Fleetwood nodded from the doorway.  Gower was left with humming ears.

CHAPTER XL

RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS

They went to their beds doomed to lie and roam as the solitaries of a sleepless night.  They met next day like a couple emerging from sirocco deserts, indisposed for conversation or even short companionship, much of the night’s dry turmoil in their heads.  Each would have preferred the sight of an enemy; and it was hardly concealed by them, for they inclined to regard one another as the author of their infernal passage through the drear night’s wilderness.

Fleetwood was the civiller; his immediate prospective duties being clear, however abhorrent.  But he had inflicted a monstrous disturbance on the man he meant in his rash, decisive way to elevate, if not benefit.  Gower’s imagination, foreign to his desires and his projects, was playing juggler’s tricks with him, dramatizing upon hypotheses, which mounted in stages and could pretend to be soberly conceivable, assuming that the earl’s wild hints overnight were a credible basis.  He transported himself to his first view of the Countess Livia, the fountain of similes born of his prostrate adoration, close upon the invasion and capture of him by the combined liqueurs in the giddy Batlen lights; and joining the Arabian magic in his breast at the time with the more magical reality now proposed as a sequel to it, he entered the land where dreams confess they are outstripped by revelations.

Yet it startled him to hear the earl say:  ’You’ll get audience at ten; I’ve arranged; make the most of the situation to her.  I refuse to help.  I foresee it ’s the only way of solving this precious puzzle.  You do me and every one of us a service past paying.  Not a man of her set worth. . . .  She—­but you’ll stop it; no one else can.  Of course, you’ve had your breakfast.  Off, and walk yourself into a talkative mood, as you tell me you do.’

‘One of the things I do when I’ve nobody to hear,’ said Gower, speculating whether the black sprite in this young nobleman was for sending him as a rod to scourge the lady:  an ingenious device, that smelt of mediaeval Courts and tickled his humour.

‘Will she listen?’ he said gravely.

’She will listen; she has not to learn you admire.  You admit she has helped to trim and polish, and the rest.  She declares you’re incorruptible.  There’s the ground open.  I fling no single sovereign more into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject.  I follow you to Esslemont.  Pray, go.’

Fleetwood pushed into the hall.  A footman was ordered to pack and deposit Mr. Woodseer’s portmanteau at the coach-office.

‘The principal point is to make sure we have all the obligations,’ Gower said.

‘You know the principal point,’ said the earl.  ‘Relieve me.’

He faced to the opening street door.  Lord Feltre stood in the framing of it—­a welcome sight.  The ‘monastic man of fashion,’ of Gower’s phrase for him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for his friend, a partial nod for Nature’s worshipper—­inefficient at any serious issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.