George Meredith - The Amazing Marriage. Complete

Her brother glanced at her. He was fond of her, and personally he liked her face; but such a confident anticipation of marriage on the part of a portionless girl set him thinking of the character of her charms and the attraction they would present to the world of men. They were expressive enough; at times he had thought them marvellous in their clear cut of the animating mind.—No one could fancy her handsome; and just now her hair was in some disorder, a night without sleep had an effect on her complexion.

‘It’s not usually the wife who decides where to live,’ said he.

Her ideas were anywhere but with the dream of a husband. ‘Could we stay on another day?—’

‘My dear girl! Another night on that crazy stool! ‘Besides, Mariandl is bound to go to-day to her new place, and who’s to cook for us? Do you propose fasting as well as watching?’

‘Could I cook?’ she asked him humbly.

‘No, you couldn’t; not for a starving regiment! Your accomplishments are of a different sort. No, it’s better to get over the pain at once, if we can’t escape it.

‘That I think too,’ said she, ‘and we should have to buy provisions. Then, brother, instantly after breakfast. Only, let us walk it. I know the whole way, and it is not more than a two days’ walk for you and me. Consent. Driving would be like going gladly. I could never bear to remember that I was driven away.

And walking will save money; we are not rich, you tell me, brother.’

‘A few florins more or less!’ he rejoined, rather frowning. ‘You have good Styrian boots, I see. But I want to be over at the Baths there soon; not later than to-morrow.’

‘But, brother, if they know we are coming they will wait for us. And we can be there to-morrow night or the next morning!’

He considered it. He wanted exercise and loved this mountain-land; his inclinations melted into hers; though he had reasons for hesitating. ‘Well, we’ll send on my portmanteau and your boxes in the cart; we’ll walk it. You’re a capital walker, you’re a gallant comrade; I wouldn’t wish for a better.’ He wondered, as he spoke, whether any true-hearted gentleman besides himself would ever think the same of this lonely girl.

Her eyes looked a delighted ‘No-really?’ for the sweetest on earth to her was to be prized by her brother.

She hastened forward. ‘We will go down and have our last meal at home,’ she said in the dialect of the country. ‘We have five eggs. No meat for you, dear, but enough bread and butter, some honey left, and plenty of coffee. I should like to have left old Mariandl more, but we are unable to do very much for poor people now. Milk, I cannot say. She is just the kind soul to be up and out to fetch us milk for an early first breakfast; but she may have overslept herself.’

Chillon smiled. ‘You were right, Janet’, about not going to bed last night; we might have missed the morning.’

‘I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will,’ she replied.

‘You’d be glad of your doses of sleep if you had to work and study.’

‘To fall down by the wayside tired out—yes, brother, a dead sleep is good. Then you are in the hands of God. Father used to say, four hours for a man, six for a woman.’

‘And four and twenty for a lord,’ added Chillon. ‘I remember.’

‘A lord of that Admiralty,’ she appealed to his closer recollection. ‘But I mean, brother, dreaming is what I detest so.’

‘Don’t be detesting, my dear; reserve your strength,’ said he. ‘I suppose dreams are of some use, now and then.’

‘I shall never think them useful.’

‘When we can’t get what we want, my good Carin.’

‘Then we should not waste ourselves in dreams.’

‘They promise falsely sometimes. That’s no reason why we should reject the consolation when we can’t get what we want, my little sister.’

‘I would not be denied.’

‘There’s the impossible.’

‘Not for you, brother.’

Perhaps a half-minute after she had spoken, he said, ‘pursuing a dialogue within himself aloud rather than revealing a secret: ‘You don’t know her position.’

Carinthia’s heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly conjured up?

She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and yet she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain of an unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she asked she would suffer greater pain.

The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some of the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the three aspects and signs of a house’s emptiness when they are seen together.

Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population of the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of sunrise. They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one stroke, and wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and all had vanished.

The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows, from a fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The firwood was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon fell rayless and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high overhead, themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like the mottled grey of an eagle’s breast: the smaller of them bluish like traces of the beaked wood-pigeon.

She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.

Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast, which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl had stuffed into Chillon’s leather sack—the fruit of secret begging on their behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky as he slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such a trifle till he had it inside him. ‘And you that love tea so, my pretty one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your mother,’ she said to Carinthia, ‘you will find one pinch of it in your bag at the end of the left-foot slipper, to remember your home by when you are out in the world.’

She crossed the strap of the bag on her mistress’s bosom, and was embraced by Carinthia and Chillon in turns, Carinthia telling her to dry her eyes, for that she would certainly come back and perhaps occupy the house one day or other. The old soul moaned of eyes that would not be awake to behold her; she begged a visit at her grave, though it was to be in a Catholic burial-place and the priests had used her dear master and mistress ill, not allowing them to lie in consecrated ground; affection made her a champion of religious tolerance and a little afraid of retribution. Carinthia soothed her, kissed her, gave the promise, and the parting was over.

She and Chillon had on the previous day accomplished a pilgrimage to the resting-place of their father and mother among humble Protestants, iron-smelters, in a valley out of the way of their present line of march to the glacier of the great snow-mountain marking the junction of three Alpine provinces of Austria. Josef, the cart-driver with the boxes, who was to pass the valley, vowed of his own accord to hang a fresh day’s wreath on the rails. He would not hear of money for the purchase, and they humoured him. The family had been beloved. There was an offer of a home for Carinthia in the castle of Count Lebern, a friend of her parents, much taken with her, and she would have accepted it had not Chillon overruled her choice, determined that, as she was English, she must come to England and live under the guardianship of her uncle, Lord Levellier, of whose character he did not speak.