saying he would come and see Mrs.
+Danvers in the morning.
+
+His wrath was partially quieted by the new speculations offered up to it.
+He could not conjure a suspicion of treachery in Diana Warwick; and a
+treachery so foully cynical!  She had gone with a gentleman.  He guessed
+on all sides; he struck at walls, as in complete obscurity.
+
+The mystery of her conduct troubling his wits for the many hours was
+explained by Danvers.  With a sympathy that she was at pains to show, she
+informed him that her mistress was not at all unwell, and related of how
+Mr. Redworth had arrived just when her mistress was on the point of
+starting for Paris and the Continent; because poor Lady Dunstane was
+this very day to undergo an operation under the surgeons at Copsley, and
+she did not wish her mistress to be present, but Mr. Redworth thought her
+mistress ought to be there, and he had gone down thinking she was there,
+and then came back in hot haste to fetch her, and was just in time, as it
+happened, by two or three minutes.
+
+Dacier rewarded the sympathetic woman for her intelligence, which
+appeared to him to have shot so far as to require a bribe.  Gratitude to
+the person soothing his unwontedly ruffled temper was the cause of the
+indiscretion in the amount he gave.
+
+It appeared to him that he ought to proceed to Copsley for tidings of
+Lady Dunstane.  Thither he sped by the handy railway and a timely train.
+He reached the parkgates at three in the afternoon, telling his flyman to
+wait.  As he advanced by short cuts over the grass, he studied the look
+of the rows of windows.  She was within, and strangely to his clouded
+senses she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in
+justice abuse.  He and she, so close to union, were divided.  A hand
+resembling the palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder.
+Having the poorest right--not any--to reproach her, he was disarmed, he
+felt himself a miserable intruder; he summoned his passion to excuse him,
+and gained some unsatisfied repose of mind by contemplating its devoted
+sincerity; which roused an effort to feel for the sufferer--Diana
+Warwick's friend.  With the pair of surgeons named, the most eminent of
+their day, in attendance, the case must be serious.  To vindicate the
+breaker of her pledge, his present plight likewise assured him of that,
+and nearing the house he adopted instinctively the funeral step and mood,
+just sensible of a novel smallness.  For the fortifying testimony of his
+passion had to be put aside, he was obliged to disavow it for a simpler
+motive if he applied at the door.  He stressed the motive, produced the
+sentiment, and passed thus naturally into hypocrisy, as lovers
+precipitated by their blood among the crises of human conditions are
+often forced to do.  He had come to inquire after Lady Dunstane.  He
+remembered that it had struck him as a duty, on hearing of her dangerous
+illness.
+
+The door opened before he touched the bell.  Sir Lukin knocked against
+him and stared.
+
+'Ah!--who--?--you?' he said, and took him by the arm and pressed him on
+along the gravel.  'Dacier, are you?  Redworth's in there.  Come on a
+step, come!  It's the time for us to pray.  Good God!  There's mercy for
+sinners.  If ever there was a man!  .  .  .  But, oh, good God!  she's in
+their hands this minute.  My saint is under the knife.'
+
+Dacier was hurried forward by a powerful hand.  'They say it lasts about
+five minutes, four and a half--or more!  My God!  When they turned me out
+of her room, she smiled to keep me calm.  She said: "Dear husband": the
+veriest wretch and brutallest husband ever poor woman .  .  .  and a
+saint!  a saint on earth!  Emmy!' Tears burst from him.
+
+He pulled forth his watch and asked Dacier for the time.
+
+'A minute's gone in a minute.  It's three minutes and a half.  Come
+faster.  They're at their work!  It's life or death.  I've had death
+about me.  But for a woman! and your wife! and that brave soul!  She
+bears it so.  Women are the bravest creatures afloat.  If they make her
+shriek, it'll be only if she thinks I 'm out of hearing.  No: I see her.
+She bears it!--They mayn't have begun yet.  It may all be over!  Come
+into the wood.  I must pray.  I must go on my knees.'
+
+Two or three steps in the wood, at the mossed roots of a beech, he fell
+kneeling, muttering, exclaiming.
+
+The tempest of penitence closed with a blind look at his watch, which he
+left dangling.  He had to talk to drug his thoughts.
+
+'And mind you,' said he, when he had rejoined Dacier and was pushing his
+arm again, rounding beneath the trees to a view of the house, 'for a man
+steeped in damnable iniquity!  She bears it all for me, because I begged
+her, for the chance of her living.  It's my doing--this knife!
+Macpherson swears there is a chance.  Thomson backs him.  But they're at
+her, cutting!  .  .  .  The pain must be awful--the mere pain!  The
+gentlest creature ever drew breath!  And women fear blood--and her own!
+And a head!  She ought to have married the best man alive, not a--!  I
+can't remember her once complaining of me--not once.  A common donkey
+compared to her!  All I can do is to pray.  And she knows the beast I am,
+and has forgiven me.  There isn't a blessed text of Scripture that
+doesn't cry out in praise of her.  And they cut and hack .  .  .  !' He
+dropped his head.  The vehement big man heaved, shuddering.  His lips
+worked fast.
+
+'She is not alone with them, unsupported?' said Dacier.
+
+Sir Lukin moaned for relief.  He caught his watch swinging and stared at
+it.  'What a good fellow you were to come!  Now 's the time to know your
+friends.  There's Diana Warwick, true as steel.  Redworth came on her
+tiptoe for the Continent; he had only to mention .  .  .  Emmy wanted
+to spare her.  She would not have sent--wanted to spare her the sight.
+I offered to stand by .  .  .  Chased me out.  Diana Warwick's there:--
+worth fifty of me!  Dacier, I've had my sword-blade tried by Indian
+horsemen, and I know what true as steel means.  She's there.  And I know
+she shrinks from the sight of blood.  My oath on it, she won't quiver a
+muscle!  Next to my wife, you may take my word for it, Dacier, Diana
+Warwick is the pick of living women.  I could prove it.  They go
+together.  I could prove it over and over.  She 's the loyallest woman
+anywhere.  Her one error was that marriage of hers, and how she ever
+pitched herself into it, none of us can guess.'  After a while, he said:
+'Look at your watch.'
+
+'Nearly twenty minutes gone.'
+
+'Are they afraid to send out word?  It's that window !' He covered his
+eyes, and muttered, sighed.  He became abruptly composed in appearance.
+'The worst of a black sheep like me is, I'm such an infernal sinner, that
+Providence!  .  .  .  But both surgeons gave me their word of honour that
+there was a chance.  A chance!  But it's the end of me if Emmy . . . .
+Good God! no! the knife's enough; don't let her be killed!  It would be
+murder.  Here am I talking!  I ought to be praying.  I should have sent
+for the parson to help me; I can't get the proper words--bellow like a
+rascal trooper strung up for the cat.  It must be twenty-five minutes
+now.  Who's alive now!'
+
+Dacier thought of the Persian Queen crying for news of the slaughtered,
+with her mind on her lord and husband: 'Who is not dead?' Diana exalted
+poets, and here was an example of the truth of one to nature, and of the
+poor husband's depth of feeling.  They said not the same thing, but it
+was the same cry de profundis.
+
+He saw Redworth coming at a quick pace.
+
+Redworth raised his hand.  Sir Lukin stopped.  'He's waving!'
+
+'It's good,' said Dacier.
+
+'Speak!  are you sure?'
+
+'I judge by the look.'
+
+Redworth stepped unfalteringly.
+
+'It's over, all well,' he said.  He brushed his forehead and looked
+sharply cheerful.
+
+'My dear fellow! my dear fellow!' Sir Lukin grasped his hand.  'It's more
+than I deserve.  Over?  She has borne it!  She would have gone to heaven
+and left me!
+
+Is she safe?'
+
+'Doing well.'
+
+'Have you seen the surgeons?'
+
+'Mrs. Warwick.'
+
+'What did she say?'
+
+'A nod of the head.'
+
+'You saw her?'
+
+'She came to the stairs.'
+
+'Diana Warwick never lies.  She wouldn't lie, not with a nod!  They've
+saved Emmy--do you think?'
+
+'It looks well.'
+
+My girl has passed the worst of it?'
+
+'That's over.'
+
+Sir Lukin gazed glassily.  The necessity of his agony was to lean to the
+belief, at a beckoning, that Providence pardoned him, in tenderness for
+what would have been his loss.  He realized it, and experienced a sudden
+calm: testifying to the positive pardon.
+
+'Now, look here, you two fellows, listen half a moment,' he addressed
+Redworth and Dacier; 'I've been the biggest scoundrel of a husband
+unhung, and married to a saint; and if she's only saved to me; I'll swear
+to serve her faithfully, or may a thunderbolt knock me to perdition!
+and thank God for his justice!  Prayers are answered, mind you, though
+a fellow may be as black as a sweep.  Take a warning from me.  I've had
+my lesson.'
+
+Dacier soon after talked of going.  The hope of seeing Diana had
+abandoned him, the desire was almost extinct.
+
+Sir Lukin could not let him go.  He yearned to preach to him or any one
+from his personal text of the sinner honourably remorseful on account of
+and notwithstanding the forgiveness of Providence, and he implored Dacier
+and Redworth by turns to be careful when they married of how they behaved
+to--the sainted women their wives; never to lend ear to the devil, nor to
+believe, as he had done, that there is no such thing as a devil, for he
+had been the victim of him, and he knew.  The devil, he loudly
+proclaimed, has a multiplicity of lures, and none more deadly than when
+he baits with a petticoat.  He had been hooked, and had found the devil
+in person.  He begged them urgently to keep his example in memory.  By
+following this and that wildfire he had stuck himself in a bog--a common
+result with those who would not see the devil at work upon them; and it
+required his dear suffering saint to be at death's doors, cut to pieces
+and gasping, to open his eyes.  But, thank heaven, they were opened at
+last!  Now he saw the beast he was: a filthy beast!  unworthy of tying
+his wife's shoestring.  No confessions could expose to them the beast he
+was.  But let them not fancy there was no such thing as an active DEVIL
+about the world.
+
+Redworth divined that the simply sensational man abased himself before
+Providence and heaped his gratitude on the awful Power in order to render
+it difficult for the promise of the safety of his wife to be withdrawn.
+
+He said: 'There is good hope'; and drew an admonition upon himself.
+
+'Ah! my dear good Redworth,' Sir Lukin sighed from his elevation of
+outspoken penitence: 'you will see as I do some day.  It is the devil,
+think as you like of it.  When you have pulled down all the Institutions
+of the Country, what do you expect but ruins?  That Radicalism of yours
+has its day.  You have to go through a wrestle like mine to understand
+it.  You say, the day is fine, let's have our game.  Old England pays for
+it!  Then you'll find how you love the old land of your birth--the
+noblest ever called a nation!--with your Corn Law Repeals!--eh, Dacier?
+--You 'll own it was the devil tempted you.  I hear you apologizing.
+Pray God, it mayn't be too late!'
+
+He looked up at the windows.  'She may be sinking!'
+
+'Have no fears,' Redworth said; 'Mrs. Warwick would send for you.'
+
+'She would.  Diana Warwick would be sure to send.  Next to my wife, Diana
+Warwick's .  .  .  she'd send, never fear.  I dread that room.  I'd
+rather go through a regiment of sabres--though it 's over now.  And Diana
+Warwick stood it.  The worst is over, you told me.  By heaven! women are
+wonderful creatures.  But she hasn't a peer for courage.  I could trust
+her--most extraordinary thing; that marriage of hers!--not a soul has
+ever been able to explain it:--trust her to the death.'
+
+Redworth left them, and Sir Lukin ejaculated on the merits of Diana
+Warwick to Dacier.  He laughed scornfully: 'And that's the woman the
+world attacks for want of virtue!  Why, a fellow hasn't a chance with
+her, not a chance.  She comes out in blazing armour if you unmask a
+battery.  I don't know how it might be if she were in love with a fellow.
+I doubt her thinking men worth the trouble.  I never met the man.  But if
+she were to take fire, Troy 'd be nothing to it.  I wonder whether we
+might go in: I dread the house.'
+
+Dacier spoke of departing.
+
+'No, no, wait,' Sir Lukin begged him.  'I was talking about women.  They
+are the devil--or he makes most use of them: and you must learn to see
+the cloven foot under their petticoats, if you're to escape them.
+There's no protection in being in love with your wife; I married for
+love; I am, I always have been, in love with her; and I went to the
+deuce.  The music struck up and away I waltzed.  A woman like Diana
+Warwick might keep a fellow straight, because she,'s all round you; she's
+man and woman in brains; and legged like a deer, and breasted like a
+swan, and a regular sheaf of arrows--in her eyes.  Dark women--ah!
+But she has a contempt for us, you know.  That's the secret of her.--
+Redworth 's at the door.  Bad?  Is it bad?  I never was particularly fond
+of that house--hated it.  I love it now for Emmy's sake.  I couldn't live
+in another--though I should be haunted.  Rather her ghost than nothing--
+though I'm an infernal coward about the next world.  But if you're right
+with religion you needn't fear.  What I can't comprehend in Redworth is
+his Radicalism, and getting richer and richer.'
+
+'It's not a vow of poverty,' said Dacier.
+
+'He'll find they don't coalesce, or his children will.  Once the masses
+are uppermost!  It's a bad day, Dacier, when we 've no more gentlemen in
+the land.  Emmy backs him, so I hold my tongue.  To-morrow's a Sunday.
+I wish you were staying here; I 'd take you to church with me-we shirk
+it when we haven't a care.  It couldn't do you harm.  I've heard capital
+sermons.  I've always had the good habit of going to church, Dacier.
+Now 's the time for remembering them.  Ah, my dear fellow, I 'm not a
+parson.  It would have been better for me if I had been.'
+
+And for you too!  his look added plainly.  He longed to preach; he was
+impelled to chatter.
+
+Redworth reported the patient perfectly quiet, breathing calmly.
+
+'Laudanum?' asked Sir Lukin.  'Now there's a poison we've got to bless!
+And we set up in our wisdom for knowing what is good for us!'
+
+He had talked his hearers into a stupefied assent to anything he uttered.
+
+'Mrs. Warwick would like to see you in two or three minutes; she will
+come down,' Redworth said to Dacier.
+
+'That looks well, eh?  That looks bravely,' Sir Lukin cried.  'Diana,
+Warwick wouldn't leave the room without a certainty.  I dread the look of
+those men; I shall have to shake their hands!  And so I do, with all my
+heart: only--But God bless them!  But we must go in, if she's coming
+down.'
+
+They entered the house, and sat in the drawing-room, where Sir Lukin took
+up from the table one of his wife's Latin books, a Persius, bearing her
+marginal notes.  He dropped his head on it, with sobs.
+
+The voice of Diana recalled him to the present.  She counselled him to
+control himself; in that case he might for one moment go to the chamber-
+door and assure himself by the silence that his wife was resting.  She
+brought permission from the surgeons and doctor, on his promise to be
+still.
+
+Redworth supported Sir Lukin tottering out.
+
+Dacier had risen.  He was petrified by Diana's face, and thought of her
+as whirled from him in a storm, bearing the marks of it.  Her underlip
+hung for short breaths; the big drops of her recent anguish still
+gathered on her brows; her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked
+ancient in youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the
+vaults, issuing white-ringed, not of our light.
+
+She shut her mouth for strength to speak to him.
+
+He said: 'You are not ill?  You are strong?'
+
+'I?  Oh, strong.  I will sit.  I cannot be absent longer than two
+minutes.  The trial of her strength is to come.  If it were courage,
+we might be sure.  The day is fine?'
+
+'A perfect August day.'
+
+'I held her through it.  I am thankful to heaven it was no other hand
+than mine.  She wished to spare me.  She was glad of her Tony when the
+time came.  I thought I was a coward--I could have changed with her to
+save her; I am a strong woman, fit to submit to that work.  I should not
+have borne it as she did.  She expected to sink under it.  All her
+dispositions were made for death-bequests to servants and to .  .  .  to
+friends: every secret liking they had, thought of!'
+
+Diana clenched her hands.
+
+'I hope!' Dacier said.
+
+'You shall hear regularly.  Call at Sir William's house to-morrow.  He
+sleeps here to-night.  The suspense must last for days.  It is a question
+of vital power to bear the shock.  She has a mind so like a flying spirit
+that, just before the moment, she made Mr. Lanyan Thomson smile by
+quoting some saying of her Tony's.'
+
+'Try by-and-by to recollect it,' said Dacier.
+
+'And you were with that poor man!  How did he pass the terrible time?  I
+pitied him.'
+
+'He suffered; he prayed.'
+
+'It was the best he could do.  Mr. Redworth was as he always is at the
+trial, a pillar.  Happy the friend who knows him for one!  He never
+thinks of himself in a crisis.  He is sheer strength to comfort and aid.
+They will drive you to the station with Mr. Thomson.  He returns to
+relieve Sir William to-morrow.  I have learnt to admire the men of the
+knife!  No profession equals theirs in self-command and beneficence.
+Dr. Bridgenorth is permanent here.'
+
+'I have a fly, and go back immediately,' said Dacier.
+
+'She shall hear of your coming.  Adieu.'
+
+Diana gave him her hand.  It was gently pressed.
+
+A wonderment at the utter change of circumstances took Dacier passingly
+at the sight of her vanishing figure.
+
+He left the house, feeling he dared have no personal wishes.  It had
+ceased to be the lover's hypocrisy with him.
+
+The crisis of mortal peril in that house enveloped its inmates, and so
+wrought in him as to enshroud the stripped outcrying husband, of whom he
+had no clear recollection, save of the man's agony.  The two women,
+striving against death, devoted in friendship, were the sole living
+images he brought away; they were a new vision of the world and our life.
+
+He hoped with Diana, bled with her.  She rose above him high, beyond his
+transient human claims.  He envied Redworth the common friendly right to
+be near her.  In reflection, long after, her simplicity of speech, washed
+pure of the blood-emotions, for token of her great nature, during those
+two minutes of their sitting together, was, dearer, sweeter to the lover
+than if she had shown by touch or word that a faint allusion to their
+severance was in her mind; and this despite a certain vacancy it created.
+
+He received formal information of Lady Dunstane's progress to
+convalescence.  By degrees the simply official tone of Diana's letters
+combined with the ceasing of them and the absence of her personal charm
+to make a gentleman not remarkable for violence in the passion so calmly
+reasonable as to think the dangerous presence best avoided for a time.
+Subject to fits of the passion, he certainly was, but his position in the
+world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name.  He did not
+regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if
+taken.  On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look
+to his cool blood.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness
+Capricious potentate whom they worship
+Circumstances may combine to make a whisper as deadly as a blow
+Compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse
+Could have designed this gabbler for the mate
+Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable
+Explaining of things to a dull head
+Happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept beauty
+He gained much by claiming little
+Her peculiar tenacity of the sense of injury
+His ridiculous equanimity
+Keep passion sober, a trotter in harness
+Moral indignation is ever consolatory
+Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves
+Strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that
+Tendency to polysyllabic phraseology
+The blindness of Fortune is her one merit
+They have no sensitiveness, we have too much
+Top and bottom sin is cowardice
+Touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight
+We must fawn in society
+We never see peace but in the features of the dead
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Diana of the Crossways, v3,
+by George Meredith
+
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