The Amazing Marriage. Complete. George Meredith

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      Her expression of wonder whether they were to meet him again gave Chillon the opportunity of saying:

      ‘It ‘s the unlikeliest thing possible—at all events in England.’

      ‘But I think we shall,’ said she.

      ‘My dear, you meet people of your own class; you don’t meet others.’

      ‘But we may meet anybody, Chillon!’

      ‘In the street. I suppose you would not stop to speak to him in the street.’

      ‘It would be strange to see him in the street!’ Carinthia said.

      ‘Strange or not!’

      .... Chillon thought he had said sufficient. She was under his protectorship, otherwise he would not have alluded to the observance of class distinctions. He felt them personally in this case because of their seeming to stretch grotesquely by the pretentious heterodoxy of the young fellow, whom, nevertheless, thinking him over now that he was mentioned, he approved for his manliness in bluntly telling his origin and status.

      A chalet supplied them with fresh milk, and the inn of a village on a perch with the midday meal. Their appetites were princely and swept over the little inn like a conflagration. Only after clearing it did they remember the rearward pedestrian, whose probable wants Chillon was urged by Carthinia to speak of to their host. They pushed on, clambering up, scurrying down, tramping gaily, till by degrees the chambers of Carinthia’s imagination closed their doors and would no longer intercommunicate. Her head refused to interest her, and left all activity to her legs and her eyes, and the latter became unobservant, except of foot-tracks, animal-like. She felt that she was a fine machine, and nothing else: and she was rapidly approaching those ladies!

      ‘You will tell them how I walked with you,’ she said.

      ‘Your friends over yonder?’ said he.

      ‘So that they may not think me so ignorant, brother.’ She stumbled on the helpless word in a hasty effort to cloak her vanity.

      He laughed. Her desire to meet the critical English ladies with a towering reputation in one department of human enterprise was comprehensible, considering the natural apprehensiveness of the half-wild girl before such a meeting. As it often happens with the silly phrases of simple people, the wrong word, foolish although it was, went to the heart of the hearer and threw a more charitable light than ridicule on her. So that they may know I can do something they cannot do, was the interpretation. It showed her deep knowledge of her poorness in laying bare the fact.

      Anxious to cheer her, he said: ‘Come, come, you can dance. You dance well, mother has told me, and she was a judge. You ride, you swim, you have a voice for country songs, at all events. And you’re a bit of a botanist too. You’re good at English and German; you had a French governess for a couple of years. By the way, you understand the use of a walking-stick in self-defence: you could handle a sword on occasion.’

      ‘Father trained me,’ said Carthinia. ‘I can fire a pistol, aiming.’

      ‘With a good aim, too. Father told me you could. How fond he was of his girl! Well, bear in mind that father was proud of you, and hold up your head wherever you are.’

      ‘I will,’ she said.

      He assured her he had a mind to have a bugle blown at the entrance of the Baths for a challenge to the bathers to match her in warlike accomplishments.

      She bit her lips: she could not bear much rallying on the subject just then:

      ‘Which is the hard one to please?’ she asked.

      ‘The one you will find the kinder of the two.’

      ‘Henrietta?’

      He nodded.

      ‘Has she a father?’

      ‘A gallant old admiral: Admiral Baldwin Fakenham.’

      ‘I am glad of that!’ Carinthia sighed out heartily. ‘And he is with her? And likes you, Chillon?’

      ‘On the whole, I think he does.’

      ‘A brave officer!’ Such a father would be sure to like him.

      So the domestic prospect was hopeful.

      At sunset they stood on the hills overlooking the basin of the Baths, all enfolded in swathes of pink and crimson up to the shining grey of a high heaven that had the fresh brightness of the morning.

      ‘We are not tired in the slightest,’ said Carinthia, trifling with the vision of a cushioned rest below. ‘I could go on through the night quite comfortably.’

      ‘Wait till you wake up in your little bed to-morrow,’ Chillon replied stoutly, to drive a chill from his lover’s heart, that had seized it at the bare suggestion of their going on.

      CHAPTER VII. THE LADY’S LETTER

      Is not the lover a prophet? He that fervently desires may well be one; his hurried nature is alive with warmth to break the possible blow: and if his fears were not needed they were shadows; and if fulfilled, was he not convinced of his misfortune by a dark anticipation that rarely erred? Descending the hills, he remembered several omens: the sun had sunk when he looked down on the villas and clustered houses, not an edge of the orb had been seen; the admiral’s quarters in the broad-faced hotel had worn an appearance resembling the empty house of yesterday; the encounter with the fellow on the rocks had a bad whisper of impish tripping. And what moved Carinthia to speak of going on?

      A letter was handed to Chillon in the hall of the admiral’s hotel, where his baggage had already been delivered. The manager was deploring the circumstance that his rooms were full to the roof, when Chillon said:

      ‘Well, we must wash and eat’; and Carinthia, from watching her brother’s forehead during his perusal of the letter, declared her readiness for anything. He gave her the letter to read by herself while preparing to sit at table, unwilling to ask her for a further tax on her energies—but it was she who had spoken of going on! He thought of it as of a debt she had contracted and might be supposed to think payable to their misfortune.

      She read off the first two sentences.

      ‘We can have a carriage here, Chillon; order a carriage; I shall get as much sleep in a carriage as in a bed: I shall enjoy driving at night,’ she said immediately, and strongly urged it and forced him to yield, the manager observing that a carriage could be had.

      In the privacy of her room, admiring the clear flowing hand, she read the words, delicious in their strangeness to her, notwithstanding the heavy news, as though they were sung out of a night-sky:

      ‘We start at noon to-day. Sailing orders have been issued, and I could only have resisted them in my own person by casting myself overboard. I go like the boat behind the vessel. You were expected yesterday, at latest this morning. I have seen boxes in the hall, with a name on them not foreign to me. Why does the master tarry? Sir, of your valliance you should have held to your good vow,—quoth the СКАЧАТЬ