Diana of the Crossways

I have seen them in danger, and there they shine first of any, and one is proud of them. They should always be facing the elements or in action. Redworth reserved his assent to the proclamation of any English disadvantage. A whiff of Celtic hostility in the atmosphere put him on his mettle. She responded to the salute, and Mr. Sullivan Smith proceeded to tell her, half in speech, half in dots most luminous, of a civil contention between the English gentleman and himself, as to the possession of the loveliest of partners for this particular ensuing dance, and that they had simultaneously made a rush from the Lower Courts, namely, their cards, to the Upper, being the lady; and Mr.

Sullivan Smith partly founded his preferable claim on her Irish descent, and on his acquaintance with her eminent defunct father—one of the ever-radiating stars of his quenchless country. Lady Dunstane sympathized with him for his not intruding his claim when the young lady stood preengaged, as well as in humorous appreciation of his imaginative logic.

See, my lady, the gentleman, as we call him; there he is working his gamut perpetually up to da capo. Sullivan Smith groaned disgusted. He hated bad manners, particularly in cases involving ladies; and the bad manners of a Saxon fired his antagonism to the race; individual members of which he boasted of forgiving and embracing, honouring. So the man blackened the race for him, and the race was excused in the man. But his hatred of bad manners was vehement, and would have extended to a fellow-countryman. His own were of the antecedent century, therefore venerable.

Diana turned from her pursuer with a comic woeful lifting of the brows at her friend. Lady Dunstane motioned her fan, and Diana came, bending head. And I do want to go on talking with the General. He is so delightful and modest—my dream of a true soldier! Redworth—Miss Diana Merlon, Mr. Diana instantly struck a treaty with the pertinacious advocate of his claims, to whom, on his relinquishing her, Mr. Sullivan Smith derided him. He besought Lady Dunstane to console him with a turn.

He proposed to sit beside her and divert her. She smiled, but warned him that she was English in every vein. But we read, the last shall be first. And English women and Irish men make the finest coupling in the universe. And what was my observation about the coupling? Dan Merion would make her Irish all over. Oh, a man can hold his own with an English roly-poly mate: She must choose at home for a perfect harmonious partner.

They rack their poor brains to get the laugh of us. Now, is she engaged? A look at him under the eyelids assured Lady Dunstane that there would be small chance for Mr. Sullivan Smith; after a life of bondage, if she knew her Diana, in spite of his tongue, his tact, his lively features, and breadth of shoulders. Diana was on Mr.

Sullivan Smith, who ejaculated,. Diana hummed a little of the air of Planxty Kelly, the favourite of her childhood, as Lady Dunstane well remembered, they smiled together at the scenes and times it recalled. At one part of the fight he thought he would be beaten. He was overmatched in artillery, and it was a cavalry charge he thundered on them, riding across the field to give the word of command to the couple of regiments, riddled to threads, that gained the day. That is life—when we dare death to live!

I wonder at men, who are men, being anything but soldiers! I told you, madre, my own Emmy, I forgave you for marrying, because it was a soldier. But you have not told me a word of yourself. What has been done with the old Crossways? I must be driven there for shelter, for a roof, some month.

And I could make a pilgrimage in rain or snow just to doat on the outside of it. Be sure I am giving up the ghost when I cease to be one soul with you, dear and dearest! No secrets, never a shadow of a deception, or else I shall feel I am not fit to live. Was I a bad correspondent when you were in India? I knew I should be writing, to Emmy and another, and only when I came to the flow could I forget him. He is very finely built; and I dare say he has a head. I read of his deeds in India and quivered. But he was just a bit in the way. Men are the barriers to perfect naturalness, at least, with girls, I think.

You wrote to me in the same tone as ever, and at first I had a struggle to reply. And I, who have such pride in being always myself! Two staring semi-circles had formed, one to front the Hero; the other the Beauty. These half moons imperceptibly dissolved to replenish, and became a fixed obstruction. She was getting used to it, and her friend had a gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect naturalness. The block of sturdy gazers began to melt. The General had dispersed his group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm, construed as the signal for procession to the supper-table.

You must eat, and he is handiest to conduct you. Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour. And once more Mr. Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom of a happiness resembling tempest. He talked, and knew not what he uttered.

Diana of the Crossways — Complete by George Meredith

To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his business, and he performed it. Oddly, for a man who had no loaded design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he fell upon calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she sat at the table and he stood behind her. Others were wrangling for places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne: Say, seven hundred and fifty. Redworth agreed with her taste in poets.

We require the supple tongue a closer intercourse of society gives. Comfortable enough for a man in chambers. To dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be stark nonsense: But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office! Clearly they intended him to remain a bachelor for life. And they sent him over to Ireland on inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty.

I think exactly the reverse. It brings out the noblest traits in human character? It brings out some but under excitement, when you have not always the real man. Well, there was a suspicion of disdain. Redworth endeavoured to render practicable an opening in her mind to reason. He admitted the grandeur of the poetry of Homer. We are a few centuries in advance of Homer. We do not slay damsels for a sacrifice to propitiate celestial wrath; nor do we revel in details of slaughter.

He reasoned with her; he repeated stories known to him of civilian heroes, and won her assent to the heroical title for their deeds, but it was languid, or not so bright as the deeds deserved—or as the young lady could look; and he insisted on the civilian hero, impelled by some unconscious motive to make her see the thing he thought, also the thing he was—his plain mind and matter-of-fact nature. Possibly she caught a glimpse of that. After a turn of fencing, in which he was impressed by the vibration of her tones when speaking of military heroes, she quitted the table, saying: As Pat said to the constable, when his hands were tied, You beat me with the fists, but my spirit is towering and kicks freely.

Consequently he was a settled bachelor. In the character of disengaged and unaspiring philosophical bachelor, he reviewed the revelations of her character betrayed by the beautiful virgin devoted to the sanguine coat. The thrill of her voice in speaking of soldier-heroes shot him to the yonder side of a gulf. Not knowing why, for he had no scheme, desperate or other, in his head, the least affrighted of men was frightened by her tastes, and by her aplomb, her inoffensiveness in freedom of manner and self-sufficiency—sign of purest breeding: The candour of the look of her eyes in speaking, her power of looking forthright at men, and looking the thing she spoke, and the play of her voluble lips, the significant repose of her lips in silence, her weighing of the words he uttered, for a moment before the prompt apposite reply, down to her simple quotation of Pat, alarmed him; he did not ask himself why.

His manly self was not intruded on his cogitations. A mere eight hundred or thousand per annum had no place in that midst. He beheld her quietly selecting the position of dignity to suit her: A war would offer her the decorated soldier she wanted. Such are women of this kind!

The thought revolted him, and pricked his appetite for supper. He did service by Mrs. Pettigrew, to which lady Miss Merion, as she said, promoted him, at the table, and then began to refresh in person, standing. Sullivan Smith had drained a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr.

He explained to Mr. Redworth that he had summoned Mr. Malkin to answer to him as a gentleman for calling Miss Merion a jilt. I happened by the blessing of Providence to be by when he named her publicly jilt. The same if she had been an Esquimaux squaw. Redworth burst out gruffly, through turkey and stuffing. Sullivan Smith was flowing on. He became frigid, he politely bowed: I keep my pistols for bandits and law-breakers. The pleasing prospect of by-and-by renewed in Mr. Sullivan Smith his composure. They touched the foaming glasses: Sullivan Smith proposed that they should go outside as soon as Mr.

Redworth had finished supper-quite finished supper: Redworth declared the term to be simply hypothetical. Sullivan Smith, swinging his heel moodily to wander in search of the foe. This was his prelude to an account of Mr. Sullivan Smith, whom, as a specimen, he rejoiced to have met.

He talked of his prospects, and of the women. Fair ones, in his opinion, besides Miss Merion were parading; he sketched two or three of his partners with a broad brush of epithets. The remark had hardly escaped him when a wreath of metaphorical smoke, and fire, and no mean report, startled the company of supping gentlemen. At the pitch of his voice, Mr. Sullivan Smith denounced Mr.

Malkin in presence for a cur masquerading as a cat. He said the word. Dozens of gentlemen heard the word. And I demand an apology of Misterr Malkin—or. And none of your guerrier nodding and bravado, Mister Malkin, at me, if you please. The case is for settlement between gentlemen. The harassed gentleman of the name of Malkin, driven to extremity by the worrying, stood in braced preparation for the English attitude of defence.

His tormentor drew closer to him. Sullivan Smith uttered a low melodious cry. And then, as one intending gently to remonstrate, he was on the point of stretching out his finger to the shoulder of Mr. Malkin, when Redworth seized his arm, saying: Sullivan Smith beheld the vanishing of his foe in a cloud of faces. Now was he wroth on patently reasonable grounds.

Man up, man down, he challenged the race of short-legged, thickset, wooden-gated curmudgeons: Redworth, in the struggle to haul him away, received a blow from him. The thing has been done before by torchlight—and neatly. A way was cleared for them. Sir Lukin hurried up to Redworth, who had no doubt of his ability to manage Mr. He managed that fine-hearted but purely sensational fellow so well that Lady Dunstane and Diana, after hearing in some anxiety of the hubbub below, beheld them entering the long saloon amicably, with the nods and looks of gentlemen quietly accordant.

A little later, Lady Dunstane questioned Redworth, and he smoothed her apprehensions, delivering himself, much to her comfort, thus: The whole affair was nonsensical. Only he has, or thinks he has, like lots of his countrymen, a raw wound—something that itches to be grazed.

Irishmen, as far as I have seen of them, are, like horses, bundles of nerves; and you must manage them, as you do with all nervous creatures, with firmness, but good temper. You must never get into a fury of the nerves yourself with them. They want the bridle-rein. That seems to me the secret of Irish character. We English are not bad horsemen. To reward him for his practical discretion, she contrived that Diana should give him a final dance; and the beautiful gill smiled quickly responsive to his appeal. By which he humbly understood that her friend approved him.

A gentle delirium enfolded his brain. Eight hundred may stand as a superior basis. That sum is a distinct point of vantage. If it does not mean a carriage and Parisian millinery and a station for one of the stars of society, it means at any rate security; and then, the heart of the man being strong and sound. He had implied the people of the two islands. He allowed her interpretation to remain personal, for the sake of a creeping deliciousness that it carried through his blood. His thrilled blood was chilled. She entertained a sentiment amounting to adoration for the profession of arms!

Gallantly had the veteran General and Hero held on into the night, that the festivity might not be dashed by his departure; perhaps, to a certain degree, to prolong his enjoyment of a flattering scene. At last Sir Lukin had the word from him, and came to his wife. Diana slipped across the floor to her accommodating chaperon, whom, for the sake of another five minutes with her beloved Emma, she very agreeably persuaded to walk in the train of Lord Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nodding heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale, even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr.

At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth hearing. She turned and sent one of her brilliant glances flying over him, in gratitude for a timely word well said. And she never forgot the remark, nor he the look. A fortnight after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes had crossed the Channel back to England, and old Ireland was left to her rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously. The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web, not without colour: At a first inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect.

Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: She withdrew the trumpeting placard. Yet Lady Dunstane herself could name the bank of smoke, when looking North-eastward from her summerhouse, the flag of London: A year of habitation induced her to conceal her dislike of the place in love: Here, she confessed to Diana, she would wish to live to her end.

It seemed remote, where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks; but she kept one secret from her friend. Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South. Seven counties rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the Copsley windows. Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the grounds held both flaming horizons. So much of the heavens and of earth is rarely granted to a dwelling. The drawback was the structure, which had no charm, scarce a face.

The colour of it taught white to impose a sense of gloom. Her sensitiveness, too, was racked by the presentation of so pitiably ugly a figure to the landscape. She likened it to a coarse-featured country wench, whose cleaning and decorating of her countenance makes complexion grin and ruggedness yawn. Dirty, dilapidated, hung with weeds and parasites, it would have been more tolerable. She tried the effect of various creepers, and they were as a staring paint. What it was like then, she had no heart to say. One may, however, fall on a pleasurable resignation in accepting great indemnities, as Diana bade her believe, when the first disgust began to ebb.

Her friend bore such reminders meekly. They were readers of books of all sorts, political, philosophical, economical, romantic; and they mixed the diverse readings in thought, after the fashion of the ardently youthful. Romance affected politics, transformed economy, irradiated philosophy. They discussed the knotty question, Why things were not done, the things being confessedly to do; and they cut the knot: Men, men calling themselves statesmen, declined to perform that operation, because, forsooth, other men objected to have it performed on them.

And common humanity declared it to be for the common weal! If so, then it is clearly indicated as a course of action: They are the knot we cut; or would cut, had we the sword. Diana did it to the tune of Garryowen or Planxty Kelly. O for a despot! The cry was for a beneficent despot, naturally: In short, a despot to obey their bidding. Thoughtful young people who think through the heart soon come to this conclusion. The heart is the beneficent despot they would be. He cures those miseries; he creates the novel harmony.

He sees all difficulties through his own sanguine hues. He is the musical poet of the problem, demanding merely to have it solved that he may sing: Thus far in their pursuit of methods for the government of a nation, to make it happy, Diana was leader. By dint of reading solid writers, using the brains they possessed, it was revealed to them gradually that their particular impatience came perhaps of the most earnest desire to get to a comfortable termination of the inquiry: At this point Lady Dunstane took the lead.

Diana had to be tugged to follow. She protested a perfect certainty of the single aim of her heart outward. She discovered that her friend had gone ahead of her. The discovery was reached, and even acknowledged, before she could persuade herself to swallow the repulsive truth. Nevertheless the poor, the starving, the overtaxed in labour, they have a right to the cry of Now! They have; and if a cry could conduct us to the secret of aiding, healing, feeding, elevating them, we might swell the cry.

As it is, we must lay it on our wits patiently to track and find the secret; and meantime do what the individual with his poor pittance can. Old Self was perceived in the sigh. Placing her on a lower pedestal in her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an advantage in getting inward eyes.

I shall give up thinking and take to drifting. If the old Crossways had no tenant, it would be a purse all mouth. And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I say with my whole strength yes, I am sure, in spite of the men professing that they are practical, the rich will not move without a goad. I have and hold—you shall hunger and covet, until you are strong enough to force my hand: And they are Christians. It suited her, frail as her health was, and her wisdom striving to the spiritual of happiness.

War with herself was far from happiness in the bosom of Diana. She wanted external life, action, fields for energies, to vary the struggle. It fretted and rendered her ill at ease. In her solitary rides with Sir Lukin through a long winter season, she appalled that excellent but conventionally-minded gentleman by starting, nay supporting, theories next to profane in the consideration of a land-owner. She spoke of Reform: She had her ideas, of course, from that fellow Redworth, an occasional visitor at Copsley; and a man might be a donkey and think what he pleased, since he had a vocabulary to back his opinions.

A woman, Sir Lukin held, was by nature a mute in politics. Of the thing called a Radical woman, he could not believe that she was less than monstrous: As for a girl, an unmarried, handsome girl, admittedly beautiful, her interjections, echoing a man, were ridiculous, and not a little annoying now and them, for she could be piercingly sarcastic. Her vocabulary in irony was a quiverful. He admired her and liked her immensely; complaining only of her turn for unfeminine topics.

He pardoned her on the score of the petty difference rankling between them in reference to his abandonment of his Profession, for here she was patriotically wrong-headed. Everybody knew that he had sold out in order to look after his estates of Copsley and Dunena, secondly: He had left her but four times in five months; he had spent just three weeks of that time away from her in London.

No one could doubt of his having kept his pledge, although his wife occupied herself with books and notions and subjects foreign to his taste—his understanding, too, he owned. And Redworth had approved of his retirement, had a contempt for soldiering. Her unexpressed disdain was ruffling.

Sir Lukin exclaimed that he had been a working soldier; he was ready to serve if his country wanted him. He directed her to anathematize Peace, instead of scorning a fellow for doing the duties next about him: He quoted a distinguished Tory orator, to the effect, that any lengthened term of peace bred maggots in the heads of the people. He deemed it prudent to hint to his wife that Diana Merion appeared to be meditating upon Mr.

She thought so for two reasons: Redworth generally disagreed in opinion with Diana, and contradicted her so flatly as to produce the impression of his not even sharing the popular admiration of her beauty; and, further, she hoped for Diana to make a splendid marriage.

The nibbles threatened to be snaps and bites. There had been a proposal, in an epistle, a quaint effusion, from a gentleman avowing that he had seen her, and had not danced with her on the night of the Irish ball. He was rejected, but Diana groaned over the task of replying to the unfortunate applicant, so as not to wound him.

In the Spring Diana, went on a first pilgrimage to her old home, The Crossways, and was kindly entertained by the uncle and aunt of a treasured nephew, Mr. She rode with him on the Downs. A visit of a week humanized her view of the intruders. His age was thirty-four. Lady Dunstane thought no more of the gentlemanly official. He was a barrister who did not practise: The letter succeeding the omission contained no excuse, and it was brief. There was a strange interjection, as to the wearifulness of constantly wandering, like a leaf off the tree. Diana spoke of looking for a return of the dear winter days at Copsley.

That was her station. She spelt over the names of the guests at the houses. Lord Wroxeter was of evil report: Captain Rampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety. And it is impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover every dame and damsel present. She has to depend on the women being discreet, the men civilized. There were, one hears that there still are, remnants of the pristine male, who, if resisted in their suing, conclude that they are scorned, and it infuriates them: Assault or siege, they have achieved their triumphs; they have dominated a frailer system of nerves, and a young woman without father, or brother, or husband, to defend her, is cryingly a weak one, therefore inviting to such an order of heroes.

Lady Dunstane was quick-witted and had a talkative husband; she knew a little of the upper social world of her time. She was heartily glad to have Diana by her side again. Not a word of any serious experience was uttered. I have discovered that I can be a tigress! Lady Dunstane now indulged a partial hope that Mr. Redworth might see in this unprotected beautiful girl a person worthy of his esteem. He had his opportunities, and evidently he liked her. She appeared to take more cordially to him.

She valued the sterling nature of the man. But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly. Both ladies noticed in him an abstractedness of look, often when conversing, as of a man in calculation; they put it down to an ambitious mind. Yet Diana said then, and said always, that it was he who had first taught her the art of observing. Diana regained her happy composure at Copsley. She had, as she imagined, no ambition. The dulness of the place conveyed a charm to a nature recovering from disturbance to its clear smooth flow.

Air, light, books, and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted. She rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr. Redworth, for companion; or with Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among them. Imagination had become her broader life, and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain of it, certainly is a foreign animal: He contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy.

He is gross fact, a leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is detestable to the free limbs and senses. It amused Lady Dunstane to hear Diana say, one evening when their conversation fell by hazard on her future, that the idea of a convent was more welcome to her than the most splendid marriage. She wished her view of the yoke to be considered purely personal, drawn from no examples and comparisons.

The excellent Sir Lukin was passing a great deal of his time in London. His wife had not a word of blame for him; he was a respectful husband, and attentive when present; but so uncertain, owing to the sudden pressure of engagements, that Diana, bound on a second visit to The Crossways, doubted whether she would be able to quit her friend, whose condition did not allow of her being left solitary at Copsley. She was pleased with him, and let him see it, for the encouragement of a husband in the observance of his duties.

It was a delicious afternoon of Spring, with the full red disk of sun dropping behind the brown beech-twigs. She remembered long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods jaws of another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified woods, might be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a little ludicrous in him.

She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition that she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant exdragoon. He would rather hear that than any opera: His face, on a screw of the neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. His fist was raised on the length of the arm, as if in invocation. My oath on it! She told him not to think it necessary to pay her compliments. She found her hand seized—her waist. Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path.

If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words, direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them, sufficed for the work of defence. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above: He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—Oh! Once in the roadway, and Copsley visible, she checked her arrowy pace for breath, and almost commiserated the dejected wretch in her thankfulness to him for silence.

Nothing exonerated him, but at least he had the grace not to beg secresy. That would have been an intolerable whine of a poltroon, adding to her humiliation. He abstained; he stood at her mercy without appealing. She was not the woman to take poor vengeance. The question, was I guilty of any lightness—anything to bring this on me?

And how she pitied her friend! The burden of the task of meeting Emma with an open face, crushed her like very guilt. After an hour in her bedchamber she managed to lock up her heart and summon the sprite of acting to her tongue and features: But, to be just as well as penetrating, this was only the effect of her personal charm on his nature. Reflection washed him clean. Reflection informed him that the honourable, generous, proud girl spared him for the sake of the house she loved. After a night of tossing, he rose right heartily repentant.

He showed it in the best manner, not dramatically. On her accepting his offer to drive her down to the valley to meet the coach, a genuine illumination of pure gratitude made a better man of him, both to look at and in feeling. She did not hesitate to consent; and he had half expected a refusal. She talked on the way quite as usual, cheerfully, if not altogether so spiritedly.

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A flash of her matchless wit now and then reduced him to that abject state of man beside the fair person he has treated high cavalierly, which one craves permission to describe as pulp. He was utterly beaten. The sight of Redworth on the valley road was a relief to them both. He had slept in one of the houses of the valley, and spoke of having had the intention to mount to Copsley. Sir Lukin proposed to drive him back. He glanced at Diana, still with that calculating abstract air of his; and he was rallied.

He confessed to being absorbed in railways, the new lines of railways projected to thread the land and fast mapping it. He asked her where she was to be met, where written to, during the Summer, in case of his wishing to send her news. I am always in communication with Lady Dunstane. The recollection of the change of her feeling for Copsley suffused her maiden mind. The strange blush prompted an impulse in Redworth to speak to her at once of his venture in railways. But what would she understand of them, as connected with the mighty stake he was playing for?

The coach came at a trot of the horses, admired by Sir Lukin, round a corner. She entered it, her maid followed, the door banged, the horses trotted. Her destiny of the Crossways tied a knot, barred a gate, and pointed to a new direction of the road on that fine spring morning, when beech-buds were near the burst, cowslips yellowed the meadow-flats, and skylarks quivered upward.

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For many long years Redworth had in his memory, for a comment on procrastination and excessive scrupulousness in his calculating faculty, the blue back of a coach. He declined the vacated place beside Sir Lukin, promising to come and spend a couple of days at Copsley in a fortnight—Saturday week. He wanted, he said, to have a talk with Lady Dunstane. Evidently he had railways on the brain, and Sir Lukin warned his wife to be guarded against the speculative mania, and advise the man, if she could.

On the Saturday of his appointment Redworth arrived at Copsley, with a shade deeper of the calculating look under his thick brows, habitual to him latterly. He found Lady Dunstane at her desk, pen in hand, the paper untouched; and there was an appearance of trouble about her somewhat resembling his own, as he would have observed, had he been open-minded enough to notice anything, except that she was writing a letter.

He begged her to continue it; he proposed to read a book till she was at leisure. She spoke of the weather, frosty, but tonic; bad for the last days of hunting, good for the farmer and the country, let us hope. It might be surmised that he was brooding over those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. When would there be peace in the land? Where one single nook of shelter and escape from them! And the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses, shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an intolerable affliction.

They will be wholesale and past help. I have borne many changes with equanimity, I pretend to a certain degree of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured. You may call it the sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly sentimental: I love my country. I do love quiet, rural England. Well, and I love beauty, I love simplicity. All that will be destroyed by the refuse of the towns flooding the land—barring accidents, as Lukin says.

There seems nothing else to save us. We have already exchanged opinions on the subject. Simplicity must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman. As for beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption. A bushelful of nonsense is talked pro and con: What we are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is all. All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table. He might within a year have a tolerable fortune: He did not expect it; still he fronted the risks.

I say only that it may: And then one may have to regret a previous rashness. He listened, and resumed: He looked pertinaciously in the direction of the letter, and it was not rightly mannered. That letter, of all others, was covert and sacred to the friend. It contained the weightiest of secrets. You could very well have done so, only I fancy she knows nothing, has never given a thought to railway stocks and shares; she has a loathing for speculation. Lady Dunstane began to look, as at a cloud charged with remote explosions: But it was a flitting moment.

When he went on, and very singularly droning to her ear: A shock of pain succeeded it. Her sympathy was roused so acutely that she slipped over the reflective rebuke she would have addressed to her silly delusion concerning his purpose in speaking of his affairs to a woman. Though he did not mention Diana by name, Diana was clearly the person. And why had he delayed to speak to her? Here was the best of men for the girl, not displeasing to her; a good, strong, trustworthy man, pleasant to hear and to see, only erring in being a trifle too scrupulous in love: And if he throws all he possesses on a stake.

Only at present the prospect seems good. He ought of course to wait. Well, the value of the stock I hold has doubled, and it increases. I am a careful watcher of the market. I have friends—brokers and railway Directors. I can rely on them. I have not named her. I had no right.

Besides, the general question first, in fairness to the petitioner. You might reasonably stipulate for more for a friend. She could make a match, as you have said. She saw him now as the man of strength that she would have selected from a thousand suitors to guide her dear friend. As soon as he had said it he perceived pity, and he drew himself tight for the stroke.

He bore it well. He was a big-chested fellow, and that excruciating twist within of the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their course to grind the contrary to that of the heart, was revealed in one short lift and gasp, a compression of the tremendous change he underwent. She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by hinting it without hurting: They are not so excessively luxurious. It is good for young women in the early days of marriage to rough it a little. Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. The task of answering it was now doubled. He was not a weaver of phrases in distress.

His blunt reserve was eloquent of it to her, and she liked him the better; could have thanked him, too, for leaving her promptly. When she was alone she took in the contents of the letter at a hasty glimpse. It was of one paragraph, and fired its shot like a cannon with the muzzle at her breast: Warwick, and have accepted him. Signify your approval, for I have decided that it is the wisest thing a waif can do. We are to live at The Crossways for four months of the year, so I shall have Dada in his best days and all my youngest dreams, my sunrise and morning dew, surrounding me; my old home for my new one.

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I write in haste, to you first, burning to hear from you. Send your blessing to yours in life and death, through all transformations,. Not a word of the lover about to be decorated with the title of husband. No confession of love, nor a single supplicating word to her friend, in excuse for the abrupt decision to so grave a step. True, she might have made a more lamentable choice; a silly lordling, or a hero of scandals; but if a gentlemanly official was of stabler mould, he failed to harmonize quite so well with the idea of a creature like Tony.

Redworth also failed in something. Where was the man fitly to mate her! Redworth, however, was manly and trustworthy, of the finest Saxon type in build and in character. He had great qualities, and his excess of scrupulousness was most pitiable. Avowedly Tony had accepted him without being in love. Or was she masking the passion?

When she had finished the composition she perused it, and did not recognize herself in her language, though she had been so guarded to cover the wound her Tony dealt their friendship—in some degree injuring their sex.

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For it might now, after such an example, verily seem that women are incapable of a translucent perfect confidence: Well, tomorrow, if not today, the tripping may be expected! This was her unconscious act of reprisal. Her brilliant beloved Tony, dazzling but in beauty and the gifted mind, stood as one essentially with the common order of women.

She wished to be settled, Mr. Warwick proposed, and for the sake of living at The Crossways she accepted him—she, the lofty scorner of loveless marriages! She degraded their mutual high standard of womankind. Diana was in eclipse, full three parts. The bulk of the gentlemanly official she had chosen obscured her. But I have written very carefully, thought Lady Dunstane, dropping her answer into the post-bag. She had, indeed, been so care ful, that to cloak her feelings, she had written as another person. Women with otiose husbands have a task to preserve friendship.

Redworth carried his burden through the frosty air at a pace to melt icicles in Greenland. He walked unthinkingly, right ahead, to the red West, as he discovered when pausing to consult his watch. Time was left to return at the same pace and dress for dinner; he swung round and picked up remembrances of sensations he had strewn by the way. She knew these woods; he was walking in her footprints; she was engaged to be married.

Yes, his principle, never to ask a woman to marry him, never to court her, without bank-book assurance of his ability to support her in cordial comfort, was right. He maintained it, and owned himself a donkey for having stuck to it. Between him and his excellent principle there was war, without the slightest division. Warned of the danger of losing her, he would have done the same again, confessing himself donkey for his pains.

The principle was right, because it was due to the woman. His rigid adherence to the principle set him belabouring his donkey-ribs, as the proper due to himself. For he might have had a chance, all through two Winters.

The opportunities had been numberless. Here, in this beech wood; near that thornbush; on the juniper slope; from the corner of chalk and sand in junction, to the corner of clay and chalk; all the length of the wooded ridge he had reminders of her presence and his priceless chances: He felt that a chance had been. And had he spoken! But a worse than donkey. Yes, his principle was right, and he lashed with it, and prodded with it, drove himself out into the sour wilds where bachelordom crops noxious weeds without a hallowing luminary, and clung to it, bruised and bleeding though he was.

The gentleness of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit that was rather like purgatory sweetened by angelical tears. He was glad to go, wretched in having gone. She diverted the incessant conflict between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly sovereign, principle. Away from her, he was the victim of a flagellation so dire that it almost drove him to revolt against the lord he served, and somehow the many memories at Copsley kept him away.

For the present the place dearest to Redworth of all places on earth was unendurable. Meanwhile the value of railway investments rose in the market, fast as asparagus-heads for cutting: Had he been only a little bolder, a little less the fanatical devotee of his rule of masculine honour, less the slave to the letter of success. But why reflect at all? Here was a goodly income approaching, perhaps a seat in Parliament; a station for the airing of his opinions—and a social status for the wife now denied to him.

The wife was denied to him; he could conceive of no other. The tyrant-ridden, reticent, tenacious creature had thoroughly wedded her in mind; her view of things had a throne beside his own, even in their differences. He perceived, agreeing or disagreeing, the motions of her brain, as he did with none other of women; and this it is which stamps character on her, divides her from them, upraises and enspheres. He declined to live with any other of the sex. Before he could hear of the sort of man Mr.

Warwick was—a perpetual object of his quest—the bridal bells had rung, and Diana Antonia Merion lost her maiden name. She became the Mrs. Warwick of our footballing world. Why she married, she never told. Possibly, in amazement at herself subsequently, she forgot the specific reason. That which weighs heavily in youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be a trifle under older eyes, to blunter senses, a more enlightened understanding. Her friend Emma probed for the reason vainly. It was partly revealed to Redworth, by guess-work and a putting together of pieces, yet quite luminously, as it were by touch of tentacle-feelers —one evening that he passed with Sir Lukin Dunstane, when the lachrymose exdragoon and son of Idlesse, had rather more than dined.

Six months a married woman, Diana came to Copsley to introduce her husband. They had run over Italy: Her first letters from Italy appeared to have a little bloom of sentiment. Augustus was mentioned as liking this and that in the land of beauty. He patronized Art, and it was a pleasure to hear him speak upon pictures and sculptures; he knew a great deal about them.

Would she some day lose her relish for ridicule, and see him at a distance? He was generous, Diana, said she saw fine qualities in him. It might be that he was lavish on his bridal tour. She said he was unselfish, kind, affable with his equals; he was cordial to the acquaintances he met. Perhaps his worst fault was an affected superciliousness before the foreigner, not uncommon in those days.

On the other hand, the reports of him gleaned by Sir Lukin sounded favourable. He was not taken to be preternaturally stiff, nor bright, but a goodish sort of fellow; good horseman, good shot, good character. In short, the average Englishman, excelling as a cavalier, a slayer, and an orderly subject. That was a somewhat elevated standard to the patriotic Emma. Only she would never have stipulated for an average to espouse Diana. Would he understand her, and value the best in her? Another and unanswered question was, how could she have condescended to wed with an average?

There was transparently some secret not confided to her friend. But his requiring to be led out, was against him. Considering the subjects, his talk was passable. I have begun many volumes of Meredith, but I have finished few. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their independence". That is my experience of the class; and I shall return among my natural protectors — the most unselfishly chivalrous to women in the whole world" Feb 26, Lucy rated it really liked it.

Reading the first pages was like swimming in jelly. Then suddenly the novel came to life and I couldn't put it down. Don't be put off by Meredith's having based it on a real person - he may have used Caroline Norton as inspiration, but of course there is no actual affair, no children involved, and the politics is vague in the extreme.

The characters are wholly plausible - poor Emma, the devoted invalid friend with the flaky husband, Miss Asper subsuming her passions in pseudo-Catholicism, an Reading the first pages was like swimming in jelly. The characters are wholly plausible - poor Emma, the devoted invalid friend with the flaky husband, Miss Asper subsuming her passions in pseudo-Catholicism, and the splendidly drawn Dacier, a real rotter but so badly treated by the heroine. OK, Meredith does get a bit waves-breaking-on-the-shore when it comes to the romance, but he was a Victorian writer after all.

You'd forgive him a lot of that for the description of Dacier burning Diana's last letter it takes several pages.

Diana of the Crossways, by Meredith, George, : chapter1

I'd recommend the Project Gutenberg version - at the end there are the etext editor's bookmarks, all the best aphorisms crammed together! Apr 13, Happyreader marked it as to-read Shelves: Having a little public-domain e-book downloading spree. Jun 15, David Madden rated it it was amazing.

This book was really, really difficult to get into. I just couldn't do it. George Meredith knew the woman that he based the vivacious Diana off of. Meh, I just couldn't finish it. Jun 05, Amanda Himes rated it really liked it Shelves: This is a wonderful yet neglected novel; those who enjoy fiction by George Eliot or Charles Dickens would like it. Dec 16, Sarah Sammis rated it it was amazing Shelves: The book was a gift from my father before I went to college. I ended up reading it at long last while sitting in a laundry mat in Alhambra. It made the rather dull chore go by quickly.

It was a torment to read. The characters are improbable and artificial, the language and style are stilted, and the plot predictable and clumsily constructed. Jul 06, Abigail rated it it was ok. A pretty dull read. The characters are not interesting, and Meredith's style is very hard to get into and overly ornate.

Lisa Detora rated it really liked it Dec 29, Inna rated it it was amazing Aug 31, Diane rated it liked it Jan 01, Aileen Ailz Grist rated it liked it Nov 01, Alysande rated it liked it Feb 11, Sarah rated it really liked it Nov 01, Miranda rated it it was amazing Mar 31, Julia rated it really liked it Jun 10, Thalita rated it really liked it Oct 11, Catherine Pope rated it liked it Jun 16, Reuben rated it really liked it Jan 14, Anne Carlisle rated it it was amazing Sep 05, Angie rated it liked it May 05, Arianna rated it really liked it Feb 06, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

George Meredith was an English novelist and poet during the Victorian era. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in He was twenty-one years old; she was thirty. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems , which wa George Meredith was an English novelist and poet during the Victorian era. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems , which was published to some acclaim in His wife left him and their five-year old son in ; she died three years later.

Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , his first "major novel. As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.