Diana of the Crossways. Volume 5

AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY

Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the head from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I trust you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and trust you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their mutual obligation in presence. Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye. The inquiry after the state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed their contrary ways.

The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would. be welcomed by Lady Dunstane. Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about to Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right of seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the lady, but the way is open to you.'

'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior titles to that distinction.'

'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'

'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my betters.'

'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;' said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you—to ascribe my acceptance of your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at heart.'

He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.

Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.

'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.

Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.

Warwick's table.'

The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.

Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour, when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness. He was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a chance, and good luck go with ye. I've said what I could on your behalf, for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian manner. Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept ejaculating: 'Not a bit! The fellow can't be Saxon! And she had a liking for him. She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the chicks. Better he than another, if it's to be any one. For he's got fun in him; he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the popular castors, as is their way over here. But I might have known there 's always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing. Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise. No matter! The daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow. For personal and patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature. But her friend says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert, kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest. They know me not, who think I can't worship. Why, what were I without my star? At best a pickled porker.'

Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. 'So, here's the boy. Query, the face he wears.'

'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.

'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.

'Well, and what next?'

'You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering.'

'Is that all?'

'Why, what more?'

Arthur was jealously, inspected.

'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.' Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a reflected ahem. 'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said. 'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world. She's down with a cold, you know.'

'An influenza,' said Arthur.

The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to cloak her sad plight.

'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country. 'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead. Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap. Ah, but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye understand?'

The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of the darting cracker-metaphor.

'I think I do,' he said. 'She will soon be at Copsley—Lady Dunstane's house, on the hills—and there we can see her.'

'And that's next to the happiness of consoling—if only it had been granted! She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes! Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament more deserving of homage than that lady.'

'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur. 'There's no sweeter subject to me.'

His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. 'As long as you like!—nor to me!' he exclaimed. 'And that ever since I first beheld her on the night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:—none of your Warwicks and your . . . But let the cur go barking. He can't tell what he's lost; perhaps he doesn't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on her tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady, to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'Tis a law they've instituted for the protection of dirty dogs—their majority!'

'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.

' Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic; and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate—down with a cold, no matter where; but we know where it was caught. So there's a pretty library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and a poetical figure too!'

He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.

Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be another world to me if I lost her.'

'True; but what of the lady?'

'No praise of mine could do her justice.'

'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the object. Hasn't she the brain of Socrates—or better, say Minerva, on the bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'

'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'

'And chaste.'

Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.

'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in

Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.

'Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your echo, my friend. Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'

'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.

'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'

Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.

It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him. But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the pleasure he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were drumming upon politics.