At last the tension ceased; they had intelligence of the earl’s arrival.

His countess was little moved by it; and the reason for that lay in her imagination being absorbed.  Henrietta had posted her a journal telling of a deed of Chillon’s:  no great feat, but precious for its ’likeness to him,’ as they phrased it; that is, for the light it cast on their conception of the man.  Heading a squadron in a riotous Midland town, he stopped a charge, after fire of a shot from the mob, and galloped up the street to catch a staggering urchin to his saddle-bow, and place the mite in safety.  Then it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made for him.

Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world’s hot stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother’s thoughtful little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.

CHAPTER XXXI

WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her detestation of imagerial epigrams.  Otherwise Gower Woodseer’s dash at the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a ’devil on his back on a river’ was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and teaser.

Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew the breath from him;—­and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and gurgle of the nurses, he could swear.  He kicked at the bondage to our common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.  But there had been a mother to his father:  odd movements of a warmish curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard.  They were, it seemed, external—­no part of him:  like blasts of a wayside furnace across wintry air.  They were, as it chanced, Nature’s woman in him plucking at her separated partner, Custom’s man; something of an oriental voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life’s convict couple walk linked to one another, to their issue more.

There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother would have.  The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,—­he would be no mean one, no coward.

That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a mother:—­Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy—­that mother, a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the world.  ‘It is my husband’ sounded foolish, sounded freshish,—­a