George Meredith
Diana of the Crossways. Complete
‘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.
