Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.

CHAPTER XXIX

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.