The Amazing Marriage — Complete. George Meredith
He drew a portrait-case from his breast-pocket, pressing the spring, and handed it to her, saying: ‘There is one.’ He spoke indifferently, but as soon as she had seen the face inside it, with a look at him and a deep breath; she understood that he was an altered brother, and that they were three instead of two.
She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only ‘Yes.’
He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to learn when some minutes later she said; ‘Shall I see her, Chillon?’
‘She is one of the ladies we are to meet.’
‘What a pity!’ Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to get to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how readily he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.
Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain. She assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her own, save to make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her brother: she could not be robbed of their relationship.
Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed of, she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed it to the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her on, after the valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of waterfalls and busy mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew short and wild, and the glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam than water, and the savagery, naturally exciting to her, breathed of its lair among the rocks and ice-fields.
Her brother said: ‘There he is.’ She saw the whitecrowned king of the region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed to think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him, and continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle, merely admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been extinguished.—‘Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.’ Chillon’s words whispered of the means of escape from the den of her uncle.
But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of melting pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up in her ‘heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: ‘Be mine!’ His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl’s chances of winning attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but, as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a beautiful woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater hopelessness on her prospects. She bore a likeness to her father, little to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the mother’s lips and hair. Thinking of herself, however, was destructive to the form of her mirror of knightliness: he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to coldness, and the more completely when we try to command it. No, she thought, a plain girl should think of work, to earn her independence.
‘Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?’ she said.
He laughed out. ‘What ‘s in your head?’
The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and, as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable: ‘You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.’
He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: ‘Livia is one, and Henrietta!
Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. ‘Henrietta!’ She chose that name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her system, to absorb it if she could.
‘You’re not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my dear?’
‘No, Chillon.’
‘You can’t explain it, I suppose?’
‘A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.’
A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near her brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable to claim the privilege. That was her meaning, involved with the hazy project of earning an independence; but she could not explain it, and Chillon set her down for one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple adventurous girl had not previously seemed to be.
She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her tongue. Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title, passed with a sigh or two. It was her first taste of life in the world.
A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her recent mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and those ladies. Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and sang the music of the splendid spheres. Henrietta was closer to earth, for her features had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer, and the richer for him who loved her, being one of us, though an over-earthly one; and Carinthia gave her to Chillon, reserving for herself a handmaiden’s place within the circle of their happiness.
This done, she sat straight in the car. It was toiling up the steep ascent of a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native province. Her proposal to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her blood, now that she had mastered a new element in it, soon restored her to her sisterly affinity with natural glories. The sunset was on yonder side of the snows. Here there was a feast of variously-tinted sunset shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river, serrated cliff. The peaked cap of the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward snow caught a scarlet illumination: one flank of the white in heaven was violetted wonderfully.
At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round head and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out of the village, and he told her some of his hopes. They referred to inventions of destructive weapons, which were primarily to place his country out of all danger from a world in arms; and also, it might be mentioned, to bring him fortune. ‘For I must have money!’ he said, sighing it out like a deliberate oath. He and his uncle were associated in the inventions. They had an improved rocket that would force military chiefs to change their tactics: they had a new powder, a rifle, a model musket—the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme for fortress artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the defensive once again. ‘And that will be really doing good,’ said Chillon, ‘for where it’s with the offensive, there’s everlasting bullying and plundering.’
Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle divided the profits equally. She discerned what his need of money signified.
Tenderness urged her to say: ‘Henrietta! Chillon.’
‘Well?’ he answered quickly.
‘Will she wait?’
‘Can she, you should ask.’
‘Is she brave?’
‘Who can tell, till she has been tried?’
‘Is she quite free?’
‘She has not yet been captured.’
‘Brother, is there no one else … ?’
‘There’s a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.’
‘He is rich?’
‘The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.’
‘Is he young?’
‘About the same age as mine.’
‘Is he a handsome young man?’
‘Handsomer than your brother, my girl.’