In which We See Nature Making of a Woman a Maid Again, and a Thrice Whimsical.
On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the carriage at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven. Redworth, like the good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year. Eight of their wickets had fallen for a lament able figure of twenty-nine runs; himself clean-bowled the first ball. But Tom Redworth had got fast hold of his wicket, and already scored fifty to his bat. ‘There! grand hit!’ Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails. ‘Once a cricketer, always a cricketer, if you’ve legs to fetch the runs. And Pullen’s not doing badly. His business is to stick. We shall mark them a hundred yet. I do hate a score on our side without the two 00’s.’ He accounted for Redworth’s mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill.
Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.
‘And why are you doing nothing?’ Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:
‘My stumps are down: I’m married.’ He took his wife’s hand prettily.
Diana had a malicious prompting. She smothered the wasp, and said: ‘Oh! look at that!’
‘Grand hit again! Oh! good! good!’ cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it, while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball flying away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading the fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers.
Diana said merrily: ‘Bravo our side!’
‘Bravo, old Tom Redworth’; rejoined Sir Lukin. ‘Four, and a three! And capital weather, haven’t we: Hope we shall have same sort day next month—return match, my ground. I’ve seen Tom Redworth score—old days—over two hundred t’ his bat. And he used to bowl too. But bowling wants practice. And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe in mouth and cheering. They do enjoy a day like this. We’ll have a supper for fifty at Copsley’s:—it’s fun. By Jove! we must have reached up to near the hundred.’
He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.
Diana praised the little fellow.
‘Yes, he’s a real English boy,’ said Emma.
‘We’ve thousands of ’em, thousands, ready to your hand,’ exclaimed Sir Lukin, ‘and a confounded Radicalized country...’ he murmured gloomily of ‘lets us be kicked!... any amount of insult, meek as gruel!... making of the finest army the world has ever seen! You saw the papers this morning? Good heaven! how a nation with an atom of self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners! We do. We’re insulted and we’re threatened, and we call for a hymn!—Now then, my man, what is it?’
The boy had flown back. ‘Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one more for the hundred.’
‘Well reckoned; and mind you’re up at Copsley for the return match.—And Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone—they don’t hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we’re not prepared for war: We never are! And whose the fault? Says, we’re a peaceful people, but ‘ware who touches us! He doesn’t feel a kick.—Oh! clever snick! Hurrah for the hundred!—Two-three. No, don’t force the running, you fools!—though they’re wild with the ball: ha!—no?—all right!’ The wicket stood. Hurrah!
The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.
‘Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,’ said Emma. ‘He looks well in flannels.’
‘Yes, he does,’ Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having spoken so simply. ‘I think the chief advantage men have over us is in their amusements.’
‘Their recreations.’
‘That is the better word.’ Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was warm. ‘I mean, the permanent advantage. For you see that age does not affect them.’
‘Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.’
‘Well, he is what would be called mature.’
‘He can’t be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his constitution, means youth.’
‘Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.’
‘I should imagine you imagine the possible chances. He is the father who would play with his boys.’
‘And lock up his girls in the nursery.’ Diana murmured of the extraordinary heat.
Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for girls.
‘He bats admirably,’ said Diana. ‘I wish I could bat half as well.’
‘Your batting is with the tongue.’
‘Not so good. And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps, is surer. But there is the difference of cricket:—when your stumps are down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.’
‘Supposing all marriages miserable.’
‘To the mind of me,’ said Diana, and observed Emma’s rather saddened eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were certainly planned.
They conversed of expeditions to Redworth’s Berkshire mansion, and to The Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who fancied it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but as he was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.
The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will not, until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called a climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter. Diana in addition sustained the weight of brains. Neither with waxen optics nor with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world. Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend, she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see. But her characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the ‘blood,—which had supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the clear reading of others distracted the view of herself. For one may be the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.
The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of Redworth’s healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life, cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;—it might be, the worthier: she thought him the handsomer. He throve to the light of day, and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies. Her intuition of Emma’s wishes led to this; he was constantly before her. She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-flannelled, and red of face: the ‘lucky calculator,’ as she named him to Emma, who shook her head, and sighed. The abstract, healthful and powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor efforts. Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation, overshadowed her. In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe. Nothing touched her there—nothing that Redworth did. She could not have admitted there her ideal of a hero. It was the sublimation of a virgin’s conception of life, better fortified against the enemy. She peopled it with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music. Higher and more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions. Living up there, she had not a feeling.
The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home, was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no allusion to the books. Mary Paynham’s portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy of that position had no significance.
‘He thinks she has a streak of genius,’ Diana said to Emma.
‘It may be shown in time,’ Emma replied, for a comment on the work. ‘He should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.’
‘They are, doubtless, good investments.’
He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana’s hearing, that he considered the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment. It had not yet a name. She suggested various titles for Emma to propose: ‘The Funds’; or ‘Capital Towers’; or ‘Dividend Manor’; or ‘Railholm’; blind to the evidence of inflicting pain. Emma, from what she had guess concerning the purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery there which might make Tony’s treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she appeared actuated contrariously; and only her invalid’s new happiness in the sma............