Chepstow

“ Chepstow stands on the lower part of a hill, near to where the beautiful Wye joins the noble Severn. The British name of the place is Aber Wye or the disemboguement of the Wye. The Saxons gave it the name of Chepstow, which in their language signifies a place where a market is held, because even in the time of the Britons it was the site of a great cheap or market. ”

“ Chepstow added, with a little laugh:
"Even a meal eaten alone is no pleasure to a woman. To-night, till you came to take pity upon me, I should have been far happier with 'something on a tray' in my own room. But now I feel quite convivial. Isn't the coffee here good?"
Suddenly she looked cheerful, almost gay. Happiness seemed to blossom within her.
"Never mind if you lie awake for once, Doctor Isaacson," she continued, looking across at him. "You will have done a good action; you will have cheered up a human being who had been feeling down on her luck. ”

“ Chepstow, surprised at the sudden radiance in Nigel's face, seeing before her for the first time a man she could not read, but a man whose physique now forcibly appealed to her—seemed to become splendid under some inward influence, as a half-naked athlete's does when he slowly fills his lungs, clenches his fists, and hardens all his muscles. ”

“ Chepstow."
"You were talking about Mrs. Chepstow?" Isaacson said slowly. "The famous Mrs. Chepstow?"
"Famous!" said Armine. "I hardly see that Mrs. Chepstow is a famous woman. She is not a writer, a singer, a painter, an actress. She does nothing that I ever heard of. I shouldn't call such a woman famous. I daresay her name is known to lots of people. But this is the age of chatterboxes, and of course—"
At this moment the brougham rolled on to the rubber pavement in front of the Savoy Hotel and stopped before the entrance. ”

“ This outlook affects men, both shames them and excites them, acting on god and brute. Neither shamed god nor brute with lifted head is in the mood for friendship.
Mrs. Chepstow had this instinctive outlook on male creation, and not even her delicate gifts as a comédienne could entirely disguise it.
At last Nigel reached a crisis of restlessness and uncertainty, which warned him that he must drift and delay no longer, but make up his mind quite definitely what course he was going to take. He was not a man who could live comfortably in indecision. ”

“ Lady Chepstow, my very best respects. I feel sure that his little lordship will be quite all right in a day or two, although I shall, of course, be glad to learn how he progresses. May I? Perhaps Miss Lorne might be persuaded to send me a word or two through—Mr. Narkom."
Lady Chepstow was still looking at him as she had been from the moment he had taken Ailsa's hand. Now she put out her own to him.
"Why wait for written reports, Mr. Cleek? Why not call in person and see?" she asked. "It will be more satisfactory than writing; and you will be welcome always." ”

“ For a moment he was silent, struck to silence by the fierceness of her cynicism, a fierceness which had leapt suddenly out of her as a drawn sword leaps from its sheath.
"I don't acknowledge that, Mrs. Chepstow," he said—and at this moment perhaps he was the man talking to himself in the dark, as Nigel often was.
"Of course not. No man would."
"Why not?"
"Men seldom name, even to themselves, the weapons by which they are conquered. But women know what those weapons are." ”

“ Once or twice Meyer Isaacson glanced across the room to Mrs. Chepstow. She was eating her supper slowly, languidly, and always looking down. Apparently she had not seen him or Armine. Indeed, she did not seem to see any one, but she was rather sadly unconscious of her surroundings. The Doctor found himself pitying her, then denying to himself that she merited compassion. With many others, he wondered at her solitude. To sup thus alone in a crowded restaurant was to advertise her ill success in the life she had chosen, her abandonment by man. ”

“ Chepstow, much as he even shrank from her, with a sort of sensitive loathing, if he saw her very often he might come to wish to see her. Never had he felt like this towards any other woman. Does not hatred contain attraction? By the light of his dislike of Mrs. Chepstow, Isaacson saw clearly why she attracted Nigel. But during those August days, in the interior combat, his Jewishness conquered his intellectual curiosity, and he did not go again to the Savoy. ”

“ His keen eyes of a physician read the ardour of Nigel's temperament. He made no mistake about his man. Nigel ought to have married. That he had never done so was due to a sorrow in early life, the death of a girl whom he had loved. Isaacson knew nothing of this, and sometimes he had wondered why no woman captured this nature so full of impulse and of sympathy, so full of just those qualities which make good women happy. If Mrs. Chepstow should capture it, the irony of life would be in flood. ”

“ In the valley, the eye follows for several miles the course of the Wye, which issues from a wooden glen on the left hand, curves round a green garden-like peninsula rising into a hill studded with beautiful clumps of trees, then forces its foaming way to the right, along a huge wall of rock nearly as high as the point where you stand, and at length, near Chepstow Castle, which looks like a ruined city, empties itself into the Bristol Channel, where ocean closes the dim and misty distance. ”

“ Whose beauty gives the simple soyle some grace.
Unlike the elevated and rock-founded castles of Chepstow and Ludlow, the strength of Skenfrith was in the low and marshy character of its position. The Munnow flows within a few feet of its walls, and overflowed into its ample ditches, and a few yards below the castle is the bridge mentioned by Leland. Skenfrith marks the uniting point of several valleys, and even now, with the advantage of modern roads, is by no means easy of approach. ”

“ He put his hand for an instant on his friend's arm.
"Clear your mind of prejudice, Isaacson," he said, in a low voice. "You are too good and too clever to be one of the prejudiced crowd. Let your first impression be a true one."
As the doctor went with his friend to Mrs. Chepstow's table, he did not tell him that first impression had been already formed in the consulting-room of the house in Cleveland Square.
V
"Mrs. Chepstow!"
At the sound of Nigel Armine's voice Mrs. Chepstow started slightly, like a person recalled abruptly from a reverie, looked up, and smiled. ”

“ Chepstow in the Civil War was held for the king, and surrendered to the Parliamentary troops. Soon afterwards it was surprised at the western gate and retaken. Cromwell then besieged it, but, the siege proving protracted, he left Colonel Ewer in charge. The Royalist garrison of about one hundred and sixty men were reduced to great extremity and tried to escape by a boat, but in this they were disappointed, as one of the besiegers, watching his opportunity, swam across the Wye with a knife in his teeth and cut the boat adrift. ”

“ The average spring rise of the tide is 38 ft. at Chepstow, while 50 ft. is sometimes exceeded; the average neap rise is 281⁄2 ft. The scenery is finest between Rhayader and Hay in the upper part, and from Goodrich, below Ross, to Chepstow in the lower, the second being the portion which gives the Wye its fame. ”

“ The triumphs of art aroused this world-feeling within him, and in his love of art he believed that he touched his highest point. As Isaacson's mental unconventionality put him en rapport with Nigel, his Jewishness, very differently, put him en rapport with her. There is a communion of repulsion as well as a communion of affection. Isaacson knew that Mrs. Chepstow and he could be linked by their dislike. His instinct was to avoid her, not to let this link be formed. Subsequent circumstances made him ask himself whether men do not often call things towards them with the voices of their fears. ”

“ All the coloured reproductions in the present volume represent drawings made during the artist’s residence in Hereford. The Chepstow Bridge and Castle (Plate XII.) was probably one of the results of Cox’s first sketching tour after his removal, and this very drawing may possibly have formed one of the exhibits which he sent to the Society of Painters in Water-Colour in 1816. Plate XXIII. may represent the sketch made for the picture of Goodrich Castle on the Wye, which the artist exhibited in 1819. ”

“ Enthusiasm plies a whip that starts steeds in a mad gallop it is not easy to arrest. Even the vigorous force that started them may be unable to pull them up.
Where exactly was Nigel going?
Smiling and sneering men in the clubs said, to a crude liaison. They said more. They said the liaison was a fact, and marvelled that a fellow like Armine should be willing to be "a bad last." Isaacson knew the untruth of this gossip. There was no liaison. But would there ever be one? Did Mrs. Chepstow intend that there should be one? ”

“ A threat against her, and the mention of a wedding bouquet!" he said, as he went back into the room and sat down to figure the puzzle out. "Only one creature in the world knows of my feelings in that direction, and only one creature in the world would be capable of that threat—Margot! But what interest could she or any of her tribe have in the death of Lady Chepstow's little son? Her game is always money. ”

“ Haddon wrote his epitaph. See Ascham's Letters: Oxon, 1703, p. 436., about his recantation. See Leland's Cygnea Cantio, 1558, p. 21.; and Preface to Hickes's Thesaurus, 1. 2."
J. H. L.
Richard Earl of Chepstow (Vol. v., p. 204.) .
—H. C. K. will find in the Conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis, my authority for styling Richard Strongbow Earl of Chepstow: e.g. Dermod MacMurrough addresses a letter to him as follows: "Dermon MacMorogh, prince of Leinster, to Richard earle of Chepstoue, and son of Gilbert the Earle, greeting," &c. I quote from Hooker's translation, ed. 1587, p. 11. ”

“ And at the same minute Diudya called out of the window —
“Sophia, make the Jewess pay a kopeck for the water. They take it always, the scabbies!”
Up and down the street ran bleating sheep; women bawled at the shepherd; and the shepherd played his reed, flourished his whip, and answered in a rough, hoarse bass. Three sheep ran into the yard and crowded together at the fence. The noise awoke Varvara, who took her bed in her arms and went towards the house. ”

“ And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!"
There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's has no meanness in him. ”

“ As it was a difficult matter for poor Chew to preserve his equilibrium, his comrades endeavored to keep him steady on the perpendicular by bracing him on either side. All went well until it came his turn to answer. When the officer called “Fitzhugh Carter,” Chew stood erect, pushed his hat back from his forehead and snapped out “Yer, sah!” and lurched forward to the line opposite. The loud and jerky way he was answered appeared to strike the lieutenant, for he raised his head and looked to where the sound came from and then cast his eyes down again to his roll. ”

“ From the yard could be seen Diudya, lighting a candle in the lower story; after which he took his spectacles, stood in the comer with a book, bowed before the ikon, and read.
The travellers slept. Afanasievna and Sophia crept up to the cart, and looked at Kuzka.
“The orphan's asleep,” said the old woman. “All skin and bone, poor lad! No mother on earth, and no one to feed him on his journey.”
“My Grishutka, I think, is about two years older,” said Sophia. “He lives in that factory like a slave, and has no mother either. . . . His master beats him. ”

“ Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp, unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:
"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick." ”

“ From the movements of the peasant women binding the sheaves, from the faces of the mowers, from the glitter of the scythes, it could be seen that the sultry heat was baking and stifling. A black dog with its tongue hanging out ran from the mowers to meet the chaise, probably with the intention of barking, but stopped halfway and stared indifferently at Deniska, who shook his whip at him; it was too hot to bark! One peasant woman got up and, putting both hands to her aching back, followed Yegorushka's red shirt with her eyes. ”

“ The invitation had been seconded by a letter from Lady Sherwood,—Chev's mother,—and after a few days sight-seeing in London, he had come down to Bishopsthorpe, very eager to know his friend's family, feeling as he did about Chev himself. "He's the finest man that ever went up in the air," he had written home; and to his own family's disgust, his letters had been far more full of Chev Sherwood than they had been of Skipworth Cary. ”