Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted
on an audience at each ear, and at the house-door,
on her return to London.
SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY
There was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane
and her customary visitor Tom Redworth now. She
was shy in speaking of the love-stricken woman, and
more was in his mind for thought than for speech.
She some times wondered how much he might know, ending
with the reflection that little passing around was
unknown to him. He had to shut his mind against
thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick;
it was based scientifically when speculating and calculating,
on the material element—a talisman.
Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had
found most readable under that illuminating inquiry,
as to their means. An inspector of sea worthy
ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would the
money come? He could not help the bent of his
mind; but he could avoid subjecting her to the talismanic
touch. The girl at the Dublin Ball, the woman
at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were
his Diana. Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper,
his manful sympathy with the mere woman in her imprisoned
liberty, defended her desperately from charges not
distinctly formulated within him:—’She’s
not made of stone.’ That was a height of
self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his roots;
but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck
to it. Her choice of a man like Dacier, too,
of whom Redworth judged highly, showed nobility.
She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in
such an alliance. If allied, they were bound
together for good. The tie—supposing
a villain world not wrong—was only not the
sacred tie because of impediments. The tie!—he
deliberated, and said stoutly—No.
Men of Redworth’s nature go through sharp contests,
though the duration of them is short, and the tussle
of his worship of this woman with the materialistic
turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting
up of the latter under lock and bar; so that a man,
very little of an idealist, was able to sustain her
in the pure imagination—where she did almost
belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because
she might have been his—but for an incredible
extreme of folly. The dark ring of the eclipse
cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining
crescent perpetually in secret claimed the whole sphere
of her, by what might have been, while admitting her
lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth’s
mind the lack of perfect sanity in his conduct at
any period of manhood, was so entirely past belief
that he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge,
and had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did
but set him dreaming backward, after flinging him.
