XX Reginald Harewood to Lady Cheyne
Plessey, Aug. 24th.
I WAS over at Lidcombe again last week. Frank was to leave to-day for his sister’s: the Radworths have asked him for some time. I am also pressed to go, but I hardly like being with him. Unfair, I suppose, but reasonable when one thinks of it. He is a good deal pulled down, and makes very little of his succession: asks after you always, and seems rather to cling to company. All the legal work is over; and I hope you will not be bothered with any more letters. If you care to hear, I may tell you there is some chance of my getting to work after all. They want to diplomatize me: I am to have some secretaryship or other under Lord Fotherington. If anything comes of it I shall leave England next month. I shall have Arthur Lunsford for a colleague, and one or two other fellows I know about me. A. L. was a great swell in our schooldays, and used to ride over the heads of us lower boys with spurs on. I wonder if Frank remembers what a tremendous licking he got once for doing Lunsford’s verses for him without a false quantity, so that when they were shown up he was caught out and came to awful grief. I don’t know if I ever believed in anything as I did once in the get-up of that fellow. To have him over one again will be very comic; he never could get on without fags. Do you think the service admits of his licking them? I suspect he might thrash me still if he tried: you know what a splendid big fellow he is. Audley says he is attaché to Lady F., not to the embassy; and makes his way by dint of his songs and his shoulders. People adore a huge musical man. Muscles and music matched will help one to bestride the world. Aimè! I wish I could buy either of them, cheap. Do you remember an old Madame de Rochelaurier, who used to claim alliance with you through some last-century Cheyne, and was great on old histories?-a lank old lady, with a halfshaved chin and eyes that our grandmother called vulturine-old hard eyes, that turned on springs in her head without appearing to look? She has turned up again this year in England, and means to marry her daughter to Frank, the Radworths say. I have seen the daughter, and she is admirable; the most perfect figure, and hair like the purple of a heartsease; her features are rather too like a little cat’s for me; she is white and supple and soft, and I suppose could sparkle and scratch if one rubbed up her fur when the weather was getting electric. Clara thinks her figure must be an English inheritance: she is hardly over seventeen. They do not think Frank will take up with her, though C. would push the match if she could on his account. You would have heard of this from her if I had not written. Madame de Rochelaurier is one-third English, you know, and avows her wishes in the plainest way. She is immense fun, and very bland towards me. She gave me one bit of family history which I must send you: it seems she had it from the great-uncle-”homme impayable, et dont mon coeur porte toujours le deuil-rapiécé.” (She really said it unprovoked; Frank is a faded replica of his father, in her eyes; “mais Claire c’est son portrait vivant-fait d’après Courbet.” Which I could not make out; why Courbet? and she would not expound.) Here is the story:-
The Lady Cheyne of James I.’s time was a great beauty, as we know by that portrait-the one with heaps of full deep-yellow hair, you remember, and opals under the throat. It seems also she was a proverb for goodness, in spite of having to husband that unbeautiful “ William, tenth Baron,” with the gaunt beard and grisly collarthat bony-cheeked head we always thought the ugly one of the lot. That was why they gave her the motto “ sans reproche “ on the frame. She had two fellows in love with her-the one a Sir Edmund Brackley, and the other, one regrets to say, the old Reginald Harewood I was christened after, who wrote those poems my father keeps under key, and will not let the Herbert Society have to print. I knew he had a story, and that the old miniature of him, with long curls, once had some inscription, which my grandfather got rubbed out. He was a fastish sort of fellow evidently, and rather a trump; he had some tremendous duel at nineteen with a Scot of the King’s household, and killed his man; never could show his face at Court afterwards. The old account was that he lost heart after six months’ suit, and killed himself for love of her: but the truth seems to be this; that our perfect Lady Margaret lost her own head, and fell seriously in love with his rhymes and his sword-hand; and one time (this is the Rochelaurier version) let him in at a wrong hour. Then, in the late night, she went to Lord Cheyne and roused him out of sleep, bidding him come now and be judge between her and all the world. So he got up and followed (in no end of a maze one would think), and she brought him to a room where her lover was lying asleep with his sword unfastened. Then she said,-if he believed her good and honest, let him strike a stroke for her and kill this fellow. And the man held off (you should have heard your uncle tell it, Madame de Rochelaurier said; her own old eyes caught fire, and her hand beat up and down); he stood back and had pity on him, for he was so noble to look at, and had such a boy’s face as he lay sleeping along. But she bade him do her right, and that did he, though it were with tears. For the lover had hired that night a gentlewoman of hers to betray her into his hands before it was yet day; and she had just got wind of the device. (But really she had let him in herself in the maid’s dress, and just then left him. “Quelle tate!” Madame de Rochelaurier observed.) Then her husband struck him and roused him, and made him stand up there and fight, and before the poor boy had got his tackling ready, ran him through at the first pass under the heart. Then he took his wife’s hand and made her dip it into the wound and sprinkle the blood over his face. And the fellow just threw up his eyes and winced as she wetted her hand, and said “ Farewell, the most sweet and bitter thing upon earth,” and so died. After that she was held in great honour, and most of all by her old suitor, Sir Edmund, who became friends with her husband till the civil war, when they took up separate sides, and people believed that Brackley (who was of the Parliament party) killed Lord Cheyne at Naseby with his own hand. His troopers, at all events, did, if he missed. The story goes, too, that Cheyne lived to get at the truth about his wife by means of her servant, and “ never had any great joy of his life afterwards.” Madame de Roche’laurier gave me a little copy of verses sent from my namesake “To his most excellent and perfect lady, the Lady Margaret Cheyne “; she got them from our uncle, who had looked up the story in some old papers once, on a rainy visit at Lidcombe. I copied them for you, thinking it might amuse you when you have time on hand to look them over.
I
Fair face, fair head, and goodly gentle brows,
Sweet beyond speech and bitter beyond measure;
A thing to make all vile things virtuous,
Fill fear with force and pain’s heart’s blood with pleasure;
Unto thy love my love takes flight, and flying
Between thy lips alights and falls to sighing.
II
Breathe, and my soul spreads wing upon thy breath;
Withhold it, in thy breath’s restraint I perish;
Sith life indeed is life, and death is death,
As thou shalt choose to chasten them or cherish;
As thou shalt please; for what is good in these
Except they fall and flower as thou shalt please?
III
Day’s eye, spring’s forehead, pearl above pearls’ price,
Hide me in thee where sweeter things are hidden,
Between the rose-roots and the roots of spice,
Where no man walks but holds his foot forbidden;
Where summer snow, in August apple-closes,
Nor frays the fruit nor ravishes the roses.
IV
Yea, life is life, for thou hast life in sight;
And death is death, for thou and death are parted.
I love thee not for love of my delight,
But for thy praise, to make thee holy-hearted;
Praise is love’s raiment, love the body of praise,
The topmost leaf and chaplet of his days.
V
I love thee not for love’s sake, nor for mine,
Nor for thy soul’s sake merely, nor thy beauty’s;
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br /> But for that honour in me which is thine,
To make men praise me for my loving duties;
Seeing neither death nor earth nor time shall cover
The soul that lived on love of such a lover.
VI
So shall thy praise be more than all it is,
As thou art tender and of piteous fashion.
Not that I bid thee stoop to pluck my kiss,
Too pale a fruit for thy red mouth’s compassion;;
But till love turn my soul’s pale cheeks to red,
Let it not go down to the dusty dead. R. H.
FINIS
The thing is dated 1625, and he was killed next year, being just my age at the time. I do call it a shame; but Madame de Rochelaurier says it was worth her while, and would make a good story, which one might call “The Cost of a Reputation.”
“C’était décidément une femme forte,” she said placidly. That is true, I should say, but the presence of mind was rather horribly admirable; she must have had great pluck of a certain sort to go straight off to her husband and put the thing into his head; no wonder they called her “sans reproche.” I should put “sans merci “ on the frame if it were mine. Those verses of his read oddly by the light of the story; I have rather a weakness for that pink and perfumed sort of poem that smells of dead spice and preserved leaves; it reads like opening an old jar of pot-pourri, with its stiff scented turns of verse and tags of gold embroidery gone tawny in the dust and rust. And in spite of all the old court-stuff about apples and roses and the rest, there is a kind of serious twang in it here and there, as if the man did care to mean something. I suppose he didn’t mind, and liked his life the better on account of her; would have gone on all the same if he had known; fellows do get to be such fools. I don’t think I should have cared much either. Conceive Ernest not liking his wife to talk about it. He found the verses in a book of hers, and wanted to burn them: then sat down and read Prodgers on Pantology, or something in that way, for two hours instead, till Madame de Rochelaurier called, Clara told me that evening. A treatise on the use of fish-bones as manure I think it was. She will not take the Rochelaurier view at all, and says Lady Margaret ought to have been hanged or burnt. As for my forefather, she calls him the perfectest knight and fool on record: the sort of man one could have risked being burnt for with pleasure. She would have been a noble chatelaine in the castle days. One would have taken the chance for her sake; rather. And if ever anything were said about her-all such natures do get ill-used-I think and trust you for one would stand by her and speak up for her. She is too good to let the world be very good to her. Tears and brilliant light mixed in her eyes when she talked of that bit of story: the beautifullest pity and anger and passionate compassion. She might have kept sans reproche on her shield, and never written sans merci on her heart. I believe she could do anything great. She wanted to be at Naples last year; would have outdone Madame Mario in that splendid labour of hers. She says if she were not in mourning already she would put on deeper black for Cavour now; I told her not. If she had been born an Italian, and had the chance given her, she would have gone into battle as gladly as the best men. That Venice visit last year set the stamp on it. I never saw her so nearly letting tears really fall as when she quoted that about the “ piteous ruinous beauty of all sights in the fair-faced city that death and love fought for when it was alive, and love was beaten, but comes back always to look at the sweet killed body left there adrift between sea and sunset.” I am certain Ernest wears her out; the miserable day’s work does tell upon her, and the nerves and head will fail bit by bit if it goes on. Men would trust in her and honour her if she were a man; why cannot women as it is? Whatever comes, she ought to look to us at least; to you and me.
XXI Lady Midhurst to Mrs. Radworth
Ashton Hildred, Sept. 10th.
I WISH my news were of a better sort; but I can only say, in answer to your nice kind letter, that Amicia is in a very bad way indeed. At least, I think so; she has not held up her head for weeks, and her face seems to me changing, as some unusually absurd poet of your generation has observed, “from the lily-leaf to the lily-stem.” Stalk he might at least have said, but he wanted a sort of villainous rhyme to “ flame.” A letter from Reginald the other day put some light and colour into her for a minute, but seemed to leave her worse than ever when the warmth was taken off. Next day she could not come down: I, with some conventional brutality, forced a way into her room and found her just asleep, her face crushed into the wet pillow, with the fever of tears on the one cheek uppermost-leaden and bluish with crying and watching. I tell her that to weep herself green is no widow’s duty, and no sign of ripeness; but she keeps wearing down; is not visibly thinner yet, but must be soon. Her eyelids will get limp and her eyelashes ragged at this rate; she speaks with a sort of hard low choke in the notes of her voice which is perfectly ruinous. Very few things seem to excite her for a second; she can hardly read at all: sits with her chin down and eyes half drawn over like a sleepy sick child. I should not wonder to see her hair beginning to go: she actually looks sharp: one might expect her brows and chin to become obtrusive in six months’ time. Even the rumour we hear (not at first hand you know) about a Rochelaurier revival did not seem to rouse or amuse her. If there is anything in the chatter, one can only be glad of such an improvement in the second generation; for I cannot well conceive Frank’s marrying, or your approving, a new edition of Mademoiselle Armande de Castigny. Fabien de Rochelaurier was the most victimized, unhappiest specimen of a husband I ever saw: a Prudhomme-Coquardeau of good company, if you can take-and will tolerate-the Gavarni metaphor. The life she led him is unknown; half her exploits, I believe devoutly, never reached the light-many I suspect never would bear the air. You must know what people say of that young M. de Saverny, who goes about with them the man you used to get on so well with two years ago? He never turned up during Madame de Saverny’s life anywhere-and months after the poor wretched lady’s death his father produces this child of four, and takes him about as his orphaned heir, and presents him-notamment to the Rochelauriers, who make an infinite ado about the child ever after. Why, at one time he wanted to marry the girl himself-had played with her in childhood-plighted troth among budding roses -chased butterflies together-Paul et Virginie, nothing less. This was a year ago, just after he went back to France, she being barely out of her convent. Do you want to knew why, and how, it was broken off? Look in the table of affinities. Of course, if the girl is nice, tant mieux. Remembering my dear mother, it is not for me to object to a French Lady Cheyne. But a Rochelaurier-if Rochelaurier it is to be-you will allow is rather startling. Old M. de Saverny is dead, certainly, which is one safeguard, and really a thing to be thankful for. He was awful. Valfons, Lauzun, Richelieu’s own self, hardly more compromising. And here the mother tells. Unluckily, but so it is. Taking one thing with another into account, though, Philomène might get over this well enough. Ce nom tramontain et dévot m’a toujours crispé les nerfs. But if Frank likes her, well and good. People do not always inherit things. Your friend, for instance, the amiable Octave, is not very like that exquisite and infamous old father. Only I should be inclined to take time, and look well about me. Here, again, you may be invaluable to the boy. By what I remember, I should hardly have thought Philomène de Rochelaurier would turn out the sort of girl to attract him. Pretty I have no doubt she is. Octave I always thought unbearable; that complexion of singed white always gives me the notion of a sheet of notepaper flung on the fire by mistake, and snatched off with the edges charred. Et puis ces yeux de lapin. Et cette voix de serin. The blood is running out, evidently. M. de Saverny père was great in his best days. They used to say last year that Count Sindrakoff had supplanted his ghost auprès de la Rochelaurier. She is nearly my age. But I believe the Russian was a young man of the Directory or thereabouts. I am getting horridly scandalous, but Armande was always too much for my poor patience. She thinks herself one of Balzac’s women, and gets up affairs
to order. Besides, she always fell short of diplomacy through pure natural lack of brain; and yet was always drawing blunt arrows to the head, and taking shaky aim at some shifting public bull’s-eye. I wrote a little thing about her some years since, and labelled it, “La Femme de Cinquante Ans, Étude “; it got sent to Jules de Versac, who touched it up, and put it in the Timon-it was the best sketch I ever made. I dare say she knows I wrote it. It amuses me ineffably to find her taking up with Redgie Harewood; I suppose by way of paying indirect court to us. I know he has more than the usual boy’s weakness for women twice his age, but surely there can be nothing of the sort here? They seem exquisitely confidential by his own innocent account. She always did like lamb and veal. The daughter must be too young for him. A woman with natural red and without natural grey is no doubt not yet worth his looking at that is, unless there were circumstances which made it wrong and unsafe-but I speak of serious things. I thought at one time he was sure to upset all kinds of women with that curious personal beauty of his, as his poor sister used to upset men; he is such a splendid boy to look at, as to face; but now I see his lot in life lies the other way, and he will always be the footstool and spindle of any woman who may choose to have him. Less mischief will come of him that way, which is consoling to remember. Indeed, I doubt now if he ever will do any; but if he gets over thirty without some damage to himself I shall be only too thankful. Really, I think, in default of better, I would rather see him than Frank married to Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier. Lord Cheyne has time and room to beat about in, and choose from right or left. Now Redgie, I begin to believe, will have to marry before long. It would be something to keep him out of absurdities. We know too well what a head it is when any windmill is set spinning inside it. And, without irony, I am convinced Madame de Rochelaurier must have a real kindly feeling about him. She was out of her depth in love with your father in 1825, and Redgie now and then reminds me a little of him; Frank is placider, and not quite such a handsome fellow as my brother used to be. It is so like her to come out with old family histories and relics as the best means of astonishing the boy’s weak mind; but I did not know she had still any actual and tangible memorials of the time by her. I have been trying to recollect the date of her daughter’s birth; she was extant in ‘46, for I saw her in Paris, a lean child in the rose blonde line. Three, I should think, at the time, or perhaps five-a good ten years younger than Octave de Saverny. Redgie’s three or four years over would just tell in the right way-Frank I should call too young. I want you to tell me honestly how you look at it. To me it seems he might brush about the world a little more before he begins marrying. Only this instant come of age, you know. The attachment might be a good thing enough for him. Mademoiselle Philomène I suppose must be clever; there is no reason to presume she can have inherited the poor old vicomte’s flaccidity of head and tongue. Very spiritually Catholic, and excitable on general matters, the girl ought to be by this time; Armande, I remember, was a tremendous legitimist (curious for her) of late years, and has doubtless undertaken to convert Reginald to sane views, and weed out his heresies and democracies. I should like to see and hear the process. Since the empire came in I believe she has put lilies on her carpets, and rallied her crew round the old standard with a will. Henri V. must be truly thankful for her. Desloches, the religious journalist, was one of her convertsthe man whom Sindrakoff, with hyperborean breadth of speech, once indicated to me as a cochon manqué. Ever since the Légende des Siècles came out I have called him Sultan Mourad’s pig. One might suggest as a motto for his paper that line, Le pourceau miserable et Dieu se regardèrent. Edmond Ramel made me a delicious sketch of the subject, with Armande de Rochelaurier, in sultanic apparel and with a beard beyond all price or praise, flapping the flies off, her victims (social and otherwise) strewing the background. On apercevait en haut, parmi des étoiles, le bon Dieu qui larmoyait, tout en s’essuyant l’œil gauche d’un mouchoir azure, au coin duquel on voyait brodé le chiffre du journal de Desloches, numéro cent. Cette figure béate avait les traitsdevinez-du pauvre vieux vicomte Fabien. Je n’ai jamais ri de si bon coeur. Que Victor Hugo me pardonne! As I suppose nobody thinks just yet of betrothals or such like, I want to hear what you think of doing for the next month or so. It is a pity to leave Lidcombe bare and void all the autumn weeks. The place is splendid then, with a sad and noble sort of beauty in all the corners of it. Such hills and fields, as Redgie neatly expressed himself in that last remarkable lyric of his, “shaken and sounded through by the trumpets of the sea.” The Hadleigh sands are worth seeing about the equinox; only, Heaven knows, we have all had sight enough of the sea for one year. Still, Frank ought to be about the place now and then, or they will never grow together properly. Why can you not go down together, and set up house in a quiet sisterly fashion for a little?-he has hardly stayed there ten days in all since the spring. After living more than six weeks with you, except that little Lidcombe interlude at the end of July and those few days in London, it is his turn to play host. Or, if any sort of feeling stands in the way of it, why not go to Lord Charnworth’s, as you did last year? If there is anything sound in the Rochelaurier business, it will grow all the better for a little separation-I am sure I for one would not for worlds mettre des batons dans les roues. But if it is a mere bit of intrigue on the mother’s part (and I can hardly believe Armande a trustworthy person), surely it is better cut loose at once, and let drift. I shall try and see Philomène this winter, whether they return or stay. The Charnworths are perfect people, and will be only too glad of you all. A cousin’s death is no absolute reason for going into a modern Thebaid, nice as he was. And I hardly suppose you still retain your old preference of Octave de Saverny to Lord Charnworth in the days before the latter poor man married-entirely, I have always believed, a result of your early cruelty. Now, if you stay at home and keep up, in or out of London, the intimacy that seems to be getting renewed, I predict you will have the whole maison Rochelaurier et Cie upon your hands at Blocksham before you know where to turn. Science will be blown up heaven-high, and Mr. Radworth will commit suicide. I am getting too terrible in my anticipations, and must come to a halt before all my colours have run to black. Besides, our doctor has just left, and the post begins to clamour for its prey. He gives us very singular auguries about his patient. For my own part, I must say I had begun to have a certain dim prevision in the quarter to which he seems to point. At all events, it appears she is in no present danger, and we must not press the doubt. I trust you not to intimate the least hope or fear of such a thing happening, and only refer to it here to relieve the anxious feeling I might have given you by the tone of my first sentences. It would be unpardonable to excite uneasiness or pity to no purpose. False alarms, especially in the posthumous way, are never things to be excused on any hand. You can just let Frank know that we none of us apprehend any actual risk: which is more than I, at least, would have said a month since. She is miserably reticent and depressed. I must end now, with all loves, as people used to say ages ago. Take good care of them all, and still better care of yourself-on many accounts-and think in the kindest way you can of
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 301
