A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY

The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens courtliness to hard attention.

After the names of Admiral Baldwin and ‘the Mr. Woodseer,’ the name of Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the name of any other place.

‘Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,’ she said, observing the young earl. ’I drove down there yesterday. I saw the lady calling herself Countess of Fleetwood. By right? She was a Miss Kirby.’

‘She has the right,’ Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge of musketry.

’Marriage not contested. You knew of her being in that place? I can’t describe it.’

‘Your ladyship will pardon me?’

London’s frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to penetrate.

He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.

As iron as he looked, he said: ‘She stays there by choice.’

The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.

‘You are not acquainted with the district.’

‘One of my men comes out of it.’

’The coming out of it!... However, I understand her story, that she travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without resources. She waited weeks; I forget how many. She has a description of maid in attendance on her. She came to London to find her husband. You were at the mines, we heard. Her one desire is to meet her husband. But, goodness! Fleetwood, why do you frown? You acknowledge the marriage, she has the name of the church; she was married out of that old Lord Levellier’s house. You drove her I won’t repeat the flighty business. You left her, and she did her best to follow you. Will the young men of our time not learn that life is no longer a game when they have a woman for partner in the match!

You don’t complain of her flavour of a foreign manner? She can’t be so very... Admiral Baldwin’s daughter has married her brother; and he is a military officer. She has germs of breeding, wants only a little rub of the world to smooth her. Speak to the point: do you meet her here? Do you refuse?’

‘At present? I do.’

‘Something has to be done.’

‘She was bound to stay where I left her.’

‘You are bound to provide for her becomingly.’

‘Provision shall be made, of course.’

‘The story will... unless and quickly, too.’

I know, I know!’

Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel at him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree fire and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.

The black flash flew.

’It ‘s a thing to mend as well as one can,’ Lady Arpington said. ’I am not inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any. Get her away from that place. She won’t come to me unless it ’s to meet her husband. Ah, well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are, if you married her. We’ll leave the husband undiscussed: with this reserve, that it seems to me men are now beginning to play the misunderstood.’

‘I hope they know themselves better,’ said Fleetwood; and he begged for the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her dwelling.

Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an assault on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old Buccaneer; it compelled to urgent measures. He, as he felt horribly in pencilling her address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the goad. Her mask of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft, which could be power; and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed to hatred.

‘A shop,’ Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: ’potatoes, vegetable stuff. Honest people, I am to believe. She is indifferent to her food, she says. She works, helping one of their ministers one of their denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves! Anything to escape from the Church! She’s likely to become a Methodist. With Lord Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time. Well, she may claim to belong to it now. She would not be persuaded against visitations to pestiferous hovels. What else is there to do in such a place? She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in the dark back room of a small greengrocer’s shop in Whitechapel. There you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood’s present address.’

It drenched him with ridicule.

‘I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,’ he said, and maintained his rigidity.

The great lady stiffened.

’I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once. The admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I warn you very well, very well. In your own interests, it will be. If she is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will stick to her.’

‘She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,’ said Fleetwood. ‘She will have Esslemont to live in.’

‘There will be more than one to speak as to that. You should know her.’

‘I do not know her.’

‘You married her.’

‘The circumstances are admitted.’

’If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a previous interview. She is bent on meeting you.’

’I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it. Those are the terms.’

‘She has a brother living, I remind you.’

‘State the deduction, if you please, my lady.’

’She is not of ‘a totally inferior family.’

’She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a diligent reader of his book of maxims for men.’

’Dear me! Then Kirby Captain Kirby! I remember. That’s her origin, is it?’ the great lady cried, illumined. ’My mother used to talk of the Cressett scandal. Old Lady Arpington, too. At any rate, it ended in their union the formalities were properly respected, as soon as they could be.’

‘I am unaware.’

’I detest such a tone of speaking. Speaking as you do now married to the daughter? You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.’

’Quite, ma’am, let me assure you. Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would be dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion’s Maxims. They will learn that I am myself.’

’You don’t improve as you proceed. I tell you this, you’ll not have me for a friend. You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal to a prophecy, you won’t have London with you; and you’ll hear of Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.’

The preluding box on them reddened him.

‘She will have the offer of Esslemont.’

‘Undertake to persuade her in person.’

‘I have spoken on that head.’

’Well, I may be mistaken, I fancied it before I knew of the pair she springs from: you won’t get her consent to anything without your consenting to meet her. Surely it’s the manlier way. It might be settled for to-morrow, here, in this room. She prays to meet you.’

With an indicated gesture of ‘Save me from it,’ Fleetwood bowed.

He left no friend thinking over the riddle of his conduct. She was a loud-voiced lady, given to strike out phrases. The ’Whitechapel Countess’ of the wealthiest nobleman of his day was heard by her on London’s wagging tongue. She considered also that he ought at least have propitiated her; he was in the position requiring of him to do something of the kind, and he had shown instead the dogged pride which calls for a whip. Fool as he must have been to go and commit himself to marriage with a girl of whom he knew nothing or little, the assumption of pride belonged to the order of impudent disguises intolerable to behold and not, in a modern manner, castigate.

Notwithstanding a dislike of the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood, Lady Arpington paid Livia an afternoon visit; and added thereby to the stock of her knowledge and the grounds of her disapprobation.

Down in Whitechapel, it was known to the Winch girls and the Woodseers that Captain Kirby and his wife had spent the bitterest of hours in vainly striving to break their immoveable sister’s will to remain there.

At the tea-time of simple people, who make it a meal, Gower’s appetite for the home-made bread of Mary Jones was checked by the bearer of a short note from Lord Fleetwood. The half-dozen lines were cordial, breathing of their walk in the Austrian highlands, and naming a renowned city hotel for dinner that day, the hour seven, the reply yes or no by messenger.

‘But we are man to man, so there’s no “No” between us two,’ the note said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when for men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.

Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him magnanimous.

‘It may be the solution,’ his father remarked.

Both had the desire; and Gower’s reply was the yes, our brave male word, supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it as a form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.