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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4475 ***
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
+XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
+XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+XL.       AN EXPIATION
+XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+XLII.     THE LAST
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+NESTA AND HER FATHER
+
+The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late when Victor was
+robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
+politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
+carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
+when she had him there.  Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
+no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
+their feet.  It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us
+up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
+extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
+aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
+other, whichever came first.  Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift
+and cleanse all degradations.  But it did seem as if he were not
+enjoying: things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if
+not prickly, in the retrospect.
+
+He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom
+of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin
+phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize.  His dulled physical system
+asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the
+hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the
+substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a
+deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of
+a whimsical nudity; hardly more.  Nay, not more!  he said; and at the end
+of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
+suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society,
+lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the
+little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was
+a small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt!  But so it is in war:
+we must pay for our allies.  What if it had been, that he and she
+together, with their united powers .  .  . ?  He dashed the silly vision
+aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it
+broke, showing no heart in it.  His heart was Nataly's.
+
+Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
+strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk,
+or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
+besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as
+he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.
+
+Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
+ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
+entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
+surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.
+
+'And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!' The songful
+satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
+upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.
+
+He peeped in.  It was dark.  Sensible of presences, he gradually
+discerned a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he
+drew near.  Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter.  He bent
+over them.  His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's; she spoke; she
+said tenderly: 'Father.'  Neither of the two made a movement.  He heard
+the shivering rise of a sob, that fell.  The dry sob going to the waste
+breath was Nataly's.  His girl did not speak again.
+
+He left them.  He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room,
+when he said 'Good!' For those two must have been lying folded together
+during the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart
+had opened; the girl knew.  Her tone: 'Father,' sweet, was heavy, too,
+with the darkness it came out of.
+
+So she knew.  Good.  He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his
+pity of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex
+which finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them;
+he strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.
+
+All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
+would not be harsh on her father.  She would say he loved!  And true:
+he did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.
+
+He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an alien
+woman's before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
+thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
+smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women the
+flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
+faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
+is not so bad.  Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
+a wing, and treat men in that way?  It is a breach of the convention; we
+pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
+tempters.  Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was.  No
+necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while on
+behalf of his Nataly he had to .  .  .  Victor closed the curtain over a
+gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
+force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the devourer.
+Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
+circumstances.  She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
+between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
+give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
+uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
+soul like Dutchmen at the dam.  Here she was, and not desired, almost
+detested!  Nature detested!  It had come about through the battle for
+Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread
+she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
+besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living.  We may well
+marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!
+
+Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
+them.
+
+Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the
+lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
+favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
+greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was
+being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of
+it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.
+
+Nesta came.  Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
+laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising
+the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings,
+and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and
+plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound,
+muted splendour.  He told her it was a reception night, with music: and
+added: 'I miss my .  .  .  seen anybody lately?'
+
+'Mr. Sowerby?' said she.  'He was to have escorted me back.  He may have
+overslept himself.'
+
+She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a
+gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
+souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.
+
+He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.
+
+More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
+in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
+whom he had conducted to Moorsedge.  'Kiss me,' he said.
+
+She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
+his forehead, saying: 'My love!  my papa!  my own dear dada!' all the
+words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
+crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
+Londen street.
+
+He strained her to his breast.  'Mama soon be here?'
+
+'Soon.'
+
+That was well.  And possibly at the present moment applying, with her
+cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment
+of the traces of grief.
+
+Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
+than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
+family dinner.  She performed her part for his comfort, though not
+prattling; and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
+running rill-like over our daily humdrum.  Simeon Fenellan would have
+helped.  Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
+morning's paper.  'No harm before Fredi, my dear.  She's a young woman
+now.  And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.
+She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her 'duque';
+--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.  Now, mark
+me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer.  If only we could have
+her now!'
+
+'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly.  Her heart had a blow in the
+thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
+bringing criticism.
+
+'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.
+
+She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly's imitation of
+the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
+theatrical operatic attitude.
+
+'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
+three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
+where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was
+happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
+innocents;--whom heaven bless!  Jealousy of their naturally closer heart-
+at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and sweetness
+was felt to be in the not excluding him.
+
+Nesta engaged to sing one of the 'old duets with her mother.  She saw her
+mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if
+doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell
+to.  Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the
+girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.
+
+She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there might
+be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
+visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
+think such a man as her father irrational.
+
+People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced by
+Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went to
+Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
+ascended a stage.  There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
+and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
+voluminous robes.
+
+They crowded about their host where he stood.  'He, is their Law!' Colney
+said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
+regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing.  They had an air of
+worshipping, and he of swimming.
+
+There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neighbours: the gentleman
+representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
+Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis.  Few young men
+and maids were seen.  Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not
+mentioning her.  Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the
+piano.  Priscilla Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus
+Barmby.  Peridon and Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places.
+There was no fluting.  A famous Canadian lady was the principal singer.
+A Galician violinist, zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of
+his corporeal frame in execution, and described by Colney as 'Paganini on
+wall,' failed to supplant Durandarte in Nesta's memory.  She was asked by
+Lady Grace for the latest of Dudley.  Sir Abraham Quatley named him with
+handsome emphasis.  Great dames caressed her; openly approved; shadowed
+the future place among them.
+
+Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn's absence.  He said: 'A
+homoeopathic doctor's wife!' nothing more; and by that little, he
+prepared Nesta for her mother's explanation.  The great London people,
+ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
+on it.  But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
+one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
+whose marriage was of her making.  She did not disapprove Priscilla's
+behaviour.  Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
+openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
+proper feelings.  Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
+or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
+had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
+from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
+one of the few not ignorant.  The rumour was traceable to the City.
+
+'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.
+
+Nataly answered: 'You will grow used to it.'
+
+Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving.  Nesta had a
+transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
+company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
+own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
+their feelings chilled her.
+
+Nataly said: 'It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.'  She smiled;
+and at once the girl read woman's armour on the dear face, and asked
+herself, Could I be so brave?  The question following was a speechless
+wave, that surged at her father.  She tried to fathom the scheme he
+entertained.  The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was.  She
+could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads cannot
+obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding it is
+the sun's brilliance to their eyes.
+
+Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
+their world.
+
+Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the,
+City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
+waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation of a
+wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home with
+him.  Lady Grace Halley was at the office.  'I'm an incorrigible Stock
+Exchange gambler,' she said.
+
+'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulating in movement, and
+their heights are a preparation for their going down.'
+
+She said she 'liked a swing.'
+
+Nesta looked at them in turn.
+
+The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present.  She made play
+with Dudley's name.
+
+This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
+in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
+jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for
+protection.  But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
+contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt.  She read rather too much
+to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
+her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
+the lady's departure.  Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
+great of soul for jealousy.  Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
+from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
+affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
+suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
+would not stoop to a meanness.  'Plot?  Nataly?' said he, and shrugged.
+In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
+Nataly.  He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
+looked.
+
+But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
+who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation.
+He told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what,
+or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was.  She was trying
+to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of
+her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated
+in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the
+simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;--the
+lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near
+midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames
+magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow.  There is no grasping of one
+who quickens us.
+
+His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
+value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
+it was.
+
+At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
+the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
+help.  That was a dream.  She could more easily have uttered the words to
+Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision
+of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's compassionateness; and
+her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music within her, a wreath of
+cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted
+her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single
+unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing
+leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange
+sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a
+trance.  So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is
+all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the
+immensity of vitality in 'the shadow of a shade.'
+
+Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
+Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
+the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
+besides.  She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
+pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
+passed it.
+
+She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
+unjust.  For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-
+creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no
+mercy is in them for the transitional.  And Dudley--and it was under her
+influence, and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development:
+interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.
+
+Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
+upon their friends.  He quite joined with his English world in its
+opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
+guns.  Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
+popgun paper pellets.  The English kick at the insolence, when they are
+not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
+overshadowing and braceing.  Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
+Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
+clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
+friend's collapse.  How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such
+a spiteful diatribe!  The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was
+the finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although
+we are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who,
+after brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of
+Old England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
+pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
+printer.  His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
+was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
+who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
+the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
+to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public.  Further, he
+discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
+the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
+of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
+'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
+porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.'  After a week's privation
+of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
+countrymen.  As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
+Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
+the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
+him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout.  Mr. Semhians, all but
+treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
+the day': stimulating and not nourishing.  Britannia's mournful
+anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
+the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
+giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
+note of Conservatism.  But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
+suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
+dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
+and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
+we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
+what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
+butcher in the Satiric Art.
+
+Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
+her present feeling, was inhuman.  As little as our native public, had
+she then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs,
+visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale
+of slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from
+the undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire.  And truly it
+is not a fruit-bearing rod.  Colney had to stand on the defence of it
+against the damsel's charges.  He thought the use of the rod, while
+expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and
+those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their
+seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest
+rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them.  Insensibility to
+Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the
+worser thing in consequence.  And consequently upon the lack of it, and
+of training to appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables
+as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting
+themselves forked.
+
+'He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta.  'Colney will
+find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
+making concessions.  Here's this absurd Serial--it fails, of course; and
+then he has to say, it's because he won't tickle his English, won't enter
+into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'
+
+'But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
+always ready to help them,' said Nesta.
+
+'If he can patronize.'
+
+'Does he patronize me, dada?'
+
+'You are one of his exceptions.  Marry a title and live in state--and
+then hear him!  I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won't
+acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
+the success.  It is "a dirty road to success," he says.  So that, if
+successful, I must have rolled myself in mire.  I compelled him to admit
+he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a triumph!'
+
+Nesta's walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
+came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was
+ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his quotations
+of her sayings, thoughtful sayings.  'I declare she helps one to think,'
+he said.  'It 's not precocity; it 's healthy inquiry.  She brings me
+nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does.  I say,
+what a wife for a man!'
+
+'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,' said
+Nataly.  'You have not seen .  .  .?'
+
+'Dudley Sowerby?  He's at Cronidge, I believe.  His elder brother's in a
+bad way.  Bad business, this looking to a death.'
+
+Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.
+
+Let it be cast on Society, then!  A Society opposing Nature forces us to
+these murderous looks upon impediments.  But what of a Society in the
+dance with Nature?  Victor did not approve of that.  He began, under the
+influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is in
+a chastened nature.  And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
+Idea.  He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight:
+a muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by the
+inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
+spiritual roost.  She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
+Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
+humanity.  Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm
+below, was most mysteriously delayed.  Owing to it, in a manner almost as
+mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
+Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again.  But there was
+a bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest.  And Fredi away, he
+might be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one
+might guess, by a predecessor or two.  Ta-ta-ta-to and mum!  Still, in
+justice to the little woman, she had been serviceable.
+
+She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
+here we are with the murder-eye again!
+
+Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
+intimation of her bent of mind.
+
+'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said, on the fifth morning
+since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear, that
+this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.
+
+'Why, don't you know,' said she, 'we all meet to have tea in Mr.
+Durance's chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined
+by mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.'
+
+'Colney's selection of them!  And Simeon Fenellan, I hope.  Perhaps
+Dartrey.  Perhaps .  .  .  eh?'
+
+She reddened.  So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name could bring the blush to
+her cheeks.  Dudley had his excuses in his brother's condition.  His
+father's health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating.  Where there
+are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
+there are complications.  Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
+pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
+aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.
+
+'And supposing a fog, my dearie?' he said.
+
+'The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
+through densest fogs as well as over deserts,' etc.  She declaimed a long
+sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left the
+room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her mother's
+neck, murmuring: 'Mother!  mother!' a cry equal to 'I am sure I do
+right,' and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line of
+her instinct, without an object in sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER
+
+Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father,
+Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it.  The unusual performance had
+a meaning; she felt she was praised.  It might be because she made
+herself her father's companion.  'I can't persuade him to put on a great-
+coat,' she said.  'You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat
+of his ambition,' said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.
+
+He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform
+celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine
+which gave out serially THE RIVAL TONGUES: and there was talk of a
+dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters.  The pained Editor
+deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica.  'In, book
+form, perhaps!' he remarked, with plaintive' resignation; adding: 'You
+read it?'  And a lady exclaimed: 'We all read it!'
+
+But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are
+reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.
+'He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!'  Colney's poor
+consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book: for the
+funny monster has been known to like a shaking.
+
+'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining the group and
+grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her
+guessing.  'A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches
+the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of
+his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous!  And no wonder;
+his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back;
+and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his
+mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it
+unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can't; only swelling, which he's
+obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that's his
+intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of
+the baillir d'eau; and he's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of
+dropsy.  You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who
+stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing
+above proof is poured in; and there's your misfortune.  He's not half a
+bad fellow, you find when you haven't got to serve him.'
+
+'Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!' Colney murmured.
+
+The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having
+certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author;
+and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness
+prompting the generosity.  Publication of a book, is the philosopher's
+lantern upon one's fellows.
+
+Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing
+Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at
+Brighton.  Simeon's tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word;
+he was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national
+grotesque-sublime.
+
+'That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor!  Don't listen to Simeon; he's a man
+of lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such
+like crop of carcase prose: this is epical.  In DRINK we have Old
+England's organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus,
+ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand.  Keep a
+straight eye on the primary motives of man, you'll own the English
+produce the material for proud verse; they're alive there!  Dartrey's
+Demerara makes a pretty episode of the battle.  I haven't seen it--if
+it's possible to look on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar
+appearance in repose, Jove's lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus
+at another.  Observe Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose
+of laying his miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars,
+who had offended.  But we have his name, my dear Victor!  His name,
+Simeon?--Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he
+obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his
+convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his
+place another young student, who'll grow up to do similarly.  And
+Dartrey, we assume, is off to stop that system.  You behold Sir Dartrey
+twirling the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we
+shall have an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading
+heroic louts.  Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!--always unpatriotic, you
+'ll say.  Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes
+on Beer for the uniting of you English!  I tell you no poetic fiction.
+Seeing him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent,
+Venus, to shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most
+diverting of interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-
+bonnet, and Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing
+bedevilled mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not
+under secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and
+that was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by
+a battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat's boys; and they fell
+upon the hymners.  Here you fill in with pastoral similes.  They struck
+the maid adored by Skepsey.  And that was the blow which slew them!
+Our little man drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their
+work.  A valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the
+nob, and suddenly the Demerara lightened.  It flailed to thresh.  Enough.
+to say, brains would have come.  The Bungays made a show of fight.  No
+lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before
+Achilles rageing.  You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the
+ballad.  We want only a few names of the fallen.  It was the carving of a
+maitre chef, according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme
+precision: they fell, accurately sliced from the joint.  Having done with
+them, Dartrey tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of
+battle; and he let his major go unscathed.  Phlebotomy sufficient for the
+day!'
+
+Nesta's ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.
+
+'Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,'
+Victor said.  'He can't have joined those people?'
+
+'They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,' interposed Fenellan.
+'The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a
+shindy.'
+
+'Suit him!  They're the scandal of our streets.'  Victor was pricked with
+a jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.
+
+'Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,' said Colney.
+'You don't see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,' he harped on the
+word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see.
+'Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge.  They're
+honest foes of vice, and they move:--in England!  Pulpit-preaching has no
+effect.  For gross maladies, gross remedies.  You may judge of what you
+are by the quality of the cure.  Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint--
+it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English
+frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make.  It may
+still be the saving of you--on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not
+observed that it aims at higher.  And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is
+off to the East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.'
+
+'So there's the reason for our not seeing him!' Victor turned to Nesta.
+
+'Papa, you won't be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,'
+said Nesta.  'I'm sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.'
+
+Colney smiled on her.  'And you too?'
+
+'If women knew how!'
+
+'They're hitting on more ways at present than the men--in England.'
+
+'But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they're allowed the
+chance here.'
+
+'Good!' Fenellan exclaimed.  'And that upsets his placement of the modern
+national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what
+remains.'
+
+Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'
+
+Their circle widened.  Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led
+about and introduced to ladies.  They were encouraging with her.  One of
+them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine
+insurrection.  She said: 'I hear your praises from Mr. Durance.  He
+rarely praises.  You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of
+women, he says.'
+
+Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart.  She speculated in the
+dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless.  And
+did Mr. Durance approve?  But surely she stood in a glorious England if
+there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils.  Oh!  that
+is the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the
+meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer
+shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.
+
+She cried in her bosom: I feel!  She had no other expression for that
+which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the
+celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran
+through her.  It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that
+certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils;
+and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel
+thanking heaven.
+
+Society was being attacked and defended.  She could but studiously
+listen.  Her father was listening.  The assailant was a lady; and she had
+a hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial
+for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by
+brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously
+claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world
+disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite!  She flung the gauntlet at
+externally venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where
+horrification, execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a
+shortly antecedent day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding
+her to expulsion.  Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her.  Colney did
+the same.  Victor turned sharp on him.  'Yes,' Colney said; 'we unfold
+the standard of extremes in this country, to get a single step taken:
+that's how we move: we threaten death to get footway.  Now, mark:
+Society's errors will be admitted.'
+
+A gentleman spoke.  He began by admitting Society's errors.
+Nevertheless, it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may
+say of Society in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul.
+We may wash, trim, purify, but we must not maim it.  The assertion of our
+individuality in opposition to the Government of Society--this existing
+Society--is a toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et
+caetera.
+
+Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.--But, if
+you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get
+it.--But you have it!  Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are
+too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the
+pits by your slackness:--etc.  There was a pretty hot debate.  Both
+assailant and defendant, to Victor's thinking, spoke well, and each the
+right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer
+neither.  He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered
+it in his position.  Mentally, he was on the side of Society.  Yet he was
+annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence
+unfolded.  But it was absurd to expect it would not be.  And in fact, a
+position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for
+stultifying us.
+
+Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly's handwriting called
+him home.  She wrote: 'Make my excuses.  C. D.  will give Nesta and some
+lady dinner.  A visitor here.  Come alone, and without delay.  Quite
+well, robust.  Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.'
+
+Nesta was happy to stay; and Victor set forth.
+
+The visitor?  plainly Dudley.  Nataly's trusting the girl to the chance
+of some lady being present, was unlike her.  Dudley might be tugging at
+the cord; and the recent conversation upon Society, rendered one of its
+gilt pillars particularly estimable.--A person in the debate had declared
+this modern protest on behalf of individualism to represent Society's
+Criminal Trial.  And it is likely to be a long one.  And good for the
+world, that we see such a Trial!--Well said or not, undoubtedly Society
+is an old criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual
+worship where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord.  But it has
+a case for pleading.  We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping
+lumberer's raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother.
+Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting level?--
+enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design.  If Society is to
+subsist, it must have the human with the logical argument against the cry
+of the free-flags, instead of presenting a block's obtuseness.  That, you
+need not hesitate to believe, will be rolled downward and disintegrated,
+sooner than later.  A Society based on the logical concrete of humane
+considerateness:--a Society prohibiting to Mrs. Burman her wielding of a
+life-long rod .  .  .  .
+
+The personal element again to confuse inquiry!--And Skepsey and Barmby
+both of them bent on doing work without inquiry of any sort!  They were
+enviable: they were good fellows.  Victor clung to the theme because it
+hinted of next door to his lost Idea.  He rubbed the back of his head,
+fancying a throb there.  Are civilized creatures incapable of abstract
+thought when their social position is dubious?  For if so, we never can
+be quit of those we forsake.--Apparently Mrs. Burman's unfathomed power
+lay in her compelling him to summon the devilish in himself and play upon
+the impish in Society, that he might overcome her.
+
+Victor's house-door stopped this current.
+
+Nataly took his embrace.
+
+'Nothing wrong?' he said, and saw the something.  It was a favourable
+moment to tell her what she might not at another time regard as a small
+affair.  'News in the City to-day of that South London borough being
+vacated.  Quatley urges me.  A death again!  I saw Pempton, too.  Will
+you credit me when I tell you he carries his infatuation so far, that he
+has been investing in Japanese and Chinese Loans, because they are less
+meat-eaters than others, and vegetarians are more stable, and outlast us
+all!--Dudley the visitor?'  'Mr. Sowerby has been here,' she said, in a
+shaking low voice.
+
+Victor held her hand and felt a squeeze more nervous than affectionate.
+
+'To consult with me,' she added.  'My maid will go at ten to bring Nesta;
+Mr. Durance I can count on, to see her safe home.  Ah!' she wailed.
+
+Victor nodded, saying: 'I guess.  And, my love, you will receive Mrs.
+John Cormyn to-morrow morning.  I can't endure gaps.  Gaps in our circle
+must never be.  Do I guess?--I spoke to Colney about bringing her home.'
+
+Nataly sighed: 'Ah!  make what provision we will!  Evil--Mr. Sowerby has
+had a great deal to bear.'
+
+'A worldling may think so.'
+
+Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze
+her speech.
+
+'Victor!  Our Nesta!  Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain.  And how the Miss
+Duvidneys!  .  .  .  At that Brighton!'--The voice he heard was not his
+darling's deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: 'She has
+been permitted to make acquaintance--she has been seen riding with--she
+has called upon--Oh! it is one of those abandoned women.  In her house!
+Our girl!  Our Nesta!  She was insulted by a man in the woman's house.
+She is talked of over Brighton.  The mother!--the daughter!  And grant me
+this--that never was girl more carefully .  .  .  never till she was
+taken from me.  Oh!  do not forget.  You will defend me?  You will say,
+that her mother did with all her soul strive .  .  .  It is not a rumour.
+Mr. Sowerby has had it confirmed.'  A sob caught her voice.
+
+Victor's hands caressed to console: 'Dudley does not propose to .  .  ?'
+
+'Nesta must promise .  .  .  But how it happened?  How!  An acquaintance
+with--contact with!--Oh!  cruel!'  Each time she ceased speaking, the
+wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but
+she locked them in.
+
+'An accident!' said Victor; 'some misunderstanding--there can't be harm.
+Of course, she promises--hasn't to promise.  How could a girl
+distinguish!  He does not cast blame on her?'
+
+'Dear, if you would go down to Dartrey to-morrow.  He knows:--it is over
+the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta.  Innocent,
+yes!  Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that.  Ignorant of the
+character of the dreadful woman?  Ah, if I could ever in anything think
+her ignorant!  She frightens me.  Mr. Sowerby is indulgent.  He does me
+justice.  My duty to her--I must defend myself--has been my first
+thought.  I said in my prayers--she at least!  .  .  .  We have to see
+the more than common reasons why she, of all girls, should--he did not
+hint it, he was delicate: her name must not be public.'
+
+'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor.  'It
+does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent."  My dear, if you were down
+there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men
+seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
+watched them along the parade, often.  Clear as day how it happened!
+I'll go down early to-morrow.'
+
+He fancied Nataly was appeased.  And even out of this annoyance, there
+was the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated
+suit.
+
+Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a
+moderation of it.  She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
+recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
+comfort they gave.  But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
+perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's
+coming returned.
+
+For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
+a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
+drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
+to the depth of it.  She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
+corruption must come of the contact with impurity.
+
+Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her sole
+revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.
+
+She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:
+'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the daughter
+excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for
+the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike consigned to
+the corners of the world's dust-heaps.  She cried out, that her pride was
+broken.  Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces.  The
+tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to come now,
+and she had none.  It might be, that she had not strength for weeping.
+She was very weak.  Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta's
+entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand: a chill
+and a clouding overcame her.  The quitted bed seemed the haven of a
+drifted wreck to reach.
+
+Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter
+morning.  'The mother!--the daughter!' had swung a pendulum for some time
+during the night in him, too.  He would rather have been subjected to the
+spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the
+dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting,
+waters.
+
+He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache:
+'Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into
+Fredi's eyes!' he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just
+a little afraid of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+
+Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness
+in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end.  Yesterday,
+before Dudley Sowerby's visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the
+tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing
+her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak
+repentantly, most tenderly.  Mrs. John said: 'You will believe I have
+suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think': and she did not set the
+smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of
+laughter between them.  Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the
+parting kissed her.  She would rather have seen her friend than not: so
+far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead
+in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved
+darkness and silence.  She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was
+broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they
+cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.
+
+The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain
+space for recovery combative.  She said:
+
+Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I
+would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt--what
+I can of it.  All I contend against is, injustice.  And she sank into
+sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to
+phrase them.
+
+Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
+loneliness;--an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how,
+more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her girl;--
+seemed under the hand of the angel of God.  The abandonment of her by
+friends, was merely the light to show it.
+
+Midday's post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to
+be allowed to call on her next day.--We are not so easily cast off!
+Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not
+been so great.  She wrote: 'Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.'
+
+Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
+the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
+all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
+receipt of Priscilla's empty letter: for her soul's desire was to be
+doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
+to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength, she
+said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.
+
+Nesta's being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
+Doubts of the girl's possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
+question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
+that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
+herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
+counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to
+reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap,
+and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the
+divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for
+chastisement.  She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal.  And that
+calmed her.
+
+She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came!  Therefore
+the blow was proved divine.  Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
+appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex!  And
+brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!
+
+Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice.  She
+had denied herself to Nesta's redoubled petition.  Nesta knocking at the
+door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her girl
+on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge.  She heard the
+voice of Dartrey Fenellan.
+
+He was admitted.  'No, dear,' she said to Nesta; and Nesta's, 'My own
+mother,' consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang
+a stinging tear to the mother's eyelids.
+
+Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.
+
+'Is it a very low woman?' Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
+face abashed.
+
+'It is not,' said he, quick to meet any abruptness.
+
+'She must be cunning.'
+
+'In the ordinary way.  We say it of Puss before the hounds.'
+
+'To deceive a girl like Nesta!'
+
+'She has done no harm.'
+
+'Dartrey, you speak to a mother.  You have seen the woman?  She is?
+--ah!'
+
+'She is womanly, womanly.'
+
+'Quite one of those .  .  . ?'
+
+'My dear soul!  You can't shake them off in that way.  She is one of us.
+If we have the class, we can't escape from it.  They are not to bear all
+the burden because they exist.  We are the bigger debtors.  I tell you
+she is womanly.'
+
+'It sounds like horrid cynicism.'
+
+'Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.'
+
+'Do not make me hate your chivalry.  This woman is a rod on my back.
+Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta's mind!'
+
+'Don't fear!'
+
+'Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?'
+
+'To Nesta herself?--not any: not to a girl like your girl.'
+
+'To my girl's name?  Speak at once.  But I know she has.  She induced
+Nesta to go to her house.  My girl was insulted in this woman's house.'
+
+Dartrey's forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present
+contempt.  'I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of
+it, knowing the facts 's not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers
+of your girl.'
+
+'She is talked of!'
+
+'A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of
+idlers!'
+
+'The woman is notorious.'  Nataly said it shivering.
+
+He shook his head.  'Not true.'
+
+'She has an air of a lady?'
+
+'She sits a horse well.'
+
+'Would she to any extent deceive me--impose on me here?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Ah!' Nataly moaned. . . .
+
+'But what?' said Dartrey.  'There was no pretence.  Her style is not
+worse than that of some we have seen.  There was no effort to deceive.
+The woman's plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or
+two tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use.  There are
+women who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the
+wilderness.'
+
+'Yes; I know!--those ideas of yours!' Nataly had once admired him for his
+knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot.  'You have
+spoken to this woman?  She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?'
+
+'She thanked God for having met her.'
+
+'Is it one of the hysterical creatures?'
+
+Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.
+
+He laughed to himself.  'A clever question.  There is a leaning to
+excitement of manner at times.  It 's not hysteria.  Allow for her
+position.'
+
+Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly
+said: 'What rank of life does the woman come from?'
+
+'The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your
+Book-stalls.  I am not precise?'
+
+'Leave Mr. Durance.  Is she in any degree commonly well bred?  .  .  .
+behaviour, talk-her English.'
+
+'I trench on Mr. Durance in replying.  Her English is passable.  You may
+hear .  .  .'
+
+'Everywhere, of course!  And this woman of slipshod English and excited
+manners imposed upon Nesta!'
+
+'It would not be my opinion.'
+
+'Did not impose on her!'
+
+'Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.'
+
+'Think what that says, Dartrey!'
+
+'You have had a detestable version of the story.'
+
+'Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!'
+
+'She may.  She's a better woman for having met her.  Don't suppose we're
+for supernatural conversions.  The woman makes no show of that.  But she
+has found a good soul among her sex--her better self in youth, as one
+guesses; and she is grateful--feels farther from exile in consequence.
+She has found a lady to take her by the hand!--not a common case.  She
+can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta.  I forget if she
+says it; I say it.  You have heard the story from one of your
+conventional gentlemen.'
+
+'A true gentleman.  I have reason to thank him.  He has not your ideas on
+these matters, Dartrey.  He is very sensitive .  .  .  on Nesta's
+behalf.'
+
+'With reference to marriage.  I'll own I prefer another kind of
+gentleman.  I 've had my experience of that kind of gentleman.  Many
+of the kind have added their spot to the outcasts abominated for
+uncleanness--in holy unction.  Many?--I won't say all; but men who
+consent to hear black words pitched at them, and help to set good women
+facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites.
+They, if you'll let me quote Colney Durance to you to-day--and how is it
+he is not in favour?--they are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of
+Society into pillars of salt.  Down comes the house.  And priests can
+rest in sight of it!--They ought to be dead against the sanctimony that
+believes it excommunicates when it curses.  The relationship is not
+dissolved so cheaply, though our Society affects to think it is.
+Barmby's off to the East End of this London, Victor informs me:--good
+fellow!  And there he'll be groaning over our vicious nature.  Nature is
+not more responsible for vice than she is for inhumanity.  Both bad, but
+the latter's the worse of the two.'
+
+Nataly interposed: 'I see the contrast, and see whom it's to strike.'
+
+Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning.  'Hardly that.  Let it stand.
+He 's only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for
+crushing hope out of its frailest victims.  They're that--no sentiment.
+What a world, too, look behind it!--brutal because brutish.  The world
+may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman.  To hear of Nesta down
+there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining!  He
+had the privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished.  There
+are men who think--men!--the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty
+business.  They depute it to certain officials.  And your women--it's the
+taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little take
+the humane as the enlightened view.  Except, by the way, sometimes, in
+secret;--they have a sisterly breast.  In secret, they do occasionally
+think as they feel.  In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call
+Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts.  I won't
+repeat my reasons for educating them differently.  At present we have but
+half the woman to go through life with--and thank you.'
+
+Dartrey stopped.  'Don't be disturbed,' he added.  'There's no ground for
+alarm.  Not of any sort.'
+
+Nataly said: 'What name?'
+
+'Her name is Mrs. Marsett.'
+
+'The name is .  .  . ?'
+
+'Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward.  He came back from the Continent
+yesterday.'
+
+A fit of shuddering seized Nataly.  It grew in violence, and speaking out
+of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said:
+'Always that name?'
+
+'Before the maiden name?  May have been or not.'
+
+'Not, you say?'
+
+'I don't accurately know.'
+
+Dartrey sprang to his legs.  'My dear soul!  dear friend--one of the
+best! if we go on fencing in the dark, there'll be wounds.  Your way of
+taking this affair disappointed me.  Now I understand.  It's the disease
+of a trouble, to fly at comparisons.  No real one exists.  I wished to
+protect the woman from a happier sister's judgement, to save you from
+alarm concerning Nesta:--quite groundless, if you'll believe me.  Come,
+there's plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts
+are more looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without
+the horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim
+distinction from the luckless.  A girl who's unprotected may go through
+adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions.
+Better if protected, we all agree.  Better also if the world did not
+favour the girl's multitude of enemies.  Your system of not dealing with
+facts openly is everyway favourable to them.  I am glad to say, Victor
+recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for.
+And now I must go and have a talk with the--what a change from the blue
+butterfly!  Eaglet, I ought to have said.  I dine with you, for Victor
+may bring news.'
+
+'Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?'
+
+'He makes it wherever he steps.'
+
+'He would reproach me for not detaining you.  Tell Nesta I have to lie
+down after talking.  She has a child's confidence in you.'
+
+A man of middle age!  he said to himself.  It is the particular
+ejaculation which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday.
+He resolved, that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of
+his age; and he went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of
+years should give him.  Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her
+was an ennobling equal to celestial.  For this fair girl was one of the
+active souls of the world--his dream to discover in woman's form.  She,
+the little Nesta, the tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though
+she was, already in the fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the
+simply Christian.  The worse for it?  Sowerby would think so.  She was
+not of the order of young women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary,
+consent to the peace with evil, and are kept externally safe from the
+smirch of evil, and are the ornaments of their country, glory of a
+country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.
+
+Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by
+Mrs. Marsett--not incredulous of the girl's heroism: that capacity he
+caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the
+measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:--but her beauty, or
+the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of
+thought in our fens.  Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to
+service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this
+earth.  Nesta was of the blooming earth.  Where do we meet girl or woman
+comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted
+of her sex?  He was puzzled by Nesta's unlikeness in deeds and in aspect.
+He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld her;
+presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind.  His doubts cleared off.
+Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be
+attached to the man Sowerby?  That entirely passed belief.
+
+And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing?  Her tones were
+singularly vibrating.
+
+They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: 'I fancy
+I am in disgrace with my mother.'
+
+'You have a suspicion why?' said he.
+
+'I have.'
+
+She would have told him why: the words were at her lips.  Previous to her
+emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out.  They were
+arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him
+drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
+worshipped.
+
+He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.
+
+To spare pain, he said: 'No misunderstanding with the dear mother will
+last the day through.  Can I help?'
+
+'Oh, Captain Dartrey!'
+
+'Drop the captain.  Dartrey will do.'
+
+'How could I!'
+
+'You're not wanting in courage, Nesta.'
+
+'Hardly for that!'
+
+'By-and-by, then.'
+
+'Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.'
+
+'You see; Dartrey, it must be.'
+
+'If I could!'
+
+'But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend, very
+old friend: he'll be tipped with grey in a year or two.'
+
+'I might be bolder then.'
+
+'Imagine it now.  There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by
+their names.'
+
+Her nature rang to the implication.  'I am not bound.'  Dartrey hung
+fast, speculating on her visibly: 'I heard you were?'
+
+'No.  I must be free.'
+
+'It is not an engagement?'
+
+'Will you laugh?--I have never quite known.  My father desired it:
+and my desire is to please him.  I think I am vain enough to think I read
+through blinds and shutters.  The engagement--what there was--has been,
+to my reading, broken more than once.  I have not considered it, to
+settle my thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be
+broken.  I have given cause--if it is known.  There is no blame
+elsewhere.  I am not unhappy, Captain Dartrey.'
+
+'Captain by courtesy.  Very well.  Tell me how Nesta judges the
+engagement to be broken?'
+
+She was mentally phrasing before she said: 'Absence.'
+
+'He was here yesterday.'
+
+All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight
+drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment.  'Then I
+understand; it enlightens me.
+
+My own mother!--my poor mother!  he should have come to me.  I was the
+guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer.  That, if in life were
+direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer
+through others or for them.'
+
+'You have soon seen that, dear girl,' said Dartrey.
+
+'So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!' Nesta sighed;
+she took a sharp breath.  'You? do you blame me too?'
+
+He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and
+heavenly candour.
+
+But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be
+honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: 'Blame?
+Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing.  I've
+made mistakes, with no bad design.  A good mother's view is not often
+wrong.'
+
+'You pressed my hand,' she murmured.
+
+That certainly had said more.
+
+'Glad to again,' he responded.  It was uttered airily and was meant to be
+as lightly done.
+
+Nesta did not draw back her hand.  'I feel strong when you press it.'
+Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
+ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged.  How was he to relax the
+pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
+should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.
+
+Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
+shower.
+
+'Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,' he said; and her
+gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.
+
+He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a
+revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
+obscurity.
+
+The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
+quicken slumbering seeds of passion.
+
+But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
+honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock.  He
+stopped the word at his mouth.  It was not in him to stop or moderate the
+force of his eyes.  She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
+her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood.  There was no soft expression,
+only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
+borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun.  And when such an exchange
+has come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded
+one.
+
+Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved.  She was his.  She
+had not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved.  Showers of
+painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
+frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let
+her hand go, she had the pressure on it.  The quivering intense of the
+moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all
+days coming.  That is how Love slays Death.  Never did girl so give her
+soul.
+
+She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
+for the character she worshipped.  But she could have given it to
+Dartrey, despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without
+any of the cravings, except to bestow.
+
+He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
+are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
+behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
+different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
+on it.  Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young
+life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking
+from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly
+pure, angelically tender.  Was there a point of honour to hold him back?
+
+Nataly entered the room.  She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.
+
+'Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?' Nesta said.
+
+'We have spoken,' her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to
+that theme.
+
+She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the, Why
+should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
+then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother's
+heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
+not set going, to have them discussed.  And the appalling theme, sitting
+offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
+girl's unblushingness.  After standing as one woman against the world so
+long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
+unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless.  Her mind had
+taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--
+And Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
+having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
+Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
+a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
+would have approved his doing.
+
+She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
+strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they say
+when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid.  The
+world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour
+toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.
+
+These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
+showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
+Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
+Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
+ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
+Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
+resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta's husband.  But, as she would
+have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to
+require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
+protection instead of inciting to rebellion.  And Dartrey, the loved and
+prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as
+they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
+him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta's
+head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
+scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
+was.
+
+Dartrey read Nataly's brows.  This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
+indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+
+He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
+envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
+accustomed.  She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were
+driven to whiteness.  'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.
+
+'Lakelands on fire?' Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: 'I
+should not be sorry.'
+
+Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.
+
+Dartrey interposed: 'I'm sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.'
+
+'That ranks low among the worries,' Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.
+
+Nesta touched her arm: 'Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
+let me!'--she turned to him: 'before .  .  .'  at the end of her breath
+she said: 'Dartrey Fenellan.  You shall see my whole heart, mother.'
+
+Her mother looked from her at him.
+
+'Victor returns by the last train.   He telegraphs, that he dines with--'
+She handed the paper to Dartrey.
+
+'Marsett,' he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not
+knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.
+
+'It's to tell you he has done what he thought good,' said Dartrey.
+'In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter's work.
+So we won't talk about it till he comes.  You have no company this
+evening?'
+
+'Oh!  there is a pause to-night!  It's nearly as unceasing as your
+brother Simeon's old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom,
+till they danced her to pieces.  I do get now and then an hour's repose,'
+Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
+had applied.
+
+'My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,' the owner of the name
+said to Nesta.
+
+Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
+the directest of the bare statements.  She could have protested, that her
+love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
+regard for decency was livelier.  Pass the deficiency in a man.  But a
+girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of a
+Mrs. Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and
+this girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she
+could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission
+of her sin's having found her out.
+
+She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to
+endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
+Dartrey's nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night.
+It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a
+manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and
+an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they
+are!
+
+For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known,
+that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
+abominable Mrs. Marsett's friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
+them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.
+
+Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's embrace, against whom
+her door was jealously locked.  She hoped those two would talk much,
+madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible,
+through any short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially
+glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth.
+But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear,
+that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them
+perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself,
+shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a
+ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a
+physical effect on me!
+
+They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them.  Yet
+she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
+for joy of an unmaidenly confession.  During dinner they talked, without
+distressful pauses.  Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
+drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup.  Could it be all because Dartrey
+Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman?  The mother had
+lost hold of her.  The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.
+
+Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
+Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
+truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
+capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
+a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.  This
+led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
+and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
+service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
+critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
+thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
+and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
+she stood.  She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
+mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
+irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.
+
+At last, after midnight Victor arrived.
+
+Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain.  'Pray, go,
+dear,' her mother said.  Victor kissed his Fredi.  'Some time to-morrow,'
+said he; and she forbore to beseech him.
+
+He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
+good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.
+
+Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do
+another?  Nataly could merely observe.  A voice pertaining to no one
+present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter's
+faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity to cope
+with the girl.  She watched Nesta's passage from the room, somewhat
+affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.
+
+'And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!' Victor
+exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl.  'I promised
+Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps.  You
+remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands.  Fancy the dear bit of
+bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
+eight; and there she lay wide awake.  "What 's Fredi thinking of?"--
+"I'm thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada."--She could
+climb them now; she has the legs.'
+
+Nataly said: 'You have some report to make.  You dined with those
+people?'
+
+'The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough.  It's to happen before
+Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
+Fredi's doing!  He has to manage, arrange.--She's a good-looking woman,
+good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won't make a bad Lady
+Marsett.  Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to
+her eyelids.'
+
+'Come to me before you go to bed,' Nataly said, rising, her voice
+foundering; 'Good-night, Dartrey.'
+
+She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
+composure.  Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp
+from Victor, it burned like a poison.
+
+'Really Fredi's doing--chiefly,' said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
+were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room.  'I played the man
+of pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman.
+She's the better horse, as far as brains go.  Good enough Lady Marsett.
+I harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted.  He knew of it--spoke
+of you properly.  The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major
+he is no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite so--and has
+cut him dead.  Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of
+the honour of my daughter's acquaintance.  Rather comical grimace, when
+he vowed he'd fasten the tie.  He doesn't like marriage.  But, he can't
+give her up.  And she's for patronizing the institution.  But she is
+ready to say good-bye to him "rather than see the truest lady in the
+world insulted"--her words.  And so he swallows his dose for health,
+and looks a trifle sourish.  Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them.
+But if a man's fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her from slipping
+lower--and it's an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its
+wheels:--I say, a woman who has a man to lean on, unless she's as
+downright corrupt as two or three of the men we've known:--upon my word,
+Dartrey, I come round to some of your ideas on these matters.  It's this
+girl of mine, this wee bit of girl in her little nightshirt with the
+frill, astonishes me most:--"thinking of the tops of the mountains at
+night!"  She has positively done the whole of this work-main part.
+I smiled when I left the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting
+us all on the road.  It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow,
+you know; he never came nearer to doing it.  I hope it's his better mind
+now; I do hope the man won't have cause to regret it.  He speaks of
+Nesta--sort of rustic tone of awe.  Mrs. Marsett has impressed him.  He
+expects the title soon, will leave the army--the poor plucked British
+army, as you call it!--and lead the life of a country squire: hunting!
+Well, it's not only the army, it's over Great Britain, with this infernal
+wealth of ours!--and all for pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost for a sugar
+plum!  Eh, Dartrey?  Upon my word, it appears to me, Esau's the
+Englishman, Jacob the German, of these times.  I wonder old Colney hasn't
+said it.  If we're not plucked, as your regiments are of the officers who
+have learnt their work, we're emasculated:--the nation's half made-up of
+the idle and the servants of the idle.'
+
+'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give the
+army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take the
+shilling--and not worth it,' said Dartrey.
+
+'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself.  'But, believe me,
+I'm ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me.  It wouldn't so
+much matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and self-
+respect.  That little fellow Skepsey's closer to the right notion,
+and the right practice, too, than any of us.  With his Matilda Pridden!
+He has jumped out of himself to the proper idea of women, too.  And
+there's a man who has been up three times before the magistrates, and is
+considered a disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens,
+I declare!  I never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary,
+witless kind of envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once had
+and never quite got hold of again.  The match for him is Fredi.  She
+threatens to be just as devoted, just as simple, as he.  I positively
+doubt whether any of us could stop her, if she had set herself to do a
+thing she thought right.'
+
+'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said Dartrey.
+
+'All very well, but it's a rock ahead.  We shall have to alter our
+course, my friend.  You know, I dined with that couple, after the private
+twenty minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as we
+were close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the woman
+happy, besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good intentions--
+politic!  And subsequently I heard from her, that--you'll think nothing
+of it!--Fredi promised to stand by her at the altar.'
+
+Dartrey said, shrugging: 'She needn't do that.'
+
+'So we may say.  You're dealing with Nesta Victoria.  Spare me a contest
+with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.'
+
+'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'
+
+'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?'
+
+'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
+would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.'
+
+'Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
+Sowerby!  I don't complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!'
+
+'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
+women rooted to the bed of the river, they'll veer with the tides, like
+water-weeds, and no wonder.'
+
+'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey.  We can't have
+women independent.'
+
+'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'
+
+Victor mused: 'It's wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
+now: but what a head she has!  Oh, she'll listen to reason: only mark
+what I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow,
+will imagine she's the most docile of wives in the world.  And as to
+wife, I'm not of the contrary opinion.  But qua individual female,
+supposing her to have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it's he who'll
+have to turn the corner second, if they're to trot in the yoke together.
+Or it may be an idea of service to a friend--or to her sex!  That Mrs.
+Marsett says she feels for--"bleeds" for her sex.  The poor woman didn't
+show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks
+in jerks, hot phrases.  She holds herself well.  At the end of the dinner
+she behaved better.  Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead.  But
+Marsett 's Marsett to the end.  Rather touching!--the poor fellow said:
+Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child!  First-
+rate sportsman, I hear.  He should have thought of his family earlier.
+You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as well.  You
+won't listen.  And for Society too!  Off you go.'
+
+A battery was opened on that wall of composite.
+
+'Ah, well,' said Victor.  'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
+so-called promise to stand at the altar.  I don't mention it upstairs.'
+
+He went to Nataly's room.
+
+She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
+might have sleep.
+
+She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade us
+--we cannot keep them out!  was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
+the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!
+
+Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
+girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct.  She
+thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a
+moral insensibility to the offence?
+
+This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
+travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
+sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door.  Or
+sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
+withdraw from the alliance.  Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
+her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
+her.  The girl was visioned as deadly.  She might be indifferent to the
+protection of Dudley's name.  Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
+might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
+at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body.  No, but the world would
+bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
+would say.  Would it say falsely?  Nataly harped on the interrogation
+until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and
+she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
+would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
+breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
+across the moors!  her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of
+the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.  Nature thereat
+renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by
+Dr. Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the
+yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal.
+Nataly's brain had a short gallop over moorland.  It brought her face to
+face with Victor's girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in
+herself and her reproaches of Nesta.  The girl had inherited from her
+father something of the cataract's force which won its way by catching or
+by mastering, uprooting, ruining!
+
+In the morning she was heavily asleep.  Victor left word with Nesta,
+that the dear mother was not to be disturbed.  Consequently, when Dudley
+called to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would
+receive him.
+
+Their interview lasted an hour.
+
+Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.
+
+His perplexity of countenance was eloquent.  He had, before seeing the
+young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
+English gentleman should be asked to consume.  She now referred him to
+her father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said, explain
+whatever there was to be explained.  But she added, that if she was
+expected to abandon a friend, she could not.  Dudley had argued with her
+upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues; he
+had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
+ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
+friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
+stamp of honourable families.
+
+'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.
+
+'Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the precepts
+were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees.  When it is a question of a
+young lady associating with a notorious woman!'
+
+'Not notorious.  You spoil your case if you "speak extremely," as a
+friend says.  I saw her yesterday.  She worships "Miss Radnor."'
+
+Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,' said Dudley
+hurriedly.  'As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
+association ceases.  Her name: I have to consider my family.'
+
+'Good anchorage!  You must fight it out with the girl.  And depend upon
+this--you're not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character;
+unless you try to bridle her.  She belongs to her time.  I don't mind
+owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi 'll be merry to-night.
+Here's a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this
+morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May;
+desirous to embrace her.  She wrote to the office.  Not a word of her
+duque.  She has pitched him to the winds.  You may like to carry it off
+to Fredi and please her.'
+
+'I have business,' Dudley replied.
+
+'Away to it, then!' said Victor.  'You stand by me?--we expect our South
+London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
+February.  You have family interest there.'
+
+'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
+with the universal censor's angry spite, that the revolutions of the
+world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
+Bohemians.  And there are eulogists of the modern time!  And the man's
+daughter was declared to belong to it!  A visit in May to the Italian
+cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
+accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.
+
+At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
+between Nesta and Nataly.  He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison,
+and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:
+particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after
+opposing, strongly favoured.  How are we ever to get a clue to the
+labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex!  Dartrey's
+theories were absurd.  Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?
+The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby!  My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart.
+You did not dismiss him?'
+
+'I repeated the word he used.  I thought of mother.  The blood leaves her
+cheeks at a disappointment now.  She has taken to like him.'
+
+'Why, you like him!'
+
+'I could not vow.'
+
+'Tush.'
+
+'Ah, don't press me, dada.  But you will see, he has disengaged himself.'
+
+He had done it, though not in formal speech.  Slow digestion of his
+native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
+condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
+letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
+told him he had the strongest hold.
+
+She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley's
+grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.
+But Nataly was not the weeper.
+
+Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor.  Dudley bore no
+resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
+had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
+Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her
+mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
+actually supplicating.  So that the reality of Dudley's love rose to
+conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
+positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
+She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
+thoughts.  Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
+thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of
+her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her
+whole being in charge accept or reject her.  Nothing else appeared in
+prospect.  Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
+the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
+depart with it.  But always he returned.  At last, as if under tuition,
+he refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
+terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be
+increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
+distasteful to her.  The slight cast of sourness on his lower features
+had almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged.  He complimented
+her for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident
+sincereness; he admitted, that the modern world is 'attempting
+difficulties with at least commendable intentions'; and that the position
+of women demands improvement, consideration for them also.  He said
+feelingly: 'They have to bear extraordinary burdens!' There he stopped.
+
+The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
+ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt.  He had,
+however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
+pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
+beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
+tolerance.  Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
+being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
+affected her.  Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
+of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society to
+its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under cloak;--
+not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the vitiation
+of the soul.  He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning her.
+It followed, that he had the lover's desire for assurance of exclusive
+possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he grew
+exacting.  He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's
+ideas.
+
+Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.'
+
+A provoking evasion.  He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
+stiffen her figure.  'Is one of them from that gentleman?'
+
+'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles.  She comes to me early
+next month.'
+
+'The other?'
+
+'The other is also from a friend.'
+
+'A dear friend?'
+
+'Not so dear.  Her letter gives me happiness.'
+
+'She writes--not from France: from .  .  .?  you tempt me to guess.'
+
+'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a way
+to make her eternally thankful.'
+
+'The place she writes from is .  .  . ?'
+
+The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting.
+He demanded assurance.
+
+'It matters in no degree,' she said.
+
+Dudley 'thought himself excusable for inquiring.'
+
+She bowed gently.
+
+The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
+Bohemians enraged him.
+
+'Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--
+I surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother's
+consent:--in communication, in correspondence with .  .  . ?'
+
+Again she bowed her head; saying: 'It is true.'
+
+'With that person?'
+
+He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
+conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
+only to be bitten.  'I decline to believe it,' he said with forcible
+sound.
+
+'She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.
+
+'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have borne--.  These may be
+Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas; they are not mine.  I have--Something at
+least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen
+who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to call one of
+them a friend!  Ask any lady, any!  Your mother .  .  .'
+
+'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.
+
+'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?' said Dudley.
+
+'All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'
+
+'You are.'  He added hastily: 'Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
+living who would tell you otherwise.  At all events, in public opinion,
+if it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or
+spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
+defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with .  .  .  hard
+words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes!  My sense is
+coherent.'
+
+'Quite,' said Nesta.
+
+'And you do not agree with me?'
+
+'I do not.'
+
+'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'
+
+'In this instance, better.'
+
+'Then I retire.  I cannot retain my place here.  You may depend upon it,
+the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of
+women leading disorderly lives.'
+
+'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'
+
+'Men, too, of course.'
+
+'You do not exclude the men from Society.'
+
+'Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.'
+
+'Oh! the worthy books, then.  I would read them, if I could find them.'
+
+'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'
+
+'It grieves me to think differently.'
+
+Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
+her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him,
+that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish,
+was in a state of liquefaction.
+
+Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: 'I do hope you
+may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
+erroneous.'
+
+'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him.  'She is not well.  When
+she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady,
+so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women.  I shall
+hope she will not disapprove of me.  I cannot forsake a friend.'
+
+'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.
+
+She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
+was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
+herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.
+
+He 'wished her prudent advisers.'
+
+She thanked him.  'In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.'
+
+A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.
+
+Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
+under a salutation regretful in frostiness.
+
+A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
+happy with a piece of Parisian riband.
+
+Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and
+House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman
+was the sole exception.  To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner
+to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an
+instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we
+standing if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.
+
+February went by.  And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
+from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman.  That is to say,
+the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
+acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
+they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
+one of our fixtures.  On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
+from her.  Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
+for the middle of April.  Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman
+and nourished her on comfortable fiction.  So the death of the member for
+the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in
+maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility
+lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his
+vacant seat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+AN EXPIATION
+
+Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
+save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
+So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
+impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
+could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
+Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
+Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
+Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
+preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
+of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as
+hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness.  Mademoiselle's
+occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
+tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
+young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
+very happily boasted.  The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
+for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
+generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
+persons.
+
+Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
+her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
+Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
+see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
+unexamining hard eyes.  Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
+honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
+the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded.
+Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion
+over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly.  And she was the
+one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would
+found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when
+he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon.  That being, in
+fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-
+conquest used by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.'  Was it
+his Idea?  He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he
+speculated.  But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a
+creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory,
+bred, born of books.  Though Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of
+self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.
+
+Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
+she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
+alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
+dealings with Dudley and with himself.  She so quietly displaced the lady
+visiting him at the City offices.  His girl's disregard of hostile
+weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
+at her coming daily.  She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
+of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
+she met the dreadful Brighton woman.  His Fredi drove constantly to walk
+back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
+and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
+conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
+and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
+advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera.  The lady resisted; she was
+vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.
+
+His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
+mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
+but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a
+ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
+reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge
+of a doubt.  Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we
+yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence?  Is she, when
+translated into us, solely the imperious appetite?  Here was Fredi, his
+little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
+her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by
+clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent,
+appeals to Nature.  They could be vindicated.  Or could they, when they
+would not bear a statement of the case?  He could not imagine himself
+stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan.  As
+for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley
+would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the
+Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's infatuation for
+the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right
+enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an
+unseemly acquaintance.  He had called at the office to say so.  Victor
+stammered the plea for him.
+
+'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in
+contrast with the tones.  Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she
+continued up to the shock she dealt: 'Do not encourage a good man to
+waste his thoughts upon me.  I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry
+him.  I do not know whether he would marry me.  He has my soul.  I have
+no shame in saying I love him.  It is to love goodness, greatness of
+heart.  He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate.
+He is the friend of the weaker everywhere.  He has been proved in fire.
+He does not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people
+for doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly.  He is not
+one of the unwise advocates.  He measures the forces against them.  He
+reads their breasts.  He likes me.  He is with me in my plans.  He has
+not said, has not shown, he loves me.  It is too high a thought for me
+until I hear it.'
+
+'Has your soul!' was all that Victor could reply, while the whole
+conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.
+
+Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank
+in dumbness.  Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the
+point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his
+character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
+fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly damnatory for being
+recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel.  He tried to
+think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world.  An effort
+to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her
+deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance,
+Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly
+backing her, upholding her.  Victor could no longer so naturally name her
+Fredi.
+
+He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he
+ventured.  When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the
+candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might
+regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor
+as audacious.  It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the
+earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch.  He
+appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he
+offered himself; he made but one stipulation.  Victor regretfully assured
+him, he feared he could do nothing.  The thought of his entry into
+Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the
+place, grew dim.
+
+But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as
+the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in
+view to be gained.
+
+Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to
+be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room
+alone.  'Nesta was tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses
+Mr. Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest,
+painfully; she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right
+course:--a mother reads her daughter!  If my girl has not guidance!--
+she means rightly, she is rash.'
+
+Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think
+with regard to Victor's daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her
+hard conscience accused of inflammability.  'Here is a note from Dr.
+Themison, dear.'
+
+Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.
+
+'From Themison,' he said; he coughed.
+
+'Don't think to deceive me,' said she.  'I have not read the contents,
+I know them.'
+
+'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four P.M.  Odd, that next
+day at eight of the evening I shall be addressing our meeting in the
+Theatre.  Simeon speaks.  Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though
+he is.  Those Tories are jollier fellows than--well, no wonder!  There
+will be no surgical .  .  .  the poor woman is very low.  A couple of
+days at the outside.  Of course, I go.'
+
+'Hand me the note, dear.'
+
+It had to be given up, out of the pocket.
+
+'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely formal.'
+
+She needed sleep: she bowed her head.
+
+Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morning, a fair Sunday
+morning.  She was going to Mrs. John Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta
+to come with her.
+
+She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch, having left Nesta
+with Mrs. John.  Louise de Seilles undertook to bring Nesta home at the
+time she might choose.  Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin,
+lunched and chatted.  Nataly chatted.  At a quarter to three o'clock
+Victor's carriage was at the door.  He rose: he had to keep an
+appointment.  Nataly said to him publicly: 'I come too.'  He stared and
+nodded.  In the carriage, he said: 'I'm driving to the Gardens, for a
+stroll, to have a look at the beasts.  Sort of relief.  Poor crazy woman!
+However, it 's a comfort to her: so .  .  .  !'
+
+'I like to see them,' said Nataly.  'I shall see her.  I have to do it.'
+
+Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dissuade his dear
+soul from this very foolish, totally unnecessary, step.  Alighting, he
+put the matter aside, for good angels to support his counsel at the final
+moment.
+
+Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys: they suggested no more than he
+would have had from prints; they sprang no reflection, except, that the
+coming hour was a matter of indifference to them.  They were about him,
+and exercised so far a distraction.  He took very kindly to an old mother
+monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of Nataly's heave of the
+bosom.  Southward, across the park, the dread house rose.  He began
+quoting Colney Durance with relish while sarcastically confuting the
+cynic, who found much pasture in these Gardens.  Over Southward, too, he
+would be addressing a popular assembly to-morrow evening.  Between now
+and then there was a ditch to jump.  He put on the sympathetic face of
+grief.  'After all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said.
+--To be well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release from the
+maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition of wealthy people:--
+creatures of prey? horrible thought! yet allied to his Idea, it seemed.
+Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not
+troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp!  Mrs.
+Burman's invitation loomed as monstrous--a final act of her cruelty.
+His skin pricked with dews.  He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping
+the ditch with him, as a relief--if she insisted on doing it.  He hoped
+she would not, for the sake of her composure.
+
+It was a ditch void of bottom.  But it was a mere matter of an hour,
+less.  The state of health of the invalid could bear only a few minutes.
+In any case, we are sure that the hour will pass.  Our own arrive?
+Certainly.
+
+'Capital place for children,' he exclaimed.  And here startlingly before
+him in the clusters of boys and girls, was the difference between young
+ones and their elders feeling quite as young: the careless youngsters
+have not to go and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
+penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after their holiday
+scamper and stare at the caged beasts.
+
+Attention to the children precipitated him upon acquaintances, hitherto
+cleverly shunned.  He nodded them off, after the brightest of greetings.
+
+Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated wild creatures,
+was exhausted.  He fell to work at Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt
+of luxury'; signifying, that we the wealthy will not exist to pamper
+flesh, but we live for the promotion of brotherhood:--ay, and that our
+England must make some great moral stand, if she is not to fall to the
+rear and down.  Unuttered, it caught the skirts of the Idea: it
+evaporated when spoken.  Still, this theme was almost an exorcism
+of Mrs. Burman.  He consulted his watch.  'Thirteen minutes to four.
+I must be punctual,' he said.  Nataly stepped faster.
+
+Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the horror of that
+place before.  'Put me down at the corner of the terrace, dear: I won't
+drive to the door.'
+
+'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.
+
+After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her resolve, he saw she
+was firm: and he asked himself, whether he might not be constitutionally
+better adapted to persuade than to dissuade.  The question thumped.
+Having that house of drugs in view, he breathed more freely for the
+prospect of feeling his Nataly near him beneath the roof.
+
+'You really insist, dear love?' he appealed to her: and her answer: 'It
+must be,' left no doubt: though he chose to say: 'Not because of standing
+by me?' And she said: 'For my peace, Victor.'  They stepped to the
+pavement.  The carriage was dismissed.
+
+Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to the funereal
+one: and the bell was tolled in the breast of each of the couple
+advancing with an air of calmness to the inevitable black door.
+
+Jarniman opened it.  'His mistress was prepared to see them.'--Not like
+one near death.--They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore.  'You will find a welcome,' was his reassurance to them:
+gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person.  His whispered tones
+were more agreeably deadening than his words.
+
+Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.
+
+'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard: 'Her wish ten minutes.'
+
+'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for
+the invalid.
+
+They rounded the open door.  They were in the drawing-room.  It was
+furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same
+as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale
+blue: the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom.  He glanced at the
+ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory.  Here she lived,--
+here she slept, behind the hangings.  There was refreshingly that little
+difference in the arrangement of the room.  The corner Northward was
+occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:--tuned?
+He sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings.  Sensible that
+Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
+heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.
+
+Mrs. Burman was present; seated.  People may die seated; she had always
+disliked the extended posture; except for the night's rest, she used to
+say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in
+her attitude when seated by day:--and often at night the poor woman had
+to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!--But I 'm bound to think
+humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched
+the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk
+veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
+morning.
+
+Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.
+
+Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was
+distinguishable as the one once known.  If the world could see it and
+hear, that it called itself a man's wife!  She looked burnt out.
+
+Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa.  Execution there!  Victor
+thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling
+devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.
+
+'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on
+the chairs.
+
+He went.  They were alone with Mrs. Burman.
+
+No voice came.  They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of
+eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance.  Big drops fell from
+Nataly's.  Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a
+familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds: his own purchase.  The time of
+day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.
+
+Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments.  More than a
+minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:
+two, if not three.
+
+A quaver sounded.  'You have come.'  The voice was articulate, thinner
+than the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by deep-sea cable.
+
+Victor answered: 'We have.'
+
+Another minute must have gone in the silence.  And when we get to five
+minutes we are on the descent, rapidly counting our way out of the house,
+into the fresh air, where we were half an hour back, among those happy
+beasts in the pleasant Gardens!
+
+Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut.  'I said you would come.'
+
+Victor started to the fire-screen.  'Your sight requires protection.'
+
+She dozed.  'And Natalia Dreighton !' she next said.
+
+They were certainly now on the five minutes.  Now for the slide downward
+and outward!  Nataly should never have been allowed to come.
+
+'The white waistcoat!' struck his ears.
+
+'Old customs with me, always!' he responded.  'The first of April,
+always.  White is a favourite.  Pale blue, too.  But I fear--I hope you
+have not distressing nights?  In my family we lay great stress on the
+nights we pass.  My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of
+the condition of health by the nightly record.'
+
+'Your daughter was in their house.'
+
+She knew everything!
+
+'Very fond of my daughter--the ladies,' he remarked.
+
+'I wish her well.'
+
+'You are very kind.'
+
+Mrs. Burman communed within or slept.  'Victor, Natalia, we will pray,'
+she said.
+
+Her trembling hands crossed their fingers.  Nataly slipped to her knees.
+
+The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush.  It
+acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church.  He forgot his
+estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
+swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears.  Ideas of
+eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds.  Death was a black bird
+among them.  The piano rang to Nataly's young voice and his.  The gold
+and white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the
+wealthy by an enamoured old lady on his arm.  Cupid tick-ticked.--Poor
+soul! poor woman!  How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury!
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top.  We get
+on fairly at the centre.  Yet it is there that we do the mischief making
+such a riddle of the bottom and the top.  What is to be said!  Prayer
+quiets one.  Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs.
+Burman bowed over her knotted fingers.  The earnestness of both enforced
+an effort at a phrased prayer in him.  Plungeing through a wave of the
+scent of Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and
+forward, he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive
+thin black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper
+emotion; and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of
+his chair, with split knees.  At once the figure vanished.  By merely
+looking at Nataly, he passed into her prayer.  A look at Mrs. Burman made
+it personal, his own.  He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from
+him.  After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he
+thanked himself with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on our
+human susceptibility to the influence of posture.  We are such creatures.
+
+Nataly resumed her seat.  Mrs. Burman had raised her head.  She said: 'We
+are at peace.'  She presently said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me.
+I die in nature's way.  I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have
+it above.  I give it here, to you, to all.  My soul is cleansed, I trust.
+Much was to say.  My strength will not.  Unto God, you both!'
+
+The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on slippered step to the back of
+the sofa.  Nataly dropped before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for
+an instant.  Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
+ceremonial shake of hands.  He turned away, then turned back, praying for
+power to speak, to say that he had found his heart, was grateful, would
+hold her in memory.  He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had done
+so when he had risen.  They were conducted by the Rev. gentleman to the
+hall-door: he was not speechless.  Jarniman uttered something.
+
+That black door closed behind them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+
+To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be
+restorative as air of Summer Alps.  It is by contrast blooming life.
+Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
+straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
+policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
+families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea; here
+and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay
+visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip him of
+the shroud, sing of the sweet old world.  He cannot but be moved to the
+extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.
+
+A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
+still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
+interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
+silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
+human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
+as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
+him for any utterance of penitence.  That worm-like thread of voice came
+up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
+without the word.  He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at
+the same time bidding her smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.'  He
+declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.
+
+She slightly pressed his arm for answer.  Perhaps she did not feel so
+deeply?  She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
+Marechale.  At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!
+
+Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
+door, who was almost now seeing his mistress's ghost--would have the
+privilege to-morrow.  He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's,
+at Nataly's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
+odour of the cab.  Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
+eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him.  He talked of the
+gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
+mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
+the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt figure
+symbolized!  .  .  .  And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
+imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he had
+the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's hand and hold it until they
+reached home.  Those two talking together in the brief words of their
+deep feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano
+filial to the divine maternal contralto.  Those two dear ones mounted to
+Nataly's room.
+
+The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
+each looked the happier for it.  Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
+and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed.  He
+did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to keep
+her from excitement.  'My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
+Burman!'  Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness.  She was never
+below a situation, he affirmed.
+
+He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly.  She began panting at a
+word about Mr. Barmby's ready services.  When, however, she related the
+state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
+to her, he said, embracing her: 'Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,'
+and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.
+
+She sighed: 'If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's revolutionary
+ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
+rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in
+the ideas he entertains!'
+
+Victor sighed too.  He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
+crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.
+
+She was distressed; she moaned: 'My girl!  my girl: I should wish to
+leave her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband.  New
+ideas must come in politics, but in Society!--and for women!  And the
+young having heads, are the most endangered.  Nesta vows her life to it!
+Dartrey supports her!'
+
+'See Colney,' said Victor.  'Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
+has.  Though you don't care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
+was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
+farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and the
+blue hand of his nation's protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
+failure with the public, of course!  However, he seems to seem wise with
+you.  The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly.
+See Colney to-morrow, my love.  Now go to sleep.  We have got over the
+worst.  I speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of
+notes and points for them.'
+
+His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
+to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
+pride of simple manhood.  But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
+and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
+Future.  It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
+Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
+the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
+He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than
+a skirt of the robe of his Idea.  For let none think him a mere City
+merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
+He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
+of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
+jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
+America, all over our habitable sphere.  Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way
+to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show
+himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
+enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
+upon the world as a factory of ideas.  Colney's insolent charge, that
+the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be
+confuted.  For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
+into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
+benevolent aim.  And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
+of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
+future solved.
+
+Surely he had here the Idea?  He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
+heated.  Only the vision was wanted.
+
+On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
+brilliant results.  That was after a fall.
+
+There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.
+
+Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
+significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
+fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
+Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
+from falling further.  His bath-water chilled.  He jumped out and rubbed
+furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
+warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with
+the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly!  And he tested it to
+prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than
+the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
+for surpassing the latter tedious performance.
+
+His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces.  Except for the making of
+money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
+uninterrupted successes, was a blank.  Or rather we have to wish it were
+a blank.  The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it is
+in prospect.  A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to
+proofs of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we
+owe him nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding
+of Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we
+are astonished to find we have in our daylight house.  How is it?  Would
+other men be so sensitive to him?  Victor was appeased by the assurance
+of his possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he
+settled the debate by thinking: 'After all, for a man like me, battling
+incessantly, a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can't be starved, must be
+fed--though, pah!  But I'm not to be questioned like other men.--But how
+about an aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is no
+escaping distinctions!  my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And
+indulges?--Say, an exceptional nature!  Supposing a certain beloved woman
+to pronounce on the case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of
+it.'---He cried: My love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy to
+right her to-day, tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the hour
+of my release!
+
+Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure.  Victor entered into
+it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall.  His intensity of sensation
+launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness to
+the measure of time gone crazy.  He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
+Burman, as the cause of the nonsense.  He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
+he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.
+
+Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her villa
+over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner.  'We
+go,' Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips--too
+much a resurrection smile.  There was talk of the Meeting at the theatre:
+Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the deceased Member, was
+known, and was likely to have a good reception.  Fun and enthusiasm might
+be expected.
+
+'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,' he whispered as he
+was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy knot
+crossed Nataly's forehead, she seemed paler.  He sent back Nesta and
+mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.
+
+Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Mr.
+Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
+fortress--were the only guests.  When they rose, Nataly drew Victor
+aside.  He came dismayed to Nesta.  She ran to her mother.  'Not hear
+papa speak?  Oh, mother, mother!  Then I stay with her.  But can't she
+come?  He is going to unfold ideas to us.  There!'
+
+'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,' Nataly said.
+'No, dearest; it would agitate me to go.  I'm better here.  I shall be at
+peace when the night is over.'
+
+'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'
+
+Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney.  He proposed to give her his
+company.  She declined it.  Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
+she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.
+
+'My love,' Nataly said, 'the thought of the Meeting--' She clasped at her
+breast; and she murmured: 'I shall be comforted by your being with him.
+There is no danger there.  But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
+this night is over.'
+
+Colney persuaded her to have him for companion.  Mr. Peridon, who was to
+have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
+stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces.  Nesta
+and Victor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's generosity.  So
+Mr. Peridon was left.  Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the
+carriage to kiss her mother again, saying: 'Just one last kiss, my own!
+And she's not to look troubled.  I shall remember everything to tell my
+own mother.  It will soon be over.'
+
+Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.
+
+Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
+delivery to her mother of news at the door.  'She is easily startled now
+by trifles--you have noticed?'
+
+Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
+believed he had 'The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
+over!  And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands.  A fortnight, and
+we have our first Concert.  Durandarte!  Oh, the dear heart 'll be at
+peace when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting.  Not a doubt of that, even
+though Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.'
+
+'One critic the less for you!' said Nesta.  Skepsey was to meet her
+carriage at the theatre.
+
+Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding thitherward
+on foot.
+
+'I have my speech,' said Victor.  'You prepare the way for me, following
+our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else they
+shout for.  We shall have a great evening.  I suspect I shall find
+Themison or Jarniman when I get home.  You don't believe in intimations?
+I've had crapy processions all day before my eyes.  No wonder, after
+yesterday!'
+
+'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said Fenellan.
+
+'We 'll drop a hint.  Where's Dartrey?'
+
+'He'll come.  He's in one of his black moods: not temper.  He's got a
+notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him.  She was
+not only ready to go, she was glad to go.  She had a bit of the heroine
+in her and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to
+herself.'
+
+'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor.  'And tell her about Dartrey.  Harp on
+it.  Once she was all for him and our girl.  But it's a woman--though the
+dearest!  I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes.  We must
+make the best of things, if we're for swimming.  The task for me to-night
+will be, to keep from rolling out all I've got in my head.  And I'm not
+revolutionary, I'm for stability.  Only I do see, that the firm stepping-
+place asks for a long stride to be taken.  One can't get the English to
+take a stride--unless it's for a foot behind them: bother old Colney!
+Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.  There!--But I
+want to say it!  I want to save the existing order.  I want,
+Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with.
+Great fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
+mediaeval Barons.  Dispersion of wealth, is the secret.  Nataly's of that
+mind with me.  A decent poverty!  She's rather wearying, wants a change.
+I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean.  All
+our set.  She likes quiet.  I believe in my political recipe for it.'
+
+He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
+aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.
+
+'It appears to me, you're on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,'
+observed Simeon.  'Strike off Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's
+couple of glasses, and there's your aristocracy established; but with
+rather a dispersed recognition of itself.'
+
+'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your own,'
+said Victor.  'Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial.  The
+last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so
+bad.  The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
+vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
+the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness.  And Bobinikine
+turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
+discovered in an emigrant's house-to-let!  And Semhians--I forget what
+and Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
+vulture on the skull of a desert camel!  But, I complain, there's nothing
+to make the English love the author; and it's wasted, he's basted, and
+the book 'll have no sale.  I hate satire.'
+
+'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor.  Does it hurt our people much?'
+
+'Not a bit; doesn't touch them.  But I want my friends to succeed!'
+
+Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme.  Victor wished
+the Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset.  He deferred to
+the suggestion, that the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.
+
+'I'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,' he said.  Then
+he queried: 'But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
+She may be going--or she's gone already, poor woman!  I shall have that
+scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
+Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel the end, as we in health imagine.
+Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace.  I 've a mind to
+send up to Regent's Park with inquiries.  It would look respectful.  God
+forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn.  Though I will
+say, a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out of it yesterday.
+I don't feel it any longer.  What are you jerking at?'
+
+'Only to remark, that if the thing's done for us, we haven't it so much
+on our sensations.'
+
+'More, if we're sympathetic.  But that compels us to be philosophic--or
+who could live!  Poor woman!'
+
+'Waft her gently, Victor!'
+
+'Tush!  Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
+what I can't mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
+on their forsaken South of the City.  I 've my scheme.  Elected or not,
+I shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first
+instalment.'
+
+Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he was
+to deliver.  He could not but reflect on the genial man's willingness and
+capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position
+into which he had plunged himself.
+
+They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors by
+Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
+obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged.  When finally they reached
+the stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the rounds of
+applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham Quatley,
+Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a politician 'never
+of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow!--go anywhere to hear
+hhm,' he vowed.
+
+'Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,' said
+Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
+in it.
+
+Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence.  Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
+chairman, the 'gentleman of local influence,' had animated the drowsed
+wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
+Simeon, did Dartrey appear.  Simeon's name was shouted, in proof of the
+happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind Nesta.
+'Half an hour with the dear mother,' he said.
+
+Nesta's eyes thanked him.  She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
+sitting close behind.  Louise de Seilles.  'You know Matilda Pridden.'
+
+Dartrey held his hand out.  'Has she forgiven me?'
+
+Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the no
+need for it, with perfect good breeding.  Dartrey was moved to think
+Skepsey's choice of a woman to worship did him honour.  He glanced at
+Louise.  Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with
+Nesta.  He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear
+that the great speech of the evening is done; it's nothing else.  I'll
+run to her as soon as it's over.'
+
+'Oh, good of you!  And kind of Mr. Peridon!'  She turned to Louise, who
+smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.
+
+Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand
+to them, and his delight at Simeon's ringing points: which were, to
+Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty.  Dartrey despised effects
+of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
+nerved to stand for their country.
+
+Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
+by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
+and another cheer rang round.  He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
+hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
+winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own.  One
+fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
+permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
+mildly amused him.  He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as
+Louise de Seilles observed.  She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
+machinery of Freedom.
+
+Skepsey entered the box.
+
+'We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,' he said, after a look at Matilda
+Pridden.
+
+There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.
+
+'And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
+promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have his word, my friends!'  And he
+told the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned
+the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand
+on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
+white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
+as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'
+
+Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
+question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
+good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
+would hear the enemy say he did.  Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
+if we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
+specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish,
+who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
+anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
+nostrum.  So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
+dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors.  And sure enough his patient
+came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
+deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons.  Any one
+at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
+exclusively to eat for a fortnight.  And that the good physician did.
+Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and
+with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices.  He vowed he
+was the man.  Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his
+tender parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten
+nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized
+on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
+surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the
+felicity of exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under
+dissecting hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for
+him.  All to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all
+the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
+scaffold, poor gentleman!  But we know politics to be no such empirical
+science.
+
+Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy.  He brought it home to Beaves
+Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it.  Yet the orator
+was asked: 'Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'
+
+He countered his questioner: 'Just to liberate you from your moribund
+state, my friend.'  And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
+lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
+captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit for
+interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
+ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
+her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
+feathers, and shouting: 'Polly tho dram dry!'--which struck on the nob of
+Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
+Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
+and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
+cried; 'That did it!  Now to business!' for he was hungry.  'And when I
+catch the ring of this world's laugh from you, my friend .  .  .  !'
+Simeon's application of the story was drowned.
+
+After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: 'You keep
+that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the old
+widow woman for her money, Simmy !'
+
+Victor leaned forward.  Simeon towered.  He bellowed
+
+'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!'
+
+It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre.  The man went under.
+Simeon flowed.  Conscience reproached him with the little he had done for
+Victor, and he had now his congenial opportunity.
+
+Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed.
+To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the
+devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort.  Dartrey sat
+rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap.  Nesta looked at Louise
+when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It was
+Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face.  Apparently he was not
+intelligible or audible but the next moment Victor sprang erect.  Dartrey
+quitted the box.  Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried words to right
+and left.  He passed from sight, Mr. Peridon with him; and Dartrey did
+not return.
+
+Nesta felt her father's absence as light gone: his eyes rayed light.
+Besides she had the anticipation of a speech from him, that would win
+Matilda Pridden.  She fancied Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the
+spell of the hilarity he roused.  A gentleman behind him spoke in his
+ear; and Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his flow.  Matilda Pridden's
+gaze on him and the people was painful to behold: Nesta saw her mind.
+She set herself to study a popular assembly.  It could be serious to the
+call of better leadership, she believed.  Her father had been telling her
+of late of a faith he had in the English, that they (or so her
+intelligence translated his remarks) had power to rise to spiritual
+ascendancy, and be once more the Islanders heading the world of a new
+epoch abjuring materialism--some such idea; very quickening to her, as it
+would be to this earnest young woman worshipped by Skepsey.  Her father's
+absence and the continued shouts of laughter, the insatiable thirst for
+fun, darkened her in her desire to have the soul of the good working
+sister refreshed.  They had talked together; not much: enough for each to
+see at either's breast the wells from the founts of life.
+
+The box-door opened, Dartrey came in.  He took her hand.  She stood-up to
+his look.  He said to Matilda Pridden: 'Come with us; she will need you.'
+
+'Speak it,' said Nesta.
+
+He said to the other: 'She has courage.'
+
+'I could trust to her,' Matilda Pridden replied.
+
+Nesta read his eyes.  'Mother?'
+
+His answer was in the pressure.
+
+'Ill?'
+
+'No longer.'
+
+'Oh!  Dartrey.'  Matilda Pridden caught her fast.
+
+'I can walk, dear,' Nesta said.
+
+Dartrey mentioned her father.
+
+She understood: 'I am thinking of him.'
+
+The words of her mother: 'At peace when the night is over,' rang.  Along
+the gassy passages of the back of tie theatre, the sound coming from an
+applausive audience was as much a thunder as rage would have been.  It
+was as void of human meaning as a sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE LAST
+
+In the still dark hour of that April morning, the Rev. Septimus Barmby
+was roused by Mr. Peridon, with a scribbled message from Victor, which he
+deciphered by candlelight held close to the sheet of paper, between short
+inquiries and communications, losing more and more the sense of it as his
+intelligence became aware of what dread blow had befallen the stricken
+man.  He was bidden come to fulfil his promise instantly.  He remembered
+the bearing of the promise.  Mr. Peridon's hurried explanatory narrative
+made the request terrific, out of tragically lamentable.  A semblance of
+obedience had to be put on, and the act of dressing aided it.  Mr. Barmby
+prayed at heart for guidance further.
+
+The two gentlemen drove Westward, speaking little; they had the dry sob
+in the throat.
+
+'Miss Radnor?'  Mr. Barmby asked.
+
+'She is shattered; she holds up; she would not break down.'
+
+'I can conceive her to possess high courage.'
+
+'She has her friend Mademoiselle de Seilles.'
+
+Mr. Barmby remained humbly silent.  Affectionate deep regrets moved him
+to say: 'A loss irreparable.  We have but one voice of sorrow.  And how
+sudden!  The dear lady had no suffering, I trust.'
+
+'She fell into the arms of Mr. Durance.  She died in his arms.  She was
+unconscious, he says.  I left her straining for breath.  She said
+"Victor"; she tried to smile:--I understood I was not to alarm him.'
+
+'And he too late!'
+
+'He was too late, by some minutes.'
+
+'At least I may comfort.  Miss Radnor must be a blessing to him.'
+
+'They cannot meet.  Her presence excites him.'
+
+That radiant home of all hospitality seemed opening on from darker
+chambers to the deadly dark.  The immorality in the moral situation could
+not be forgotten by one who was professionally a moralist.  But an
+incorruptible beauty in the woman's character claimed to plead for her
+memory.  Even the rigorous in defence of righteous laws are softened by a
+sinner's death to hear excuses, and may own a relationship, haply
+perceive the faint nimbus of the saint.  Death among us proves us to be
+still not so far from the Nature saying at every avenue to the mind:
+'Earth makes all sweet.'
+
+Mr. Durance had prophesied a wailful end ever to the carol of Optimists!
+Yet it is not the black view which is the right view.  There is one
+between: the path adopted by Septimus Barmby:--if he could but induce his
+brethren to enter on it!  The dreadful teaching of circumstances might
+help to the persuading of a fair young woman, under his direction .  .  .
+having her hand disengaged.  Mr. Barmby started himself in the dream of
+his uninterred passion for the maiden: he chased it, seized it, hurled it
+hence, as a present sacrilege:--constantly, and at the pitch of our
+highest devotion to serve, are we assailed by the tempter!  Is it, that
+the love of woman is our weakness?  For if so, then would a celibate
+clergy have grant of immunity.  But, alas, it is not so with them!  We
+have to deplore the hearing of reports too credible.  Again we are pushed
+to contemplate woman as the mysterious obstruction to the perfect purity
+of soul.  Nor is there a refuge in asceticism.  No more devilish
+nourisher of pride do we find than in pain voluntarily embraced.  And
+strangely, at the time when our hearts are pledged to thoughts upon
+others, they are led by woman to glance revolving upon ourself, our vile
+self!  Mr. Barmby clutched it by the neck.
+
+Light now, as of a strong memory of day along the street, assisted him to
+forget himself at the sight of the inanimate houses of this London, all
+revealed in a quietness not less immobile than tombstones of an unending
+cemetery, with its last ghost laid.  Did men but know it!--The habitual
+necessity to amass matter for the weekly sermon, set him noting his
+meditative exclamations, the noble army of platitudes under haloes, of
+good use to men: justifiably turned over in his mind for their good.  He
+had to think, that this act of the justifying of the act reproached him
+with a lack of due emotion, in sympathy with agonized friends truly dear.
+Drawing near the hospitable house, his official and a cordial emotion
+united, as we see sorrowful crape-wreathed countenances.  His heart
+struck heavily when the house was visible.
+
+Could it be the very house?  The look of it belied the tale inside.  But
+that threw a ghostliness on the look.
+
+Some one was pacing up and down.  They greeted Dudley Sowerby.  His
+ability to speak was tasked.  They gathered, that mademoiselle and 'a
+Miss Pridden' were sitting with Nesta, and that their services in a
+crisis had been precious.  At such times, one of them reflected, woman
+has indeed her place: when life's battle waxes red.  Her soul must be
+capable of mounting to the level of the man's, then?  It is a lesson!
+
+Dudley said he was waiting for Dr. Themison to come forth.  He could not
+tear himself from sight of the house.
+
+The door opened to Dr. Themison departing, Colney Durance and Simeon
+Fenellan bare-headed.  Colney showed a face with stains of the lashing of
+tears.
+
+Dr. Themison gave his final counsels.  'Her father must not see her.  For
+him, it may have to be a specialist.  We will hope the best.  Mr. Dartrey
+Fenellan stays beside him:--good.  As to the ceremony he calls for, a
+form of it might soothe:--any soothing possible!  No music.  I will
+return in a few hours.'
+
+He went on foot.
+
+Mr. Barmby begged advice from Colney and Simeon concerning the message he
+had received--the ceremony requiring his official presidency.  Neither of
+them replied.  They breathed the morning air, they gave out long-drawn
+sighs of relief, looking on the trees of the park.
+
+A man came along the pavement, working slow legs hurriedly.  Simeon ran
+down to him.
+
+'Humour, as much as you can,' Colney said to Mr. Barmby.  'Let him
+imagine.'
+
+'Miss Radnor?'
+
+'Not to speak of her.'
+
+'The daughter he so loves?'
+
+Mr. Barmby's tender inquisitiveness was unanswered.  Were they inducing
+him to mollify a madman?  But was it possible to associate the idea of
+madness with Mr. Radnor?
+
+Simeon ran back.  'Jarniman,' he remarked.  'It's over!'
+
+'Now!' Colney's shoulders expressed the comment.  'Well, now, Mr. Barmby,
+you can do the part desired.  Come in.  It's morning!' He stared at the
+sky.
+
+All except Dudley passed in.
+
+Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being acute.  It was
+moderated, though not more than moderated, when he was informed of the
+death of Mrs. Burman Radnor; an event that occurred, according to
+Jarniman's report, forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time
+called for information of it at the house in Regent's Park--five hours
+and a half, as Colney made his calculation, after the death of Nataly.
+He was urged by some spur of senseless irony to verify the calculation
+and correct it in the minutes.
+
+Dudley crossed the road.  No sign of the awful interior was on any of the
+windows of the house either to deepen awe or relieve.  They were blank as
+eyeballs of the mindless.  He shivered.  Death is our common cloak; but
+Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded speculating whether indeed
+a stricken man, who has become the cause of woeful trouble, may not be
+pointing a moral.  Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey
+drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor's lawyer.  Could it
+be, that there was no Will written?  Could a Will be executed now?  The
+moral was more forcibly suggested.  Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor
+successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular, brightest of the
+elect of Fortune, felled to the ground within an hour, he and all his
+house!  And if at once to pass beneath the ground, the blow would have
+seemed merciful for him.  Or if, instead of chattering a mixture of the
+rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to rave like the utterly
+distraught.  Recollection of some of the things he shouted, was an
+anguish: A notion came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the
+two, and he cried out: 'Cremation?  No, Colney's right, it robs us of our
+last laugh.  I lie as I fall.'  He 'had a confession for his Nataly, for
+her only, for no one else.'  He had 'an Idea.'  His begging of Dudley to
+listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before it), was the
+sole piece of unreasonableness in the explanation of the idea: and that
+was not much wilder than the stuff Dudley had read from reports of
+Radical speeches.  He told Dudley he thought him too young to be 'best
+man to a widower about to be married,' and that Barmby was 'coming all
+haste to do the business, because of no time to spare.'
+
+Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey Fenellan his task
+of watching over the wreck of a splendid intelligence, humouring and
+restraining.  According to the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the
+symptoms before the appearance of his daughter.  For awhile he hung, and
+then fell, like an icicle.  Nesta came with a cry for her father.  He
+rose: Dartrey was by.  Hugged fast in iron muscles, the unhappy creature
+raved of his being a caged lion.  These things Dudley had heard in the
+house.
+
+There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.
+
+Nataly's dead body was her advocate with her family, with friends, with
+the world.  Victor had more need of a covering shroud to keep calamity
+respected.  Earth makes all sweet: and we, when the privilege is granted
+us, do well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered to the
+bosom of earth.
+
+That night's infinite sadness was concentrated upon Nesta.  She had need
+of her strength of mind and body.
+
+The night went past as a year.  The year followed it as a refreshing
+night.  Slowly lifting her from our abysses, it was a good angel to the
+girl.  Permission could not be given for her to see her father.  She had
+a home in the modest home of Louise de Seilles on the borders of
+Dauphins; and with French hearts at their best in winningness around her,
+she learned again, as an art, the natural act of breathing calmly; she
+had by degrees a longing for the snow-heights.  When her imagination
+could perch on them with love and pride, she began to recover the throb
+for a part in human action.  It set her nature flowing to the mate she
+had chosen, who was her counsellor, her supporter, and her sword.  She
+had awakened to new life, not to sink back upon a breast of love, though
+thoughts of the lover were as blows upon strung musical chords of her
+bosom.  Her union with Dartrey was for the having an ally and the being
+an ally, in resolute vision of strife ahead, through the veiled dreams
+that bear the blush.  This was behind a maidenly demureness.  Are not
+young women hypocrites?  Who shall fathom their guile!  A girl with a
+pretty smile, a gentle manner, a liking for wild flowers up on the rocks;
+and graceful with resemblances to the swelling proportions of garden-
+fruits approved in young women by the connoisseur eye of man; distinctly
+designed to embrace the state of marriage, that she might (a girl of
+singularly lucid and receptive eyes) the better give battle to men
+touching matters which they howl at an eccentric matron for naming.
+So it was.  And the yielding of her hand to Dartrey, would have appeared
+at that period of her revival, as among the baser compliances of the
+fleshly, if she had not seen in him, whom she owned for leader, her
+fellow soldier, warrior friend, hero, of her own heart's mould, but a
+greater.
+
+She was on Como, at the villa of the Signora Giulia Sanfredini, when
+Dudley's letter reached her, with the supplicating offer of the share of
+his earldom.  An English home meanwhile was proposed to her at the house
+of his mother the Countess.  He knew that he did not write to a brilliant
+heiress.  The generosity she had always felt that he possessed, he thus
+proved in figures.  They are convincing and not melting.  But she was
+moved to tears by his goodness in visiting her father, as well as by the
+hopeful news he sent.  He wrote delicately, withholding the title of her
+father's place of abode.  There were expectations of her father's perfect
+recovery; the signs were auspicious; he appeared to be restored to the
+'likeness to himself' in the instances Dudley furnished:--his appointment
+with him for the flute-duet next day; and particularly his enthusiastic
+satisfaction with the largeness and easy excellent service of the
+residence 'in which he so happily found himself established.'  He held it
+to be, 'on the whole, superior to Lakelands.'  The smile and the tear
+rolled together in Nesta reading these words.  And her father spoke
+repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter
+had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he
+showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post.  He talked of
+public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the
+views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey.  He
+said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw fair
+prospects in it.
+
+Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that was perforce
+ungentle, in the signature of the name of Nesta Victoria Fenellan:--
+a name he was to hear cited among the cushioned conservatives, and plead
+for as he best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and compelled
+esteem, and regrets.
+
+The day following the report of her father's wish to see her, she and her
+husband started for England.  On that day, Victor breathed his last.
+Dudley had seen the not hopeful but an ominous illumination of the
+stricken man; for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth.  Often did
+Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the beloved mother
+with her hand at her mortal wound in secret through long years of the
+wearing of the mask to keep her mate inspirited.  Her gathered knowledge
+of things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes hard for her
+to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of the infinitely evil stamped
+blotches on its face and shrieked in stains across the skin beneath its
+gallant garb.  That was only when she thought of it as the world
+condemning her mother.  She had a husband able and ready, in return for
+corrections of his demon temper, to trim an ardent young woman's
+fanatical overflow of the sisterly sentiments; scholarly friends, too,
+for such restrainings from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of
+History exhibiting man's original sprouts to growth and fitful
+continuation of them.  Her first experience of the grief that is in
+pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was when the old Concert-
+set assembled round her.  When she heard from the mouth of a living
+woman, that she had saved her from going under the world's waggon-wheels,
+and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good living of a
+shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest happiness richer than her
+recollection of the bride's, though never was bride in fuller flower to
+her lord than she who brought the dower of an equal valiancy to Dartrey
+Fenellan.  You are aware of the reasons, the many, why a courageous young
+woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a
+doughty husband.  She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world,
+which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not
+blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her
+character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage.
+Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the world
+respectful to any brave woman.  This one was his wife.
+
+Daniel Skepsey rejoices in service to his new master, owing to the
+scientific opinion he can at any moment of the day apply for, as to the
+military defences of the country; instead of our attempting to arrest the
+enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer:--the sole point of
+difference between him and his Matilda; and it might have been fatal but
+that Nesta's intervention was persuasive.  The two members of the Army
+first in the field to enrol and give rank according to the merits of
+either, to both sexes, were made one.  Colney Durance (practically
+cynical when not fancifully, men said) stood by Skepsey at the altar.
+His published exercises in Satire produce a flush of the article in the
+Reviews of his books.  Meat and wine in turn fence the Hymen beckoning
+Priscilla and Mr. Pempton.  The forms of Religion more than the Channel's
+division of races keep Louise de Seilles and Mr. Peridon asunder: and in
+the uniting of them Colney is interested, because it would have so
+pleased the woman of the loyal heart no longer beating.  He let Victor's
+end be his expiation and did not phrase blame of him.  He considered the
+shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in Victor's history.
+He was reconciled to it when, looking on their child, he discerned, that
+for a cancelling of the errors chargeable to them, the father and mother
+had kept faith with Nature.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
+Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
+Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
+Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
+How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
+Nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
+No companionship save with the wound they nurse
+Not always the right thing to do the right thing
+The night went past as a year
+Universal censor's angry spite
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4475 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, v5,
+by George Meredith
+#81 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: One of Our Conquerors, v5
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
+XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
+XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+XL.       AN EXPIATION
+XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+XLII.     THE LAST
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+NESTA AND HER FATHER
+
+The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late when Victor was
+robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
+politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
+carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
+when she had him there.  Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
+no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
+their feet.  It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us
+up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
+extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
+aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
+other, whichever came first.  Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift
+and cleanse all degradations.  But it did seem as if he were not
+enjoying: things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if
+not prickly, in the retrospect.
+
+He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom
+of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin
+phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize.  His dulled physical system
+asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the
+hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the
+substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a
+deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of
+a whimsical nudity; hardly more.  Nay, not more!  he said; and at the end
+of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
+suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society,
+lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the
+little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was
+a small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt!  But so it is in war:
+we must pay for our allies.  What if it had been, that he and she
+together, with their united powers .  .  . ?  He dashed the silly vision
+aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it
+broke, showing no heart in it.  His heart was Nataly's.
+
+Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
+strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk,
+or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
+besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as
+he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.
+
+Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
+ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
+entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
+surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.
+
+'And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!' The songful
+satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
+upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.
+
+He peeped in.  It was dark.  Sensible of presences, he gradually
+discerned a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he
+drew near.  Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter.  He bent
+over them.  His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's; she spoke; she
+said tenderly: 'Father.'  Neither of the two made a movement.  He heard
+the shivering rise of a sob, that fell.  The dry sob going to the waste
+breath was Nataly's.  His girl did not speak again.
+
+He left them.  He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room,
+when he said 'Good!' For those two must have been lying folded together
+during the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart
+had opened; the girl knew.  Her tone: 'Father,' sweet, was heavy, too,
+with the darkness it came out of.
+
+So she knew.  Good.  He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his
+pity of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex
+which finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them;
+he strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.
+
+All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
+would not be harsh on her father.  She would say he loved!  And true:
+he did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.
+
+He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an alien
+woman's before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
+thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
+smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women the
+flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
+faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
+is not so bad.  Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
+a wing, and treat men in that way?  It is a breach of the convention; we
+pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
+tempters.  Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was.  No
+necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while on
+behalf of his Nataly he had to .  .  .  Victor closed the curtain over a
+gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
+force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the devourer.
+Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
+circumstances.  She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
+between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
+give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
+uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
+soul like Dutchmen at the dam.  Here she was, and not desired, almost
+detested!  Nature detested!  It had come about through the battle for
+Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread
+she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
+besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living.  We may well
+marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!
+
+Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
+them.
+
+Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the
+lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
+favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
+greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was
+being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of
+it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.
+
+Nesta came.  Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
+laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising
+the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings,
+and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and
+plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound,
+muted splendour.  He told her it was a reception night, with music: and
+added: 'I miss my .  .  .  seen anybody lately?'
+
+'Mr. Sowerby?' said she.  'He was to have escorted me back.  He may have
+overslept himself.'
+
+She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a
+gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
+souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.
+
+He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.
+
+More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
+in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
+whom he had conducted to Moorsedge.  'Kiss me,' he said.
+
+She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
+his forehead, saying: 'My love!  my papa!  my own dear dada!' all the
+words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
+crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
+Londen street.
+
+He strained her to his breast.  'Mama soon be here?'
+
+'Soon.'
+
+That was well.  And possibly at the present moment applying, with her
+cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment
+of the traces of grief.
+
+Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
+than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
+family dinner.  She performed her part for his comfort, though not
+prattling; and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
+running rill-like over our daily humdrum.  Simeon Fenellan would have
+helped.  Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
+morning's paper.  'No harm before Fredi, my dear.  She's a young woman
+now.  And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.
+She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her 'duque';
+--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.  Now, mark
+me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer.  If only we could have
+her now!'
+
+'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly.  Her heart had a blow in the
+thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
+bringing criticism.
+
+'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.
+
+She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly's imitation of
+the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
+theatrical operatic attitude.
+
+'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
+three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
+where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was
+happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
+innocents;--whom heaven bless!  Jealousy of their naturally closer heart-
+at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and sweetness
+was felt to be in the not excluding him.
+
+Nesta engaged to sing one of the 'old duets with her mother.  She saw her
+mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if
+doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell
+to.  Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the
+girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.
+
+She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there might
+be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
+visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
+think such a man as her father irrational.
+
+People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced by
+Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went to
+Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
+ascended a stage.  There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
+and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
+voluminous robes.
+
+They crowded about their host where he stood.  'He, is their Law!' Colney
+said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
+regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing.  They had an air of
+worshipping, and he of swimming.
+
+There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neighbours: the gentleman
+representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
+Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis.  Few young men
+and maids were seen.  Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not
+mentioning her.  Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the
+piano.  Priscilla Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus
+Barmby.  Peridon and Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places.
+There was no fluting.  A famous Canadian lady was the principal singer.
+A Galician violinist, zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of
+his corporeal frame in execution, and described by Colney as 'Paganini on
+wall,' failed to supplant Durandarte in Nesta's memory.  She was asked by
+Lady Grace for the latest of Dudley.  Sir Abraham Quatley named him with
+handsome emphasis.  Great dames caressed her; openly approved; shadowed
+the future place among them.
+
+Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn's absence.  He said: 'A
+homoeopathic doctor's wife!' nothing more; and by that little, he
+prepared Nesta for her mother's explanation.  The great London people,
+ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
+on it.  But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
+one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
+whose marriage was of her making.  She did not disapprove Priscilla's
+behaviour.  Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
+openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
+proper feelings.  Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
+or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
+had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
+from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
+one of the few not ignorant.  The rumour was traceable to the City.
+
+'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.
+
+Nataly answered: 'You will grow used to it.'
+
+Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving.  Nesta had a
+transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
+company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
+own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
+their feelings chilled her.
+
+Nataly said: 'It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.'  She smiled;
+and at once the girl read woman's armour on the dear face, and asked
+herself, Could I be so brave?  The question following was a speechless
+wave, that surged at her father.  She tried to fathom the scheme he
+entertained.  The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was.  She
+could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads cannot
+obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding it is
+the sun's brilliance to their eyes.
+
+Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
+their world.
+
+Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the,
+City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
+waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation of a
+wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home with
+him.  Lady Grace Halley was at the office.  'I'm an incorrigible Stock
+Exchange gambler,' she said.
+
+'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulating in movement, and
+their heights are a preparation for their going down.'
+
+She said she 'liked a swing.'
+
+Nesta looked at them in turn.
+
+The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present.  She made play
+with Dudley's name.
+
+This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
+in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
+jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for
+protection.  But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
+contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt.  She read rather too much
+to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
+her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
+the lady's departure.  Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
+great of soul for jealousy.  Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
+from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
+affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
+suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
+would not stoop to a meanness.  'Plot?  Nataly?' said he, and shrugged.
+In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
+Nataly.  He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
+looked.
+
+But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
+who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation.
+He told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what,
+or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was.  She was trying
+to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of
+her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated
+in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the
+simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;--the
+lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near
+midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames
+magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow.  There is no grasping of one
+who quickens us.
+
+His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
+value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
+it was.
+
+At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
+the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
+help.  That was a dream.  She could more easily have uttered the words to
+Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision
+of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's compassionateness; and
+her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music within her, a wreath of
+cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted
+her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single
+unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing
+leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange
+sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a
+trance.  So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is
+all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the
+immensity of vitality in 'the shadow of a shade.'
+
+Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
+Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
+the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
+besides.  She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
+pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
+passed it.
+
+She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
+unjust.  For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-
+creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no
+mercy is in them for the transitional.  And Dudley--and it was under her
+influence, and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development:
+interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.
+
+Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
+upon their friends.  He quite joined with his English world in its
+opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
+guns.  Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
+popgun paper pellets.  The English kick at the insolence, when they are
+not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
+overshadowing and braceing.  Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
+Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
+clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
+friend's collapse.  How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such
+a spiteful diatribe!  The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was
+the finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although
+we are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who,
+after brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of
+Old England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
+pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
+printer.  His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
+was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
+who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
+the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
+to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public.  Further, he
+discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
+the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
+of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
+'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
+porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.'  After a week's privation
+of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
+countrymen.  As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
+Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
+the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
+him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout.  Mr. Semhians, all but
+treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
+the day': stimulating and not nourishing.  Britannia's mournful
+anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
+the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
+giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
+note of Conservatism.  But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
+suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
+dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
+and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
+we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
+what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
+butcher in the Satiric Art.
+
+Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
+her present feeling, was inhuman.  As little as our native public, had
+she then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs,
+visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale
+of slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from
+the undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire.  And truly it
+is not a fruit-bearing rod.  Colney had to stand on the defence of it
+against the damsel's charges.  He thought the use of the rod, while
+expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and
+those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their
+seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest
+rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them.  Insensibility to
+Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the
+worser thing in consequence.  And consequently upon the lack of it, and
+of training to appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables
+as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting
+themselves forked.
+
+'He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta.  'Colney will
+find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
+making concessions.  Here's this absurd Serial--it fails, of course; and
+then he has to say, it's because he won't tickle his English, won't enter
+into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'
+
+'But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
+always ready to help them,' said Nesta.
+
+'If he can patronize.'
+
+'Does he patronize me, dada?'
+
+'You are one of his exceptions.  Marry a title and live in state--and
+then hear him!  I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won't
+acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
+the success.  It is "a dirty road to success," he says.  So that, if
+successful, I must have rolled myself in mire.  I compelled him to admit
+he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a triumph!'
+
+Nesta's walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
+came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was
+ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his quotations
+of her sayings, thoughtful sayings.  'I declare she helps one to think,'
+he said.  'It 's not precocity; it 's healthy inquiry.  She brings me
+nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does.  I say,
+what a wife for a man!'
+
+'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,' said
+Nataly.  'You have not seen .  .  .?'
+
+'Dudley Sowerby?  He's at Cronidge, I believe.  His elder brother's in a
+bad way.  Bad business, this looking to a death.'
+
+Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.
+
+Let it be cast on Society, then!  A Society opposing Nature forces us to
+these murderous looks upon impediments.  But what of a Society in the
+dance with Nature?  Victor did not approve of that.  He began, under the
+influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is in
+a chastened nature.  And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
+Idea.  He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight:
+a muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by the
+inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
+spiritual roost.  She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
+Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
+humanity.  Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm
+below, was most mysteriously delayed.  Owing to it, in a manner almost as
+mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
+Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again.  But there was
+a bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest.  And Fredi away, he
+might be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one
+might guess, by a predecessor or two.  Ta-ta-ta-to and mum!  Still, in
+justice to the little woman, she had been serviceable.
+
+She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
+here we are with the murder-eye again!
+
+Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
+intimation of her bent of mind.
+
+'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said, on the fifth morning
+since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear, that
+this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.
+
+'Why, don't you know,' said she, 'we all meet to have tea in Mr.
+Durance's chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined
+by mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.'
+
+'Colney's selection of them!  And Simeon Fenellan, I hope.  Perhaps
+Dartrey.  Perhaps .  .  .  eh?'
+
+She reddened.  So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name could bring the blush to
+her cheeks.  Dudley had his excuses in his brother's condition.  His
+father's health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating.  Where there
+are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
+there are complications.  Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
+pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
+aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.
+
+'And supposing a fog, my dearie?' he said.
+
+'The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
+through densest fogs as well as over deserts,' etc.  She declaimed a long
+sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left the
+room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her mother's
+neck, murmuring: 'Mother!  mother!' a cry equal to 'I am sure I do
+right,' and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line of
+her instinct, without an object in sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER
+
+Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father,
+Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it.  The unusual performance had
+a meaning; she felt she was praised.  It might be because she made
+herself her father's companion.  'I can't persuade him to put on a great-
+coat,' she said.  'You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat
+of his ambition,' said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.
+
+He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform
+celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine
+which gave out serially THE RIVAL TONGUES: and there was talk of a
+dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters.  The pained Editor
+deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica.  'In, book
+form, perhaps!' he remarked, with plaintive' resignation; adding: 'You
+read it?'  And a lady exclaimed: 'We all read it!'
+
+But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are
+reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.
+'He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!'  Colney's poor
+consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book: for the
+funny monster has been known to like a shaking.
+
+'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining the group and
+grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her
+guessing.  'A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches
+the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of
+his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous!  And no wonder;
+his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back;
+and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his
+mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it
+unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can't; only swelling, which he's
+obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that's his
+intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of
+the baillir d'eau; and he's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of
+dropsy.  You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who
+stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing
+above proof is poured in; and there's your misfortune.  He's not half a
+bad fellow, you find when you haven't got to serve him.'
+
+'Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!' Colney murmured.
+
+The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having
+certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author;
+and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness
+prompting the generosity.  Publication of a book, is the philosopher's
+lantern upon one's fellows.
+
+Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing
+Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at
+Brighton.  Simeon's tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word;
+he was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national
+grotesque-sublime.
+
+'That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor!  Don't listen to Simeon; he's a man
+of lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such
+like crop of carcase prose: this is epical.  In DRINK we have Old
+England's organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus,
+ennobled brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand.  Keep a
+straight eye on the primary motives of man, you'll own the English
+produce the material for proud verse; they're alive there!  Dartrey's
+Demerara makes a pretty episode of the battle.  I haven't seen it--if
+it's possible to look on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar
+appearance in repose, Jove's lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus
+at another.  Observe Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose
+of laying his miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars,
+who had offended.  But we have his name, my dear Victor!  His name,
+Simeon?--Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he
+obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his
+convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his
+place another young student, who'll grow up to do similarly.  And
+Dartrey, we assume, is off to stop that system.  You behold Sir Dartrey
+twirling the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we
+shall have an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading
+heroic louts.  Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!--always unpatriotic, you
+'ll say.  Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes
+on Beer for the uniting of you English!  I tell you no poetic fiction.
+Seeing him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent,
+Venus, to shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most
+diverting of interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-
+bonnet, and Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing
+bedevilled mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not
+under secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and
+that was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by
+a battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat's boys; and they fell
+upon the hymners.  Here you fill in with pastoral similes.  They struck
+the maid adored by Skepsey.  And that was the blow which slew them!
+Our little man drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their
+work.  A valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the
+nob, and suddenly the Demerara lightened.  It flailed to thresh.  Enough.
+to say, brains would have come.  The Bungays made a show of fight.  No
+lack of blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before
+Achilles rageing.  You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the
+ballad.  We want only a few names of the fallen.  It was the carving of a
+maitre chef, according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme
+precision: they fell, accurately sliced from the joint.  Having done with
+them, Dartrey tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of
+battle; and he let his major go unscathed.  Phlebotomy sufficient for the
+day!'
+
+Nesta's ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.
+
+'Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,'
+Victor said.  'He can't have joined those people?'
+
+'They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,' interposed Fenellan.
+'The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a
+shindy.'
+
+'Suit him!  They're the scandal of our streets.'  Victor was pricked with
+a jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.
+
+'Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,' said Colney.
+'You don't see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,' he harped on the
+word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see.
+'Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge.  They're
+honest foes of vice, and they move:--in England!  Pulpit-preaching has no
+effect.  For gross maladies, gross remedies.  You may judge of what you
+are by the quality of the cure.  Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint--
+it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English
+frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make.  It may
+still be the saving of you--on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not
+observed that it aims at higher.  And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is
+off to the East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.'
+
+'So there's the reason for our not seeing him!' Victor turned to Nesta.
+
+'Papa, you won't be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,'
+said Nesta.  'I'm sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.'
+
+Colney smiled on her.  'And you too?'
+
+'If women knew how!'
+
+'They're hitting on more ways at present than the men--in England.'
+
+'But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they're allowed the
+chance here.'
+
+'Good!' Fenellan exclaimed.  'And that upsets his placement of the modern
+national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what
+remains.'
+
+Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'
+
+Their circle widened.  Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led
+about and introduced to ladies.  They were encouraging with her.  One of
+them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine
+insurrection.  She said: 'I hear your praises from Mr. Durance.  He
+rarely praises.  You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of
+women, he says.'
+
+Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart.  She speculated in the
+dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless.  And
+did Mr. Durance approve?  But surely she stood in a glorious England if
+there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils.  Oh!  that
+is the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the
+meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer
+shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.
+
+She cried in her bosom: I feel!  She had no other expression for that
+which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the
+celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran
+through her.  It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that
+certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils;
+and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel
+thanking heaven.
+
+Society was being attacked and defended.  She could but studiously
+listen.  Her father was listening.  The assailant was a lady; and she had
+a hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial
+for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by
+brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously
+claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world
+disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite!  She flung the gauntlet at
+externally venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where
+horrification, execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a
+shortly antecedent day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding
+her to expulsion.  Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her.  Colney did
+the same.  Victor turned sharp on him.  'Yes,' Colney said; 'we unfold
+the standard of extremes in this country, to get a single step taken:
+that's how we move: we threaten death to get footway.  Now, mark:
+Society's errors will be admitted.'
+
+A gentleman spoke.  He began by admitting Society's errors.
+Nevertheless, it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may
+say of Society in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul.
+We may wash, trim, purify, but we must not maim it.  The assertion of our
+individuality in opposition to the Government of Society--this existing
+Society--is a toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et
+caetera.
+
+Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.--But, if
+you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get
+it.--But you have it!  Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are
+too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the
+pits by your slackness:--etc.  There was a pretty hot debate.  Both
+assailant and defendant, to Victor's thinking, spoke well, and each the
+right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer
+neither.  He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered
+it in his position.  Mentally, he was on the side of Society.  Yet he was
+annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence
+unfolded.  But it was absurd to expect it would not be.  And in fact, a
+position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for
+stultifying us.
+
+Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly's handwriting called
+him home.  She wrote: 'Make my excuses.  C. D.  will give Nesta and some
+lady dinner.  A visitor here.  Come alone, and without delay.  Quite
+well, robust.  Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.'
+
+Nesta was happy to stay; and Victor set forth.
+
+The visitor?  plainly Dudley.  Nataly's trusting the girl to the chance
+of some lady being present, was unlike her.  Dudley might be tugging at
+the cord; and the recent conversation upon Society, rendered one of its
+gilt pillars particularly estimable.--A person in the debate had declared
+this modern protest on behalf of individualism to represent Society's
+Criminal Trial.  And it is likely to be a long one.  And good for the
+world, that we see such a Trial!--Well said or not, undoubtedly Society
+is an old criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual
+worship where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord.  But it has
+a case for pleading.  We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping
+lumberer's raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother.
+Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting level?--
+enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design.  If Society is to
+subsist, it must have the human with the logical argument against the cry
+of the free-flags, instead of presenting a block's obtuseness.  That, you
+need not hesitate to believe, will be rolled downward and disintegrated,
+sooner than later.  A Society based on the logical concrete of humane
+considerateness:--a Society prohibiting to Mrs. Burman her wielding of a
+life-long rod .  .  .  .
+
+The personal element again to confuse inquiry!--And Skepsey and Barmby
+both of them bent on doing work without inquiry of any sort!  They were
+enviable: they were good fellows.  Victor clung to the theme because it
+hinted of next door to his lost Idea.  He rubbed the back of his head,
+fancying a throb there.  Are civilized creatures incapable of abstract
+thought when their social position is dubious?  For if so, we never can
+be quit of those we forsake.--Apparently Mrs. Burman's unfathomed power
+lay in her compelling him to summon the devilish in himself and play upon
+the impish in Society, that he might overcome her.
+
+Victor's house-door stopped this current.
+
+Nataly took his embrace.
+
+'Nothing wrong?' he said, and saw the something.  It was a favourable
+moment to tell her what she might not at another time regard as a small
+affair.  'News in the City to-day of that South London borough being
+vacated.  Quatley urges me.  A death again!  I saw Pempton, too.  Will
+you credit me when I tell you he carries his infatuation so far, that he
+has been investing in Japanese and Chinese Loans, because they are less
+meat-eaters than others, and vegetarians are more stable, and outlast us
+all!--Dudley the visitor?'  'Mr. Sowerby has been here,' she said, in a
+shaking low voice.
+
+Victor held her hand and felt a squeeze more nervous than affectionate.
+
+'To consult with me,' she added.  'My maid will go at ten to bring Nesta;
+Mr. Durance I can count on, to see her safe home.  Ah!' she wailed.
+
+Victor nodded, saying: 'I guess.  And, my love, you will receive Mrs.
+John Cormyn to-morrow morning.  I can't endure gaps.  Gaps in our circle
+must never be.  Do I guess?--I spoke to Colney about bringing her home.'
+
+Nataly sighed: 'Ah!  make what provision we will!  Evil--Mr. Sowerby has
+had a great deal to bear.'
+
+'A worldling may think so.'
+
+Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze
+her speech.
+
+'Victor!  Our Nesta!  Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain.  And how the Miss
+Duvidneys!  .  .  .  At that Brighton!'--The voice he heard was not his
+darling's deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: 'She has
+been permitted to make acquaintance--she has been seen riding with--she
+has called upon--Oh! it is one of those abandoned women.  In her house!
+Our girl!  Our Nesta!  She was insulted by a man in the woman's house.
+She is talked of over Brighton.  The mother!--the daughter!  And grant me
+this--that never was girl more carefully .  .  .  never till she was
+taken from me.  Oh!  do not forget.  You will defend me?  You will say,
+that her mother did with all her soul strive .  .  .  It is not a rumour.
+Mr. Sowerby has had it confirmed.'  A sob caught her voice.
+
+Victor's hands caressed to console: 'Dudley does not propose to .  .  ?'
+
+'Nesta must promise .  .  .  But how it happened?  How!  An acquaintance
+with--contact with!--Oh!  cruel!'  Each time she ceased speaking, the
+wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but
+she locked them in.
+
+'An accident!' said Victor; 'some misunderstanding--there can't be harm.
+Of course, she promises--hasn't to promise.  How could a girl
+distinguish!  He does not cast blame on her?'
+
+'Dear, if you would go down to Dartrey to-morrow.  He knows:--it is over
+the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta.  Innocent,
+yes!  Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that.  Ignorant of the
+character of the dreadful woman?  Ah, if I could ever in anything think
+her ignorant!  She frightens me.  Mr. Sowerby is indulgent.  He does me
+justice.  My duty to her--I must defend myself--has been my first
+thought.  I said in my prayers--she at least!  .  .  .  We have to see
+the more than common reasons why she, of all girls, should--he did not
+hint it, he was delicate: her name must not be public.'
+
+'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor.  'It
+does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent."  My dear, if you were down
+there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men
+seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
+watched them along the parade, often.  Clear as day how it happened!
+I'll go down early to-morrow.'
+
+He fancied Nataly was appeased.  And even out of this annoyance, there
+was the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated
+suit.
+
+Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a
+moderation of it.  She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
+recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
+comfort they gave.  But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
+perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's
+coming returned.
+
+For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
+a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
+drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
+to the depth of it.  She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
+corruption must come of the contact with impurity.
+
+Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her sole
+revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.
+
+She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:
+'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the daughter
+excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for
+the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike consigned to
+the corners of the world's dust-heaps.  She cried out, that her pride was
+broken.  Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces.  The
+tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to come now,
+and she had none.  It might be, that she had not strength for weeping.
+She was very weak.  Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta's
+entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand: a chill
+and a clouding overcame her.  The quitted bed seemed the haven of a
+drifted wreck to reach.
+
+Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter
+morning.  'The mother!--the daughter!' had swung a pendulum for some time
+during the night in him, too.  He would rather have been subjected to the
+spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the
+dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting,
+waters.
+
+He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache:
+'Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into
+Fredi's eyes!' he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just
+a little afraid of her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
+
+Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness
+in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end.  Yesterday,
+before Dudley Sowerby's visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the
+tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing
+her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak
+repentantly, most tenderly.  Mrs. John said: 'You will believe I have
+suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think': and she did not set the
+smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of
+laughter between them.  Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the
+parting kissed her.  She would rather have seen her friend than not: so
+far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead
+in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved
+darkness and silence.  She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was
+broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they
+cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.
+
+The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain
+space for recovery combative.  She said:
+
+Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I
+would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt--what
+I can of it.  All I contend against is, injustice.  And she sank into
+sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to
+phrase them.
+
+Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
+loneliness;--an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how,
+more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her girl;--
+seemed under the hand of the angel of God.  The abandonment of her by
+friends, was merely the light to show it.
+
+Midday's post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to
+be allowed to call on her next day.--We are not so easily cast off!
+Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not
+been so great.  She wrote: 'Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.'
+
+Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
+the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
+all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
+receipt of Priscilla's empty letter: for her soul's desire was to be
+doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
+to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength, she
+said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.
+
+Nesta's being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
+Doubts of the girl's possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
+question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
+that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
+herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
+counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to
+reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap,
+and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the
+divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for
+chastisement.  She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal.  And that
+calmed her.
+
+She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came!  Therefore
+the blow was proved divine.  Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
+appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex!  And
+brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!
+
+Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice.  She
+had denied herself to Nesta's redoubled petition.  Nesta knocking at the
+door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her girl
+on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge.  She heard the
+voice of Dartrey Fenellan.
+
+He was admitted.  'No, dear,' she said to Nesta; and Nesta's, 'My own
+mother,' consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang
+a stinging tear to the mother's eyelids.
+
+Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.
+
+'Is it a very low woman?' Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
+face abashed.
+
+'It is not,' said he, quick to meet any abruptness.
+
+'She must be cunning.'
+
+'In the ordinary way.  We say it of Puss before the hounds.'
+
+'To deceive a girl like Nesta!'
+
+'She has done no harm.'
+
+'Dartrey, you speak to a mother.  You have seen the woman?  She is?
+--ah!'
+
+'She is womanly, womanly.'
+
+'Quite one of those .  .  . ?'
+
+'My dear soul!  You can't shake them off in that way.  She is one of us.
+If we have the class, we can't escape from it.  They are not to bear all
+the burden because they exist.  We are the bigger debtors.  I tell you
+she is womanly.'
+
+'It sounds like horrid cynicism.'
+
+'Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.'
+
+'Do not make me hate your chivalry.  This woman is a rod on my back.
+Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta's mind!'
+
+'Don't fear!'
+
+'Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?'
+
+'To Nesta herself?--not any: not to a girl like your girl.'
+
+'To my girl's name?  Speak at once.  But I know she has.  She induced
+Nesta to go to her house.  My girl was insulted in this woman's house.'
+
+Dartrey's forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present
+contempt.  'I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of
+it, knowing the facts 's not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers
+of your girl.'
+
+'She is talked of!'
+
+'A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of
+idlers!'
+
+'The woman is notorious.'  Nataly said it shivering.
+
+He shook his head.  'Not true.'
+
+'She has an air of a lady?'
+
+'She sits a horse well.'
+
+'Would she to any extent deceive me--impose on me here?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Ah!' Nataly moaned. . . .
+
+'But what?' said Dartrey.  'There was no pretence.  Her style is not
+worse than that of some we have seen.  There was no effort to deceive.
+The woman's plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or
+two tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use.  There are
+women who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the
+wilderness.'
+
+'Yes; I know!--those ideas of yours!' Nataly had once admired him for his
+knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot.  'You have
+spoken to this woman?  She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?'
+
+'She thanked God for having met her.'
+
+'Is it one of the hysterical creatures?'
+
+Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.
+
+He laughed to himself.  'A clever question.  There is a leaning to
+excitement of manner at times.  It 's not hysteria.  Allow for her
+position.'
+
+Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly
+said: 'What rank of life does the woman come from?'
+
+'The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your
+Book-stalls.  I am not precise?'
+
+'Leave Mr. Durance.  Is she in any degree commonly well bred?  .  .  .
+behaviour, talk-her English.'
+
+'I trench on Mr. Durance in replying.  Her English is passable.  You may
+hear .  .  .'
+
+'Everywhere, of course!  And this woman of slipshod English and excited
+manners imposed upon Nesta!'
+
+'It would not be my opinion.'
+
+'Did not impose on her!'
+
+'Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.'
+
+'Think what that says, Dartrey!'
+
+'You have had a detestable version of the story.'
+
+'Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!'
+
+'She may.  She's a better woman for having met her.  Don't suppose we're
+for supernatural conversions.  The woman makes no show of that.  But she
+has found a good soul among her sex--her better self in youth, as one
+guesses; and she is grateful--feels farther from exile in consequence.
+She has found a lady to take her by the hand!--not a common case.  She
+can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta.  I forget if she
+says it; I say it.  You have heard the story from one of your
+conventional gentlemen.'
+
+'A true gentleman.  I have reason to thank him.  He has not your ideas on
+these matters, Dartrey.  He is very sensitive .  .  .  on Nesta's
+behalf.'
+
+'With reference to marriage.  I'll own I prefer another kind of
+gentleman.  I 've had my experience of that kind of gentleman.  Many
+of the kind have added their spot to the outcasts abominated for
+uncleanness--in holy unction.  Many?--I won't say all; but men who
+consent to hear black words pitched at them, and help to set good women
+facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites.
+They, if you'll let me quote Colney Durance to you to-day--and how is it
+he is not in favour?--they are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of
+Society into pillars of salt.  Down comes the house.  And priests can
+rest in sight of it!--They ought to be dead against the sanctimony that
+believes it excommunicates when it curses.  The relationship is not
+dissolved so cheaply, though our Society affects to think it is.
+Barmby's off to the East End of this London, Victor informs me:--good
+fellow!  And there he'll be groaning over our vicious nature.  Nature is
+not more responsible for vice than she is for inhumanity.  Both bad, but
+the latter's the worse of the two.'
+
+Nataly interposed: 'I see the contrast, and see whom it's to strike.'
+
+Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning.  'Hardly that.  Let it stand.
+He 's only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for
+crushing hope out of its frailest victims.  They're that--no sentiment.
+What a world, too, look behind it!--brutal because brutish.  The world
+may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman.  To hear of Nesta down
+there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining!  He
+had the privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished.  There
+are men who think--men!--the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty
+business.  They depute it to certain officials.  And your women--it's the
+taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little take
+the humane as the enlightened view.  Except, by the way, sometimes, in
+secret;--they have a sisterly breast.  In secret, they do occasionally
+think as they feel.  In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call
+Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts.  I won't
+repeat my reasons for educating them differently.  At present we have but
+half the woman to go through life with--and thank you.'
+
+Dartrey stopped.  'Don't be disturbed,' he added.  'There's no ground for
+alarm.  Not of any sort.'
+
+Nataly said: 'What name?'
+
+'Her name is Mrs. Marsett.'
+
+'The name is .  .  . ?'
+
+'Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward.  He came back from the Continent
+yesterday.'
+
+A fit of shuddering seized Nataly.  It grew in violence, and speaking out
+of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said:
+'Always that name?'
+
+'Before the maiden name?  May have been or not.'
+
+'Not, you say?'
+
+'I don't accurately know.'
+
+Dartrey sprang to his legs.  'My dear soul!  dear friend--one of the
+best! if we go on fencing in the dark, there'll be wounds.  Your way of
+taking this affair disappointed me.  Now I understand.  It's the disease
+of a trouble, to fly at comparisons.  No real one exists.  I wished to
+protect the woman from a happier sister's judgement, to save you from
+alarm concerning Nesta:--quite groundless, if you'll believe me.  Come,
+there's plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts
+are more looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without
+the horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim
+distinction from the luckless.  A girl who's unprotected may go through
+adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions.
+Better if protected, we all agree.  Better also if the world did not
+favour the girl's multitude of enemies.  Your system of not dealing with
+facts openly is everyway favourable to them.  I am glad to say, Victor
+recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for.
+And now I must go and have a talk with the--what a change from the blue
+butterfly!  Eaglet, I ought to have said.  I dine with you, for Victor
+may bring news.'
+
+'Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?'
+
+'He makes it wherever he steps.'
+
+'He would reproach me for not detaining you.  Tell Nesta I have to lie
+down after talking.  She has a child's confidence in you.'
+
+A man of middle age!  he said to himself.  It is the particular
+ejaculation which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday.
+He resolved, that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of
+his age; and he went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of
+years should give him.  Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her
+was an ennobling equal to celestial.  For this fair girl was one of the
+active souls of the world--his dream to discover in woman's form.  She,
+the little Nesta, the tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though
+she was, already in the fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the
+simply Christian.  The worse for it?  Sowerby would think so.  She was
+not of the order of young women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary,
+consent to the peace with evil, and are kept externally safe from the
+smirch of evil, and are the ornaments of their country, glory of a
+country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.
+
+Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by
+Mrs. Marsett--not incredulous of the girl's heroism: that capacity he
+caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the
+measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:--but her beauty, or
+the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of
+thought in our fens.  Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to
+service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this
+earth.  Nesta was of the blooming earth.  Where do we meet girl or woman
+comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted
+of her sex?  He was puzzled by Nesta's unlikeness in deeds and in aspect.
+He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld her;
+presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind.  His doubts cleared off.
+Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be
+attached to the man Sowerby?  That entirely passed belief.
+
+And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing?  Her tones were
+singularly vibrating.
+
+They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: 'I fancy
+I am in disgrace with my mother.'
+
+'You have a suspicion why?' said he.
+
+'I have.'
+
+She would have told him why: the words were at her lips.  Previous to her
+emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out.  They were
+arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him
+drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
+worshipped.
+
+He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.
+
+To spare pain, he said: 'No misunderstanding with the dear mother will
+last the day through.  Can I help?'
+
+'Oh, Captain Dartrey!'
+
+'Drop the captain.  Dartrey will do.'
+
+'How could I!'
+
+'You're not wanting in courage, Nesta.'
+
+'Hardly for that!'
+
+'By-and-by, then.'
+
+'Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.'
+
+'You see; Dartrey, it must be.'
+
+'If I could!'
+
+'But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend, very
+old friend: he'll be tipped with grey in a year or two.'
+
+'I might be bolder then.'
+
+'Imagine it now.  There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by
+their names.'
+
+Her nature rang to the implication.  'I am not bound.'  Dartrey hung
+fast, speculating on her visibly: 'I heard you were?'
+
+'No.  I must be free.'
+
+'It is not an engagement?'
+
+'Will you laugh?--I have never quite known.  My father desired it:
+and my desire is to please him.  I think I am vain enough to think I read
+through blinds and shutters.  The engagement--what there was--has been,
+to my reading, broken more than once.  I have not considered it, to
+settle my thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be
+broken.  I have given cause--if it is known.  There is no blame
+elsewhere.  I am not unhappy, Captain Dartrey.'
+
+'Captain by courtesy.  Very well.  Tell me how Nesta judges the
+engagement to be broken?'
+
+She was mentally phrasing before she said: 'Absence.'
+
+'He was here yesterday.'
+
+All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight
+drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment.  'Then I
+understand; it enlightens me.
+
+My own mother!--my poor mother!  he should have come to me.  I was the
+guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer.  That, if in life were
+direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer
+through others or for them.'
+
+'You have soon seen that, dear girl,' said Dartrey.
+
+'So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!' Nesta sighed;
+she took a sharp breath.  'You? do you blame me too?'
+
+He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and
+heavenly candour.
+
+But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be
+honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: 'Blame?
+Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing.  I've
+made mistakes, with no bad design.  A good mother's view is not often
+wrong.'
+
+'You pressed my hand,' she murmured.
+
+That certainly had said more.
+
+'Glad to again,' he responded.  It was uttered airily and was meant to be
+as lightly done.
+
+Nesta did not draw back her hand.  'I feel strong when you press it.'
+Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
+ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged.  How was he to relax the
+pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
+should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.
+
+Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
+shower.
+
+'Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,' he said; and her
+gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.
+
+He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a
+revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
+obscurity.
+
+The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
+quicken slumbering seeds of passion.
+
+But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
+honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock.  He
+stopped the word at his mouth.  It was not in him to stop or moderate the
+force of his eyes.  She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
+her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood.  There was no soft expression,
+only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
+borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun.  And when such an exchange
+has come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded
+one.
+
+Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved.  She was his.  She
+had not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved.  Showers of
+painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
+frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let
+her hand go, she had the pressure on it.  The quivering intense of the
+moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all
+days coming.  That is how Love slays Death.  Never did girl so give her
+soul.
+
+She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
+for the character she worshipped.  But she could have given it to
+Dartrey, despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without
+any of the cravings, except to bestow.
+
+He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
+are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
+behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
+different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
+on it.  Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young
+life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking
+from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly
+pure, angelically tender.  Was there a point of honour to hold him back?
+
+Nataly entered the room.  She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.
+
+'Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?' Nesta said.
+
+'We have spoken,' her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to
+that theme.
+
+She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the, Why
+should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
+then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother's
+heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
+not set going, to have them discussed.  And the appalling theme, sitting
+offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
+girl's unblushingness.  After standing as one woman against the world so
+long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
+unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless.  Her mind had
+taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--
+And Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
+having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
+Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
+a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
+would have approved his doing.
+
+She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
+strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they say
+when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid.  The
+world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour
+toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.
+
+These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
+showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
+Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
+Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
+ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
+Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
+resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta's husband.  But, as she would
+have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to
+require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
+protection instead of inciting to rebellion.  And Dartrey, the loved and
+prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as
+they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
+him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta's
+head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
+scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
+was.
+
+Dartrey read Nataly's brows.  This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
+indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
+
+He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
+envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
+accustomed.  She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were
+driven to whiteness.  'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.
+
+'Lakelands on fire?' Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: 'I
+should not be sorry.'
+
+Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.
+
+Dartrey interposed: 'I'm sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.'
+
+'That ranks low among the worries,' Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.
+
+Nesta touched her arm: 'Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
+let me!'--she turned to him: 'before .  .  .'  at the end of her breath
+she said: 'Dartrey Fenellan.  You shall see my whole heart, mother.'
+
+Her mother looked from her at him.
+
+'Victor returns by the last train.   He telegraphs, that he dines with--'
+She handed the paper to Dartrey.
+
+'Marsett,' he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not
+knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.
+
+'It's to tell you he has done what he thought good,' said Dartrey.
+'In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter's work.
+So we won't talk about it till he comes.  You have no company this
+evening?'
+
+'Oh!  there is a pause to-night!  It's nearly as unceasing as your
+brother Simeon's old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom,
+till they danced her to pieces.  I do get now and then an hour's repose,'
+Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
+had applied.
+
+'My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,' the owner of the name
+said to Nesta.
+
+Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
+the directest of the bare statements.  She could have protested, that her
+love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
+regard for decency was livelier.  Pass the deficiency in a man.  But a
+girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of a
+Mrs. Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and
+this girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she
+could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission
+of her sin's having found her out.
+
+She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to
+endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
+Dartrey's nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night.
+It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a
+manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and
+an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they
+are!
+
+For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known,
+that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
+abominable Mrs. Marsett's friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
+them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.
+
+Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's embrace, against whom
+her door was jealously locked.  She hoped those two would talk much,
+madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible,
+through any short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially
+glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth.
+But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear,
+that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them
+perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself,
+shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a
+ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a
+physical effect on me!
+
+They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them.  Yet
+she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
+for joy of an unmaidenly confession.  During dinner they talked, without
+distressful pauses.  Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
+drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup.  Could it be all because Dartrey
+Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman?  The mother had
+lost hold of her.  The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.
+
+Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
+Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
+truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
+capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
+a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.  This
+led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
+and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
+service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
+critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
+thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
+and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
+she stood.  She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
+mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
+irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.
+
+At last, after midnight Victor arrived.
+
+Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain.  'Pray, go,
+dear,' her mother said.  Victor kissed his Fredi.  'Some time to-morrow,'
+said he; and she forbore to beseech him.
+
+He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
+good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.
+
+Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do
+another?  Nataly could merely observe.  A voice pertaining to no one
+present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter's
+faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity to cope
+with the girl.  She watched Nesta's passage from the room, somewhat
+affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.
+
+'And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!' Victor
+exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl.  'I promised
+Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps.  You
+remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands.  Fancy the dear bit of
+bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
+eight; and there she lay wide awake.  "What 's Fredi thinking of?"--
+"I'm thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada."--She could
+climb them now; she has the legs.'
+
+Nataly said: 'You have some report to make.  You dined with those
+people?'
+
+'The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough.  It's to happen before
+Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
+Fredi's doing!  He has to manage, arrange.--She's a good-looking woman,
+good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won't make a bad Lady
+Marsett.  Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to
+her eyelids.'
+
+'Come to me before you go to bed,' Nataly said, rising, her voice
+foundering; 'Good-night, Dartrey.'
+
+She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
+composure.  Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp
+from Victor, it burned like a poison.
+
+'Really Fredi's doing--chiefly,' said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
+were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room.  'I played the man
+of pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman.
+She's the better horse, as far as brains go.  Good enough Lady Marsett.
+I harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted.  He knew of it--spoke
+of you properly.  The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major
+he is no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite so--and has
+cut him dead.  Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of
+the honour of my daughter's acquaintance.  Rather comical grimace, when
+he vowed he'd fasten the tie.  He doesn't like marriage.  But, he can't
+give her up.  And she's for patronizing the institution.  But she is
+ready to say good-bye to him "rather than see the truest lady in the
+world insulted"--her words.  And so he swallows his dose for health,
+and looks a trifle sourish.  Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them.
+But if a man's fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her from slipping
+lower--and it's an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its
+wheels:--I say, a woman who has a man to lean on, unless she's as
+downright corrupt as two or three of the men we've known:--upon my word,
+Dartrey, I come round to some of your ideas on these matters.  It's this
+girl of mine, this wee bit of girl in her little nightshirt with the
+frill, astonishes me most:--"thinking of the tops of the mountains at
+night!"  She has positively done the whole of this work-main part.
+I smiled when I left the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting
+us all on the road.  It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow,
+you know; he never came nearer to doing it.  I hope it's his better mind
+now; I do hope the man won't have cause to regret it.  He speaks of
+Nesta--sort of rustic tone of awe.  Mrs. Marsett has impressed him.  He
+expects the title soon, will leave the army--the poor plucked British
+army, as you call it!--and lead the life of a country squire: hunting!
+Well, it's not only the army, it's over Great Britain, with this infernal
+wealth of ours!--and all for pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost for a sugar
+plum!  Eh, Dartrey?  Upon my word, it appears to me, Esau's the
+Englishman, Jacob the German, of these times.  I wonder old Colney hasn't
+said it.  If we're not plucked, as your regiments are of the officers who
+have learnt their work, we're emasculated:--the nation's half made-up of
+the idle and the servants of the idle.'
+
+'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give the
+army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take the
+shilling--and not worth it,' said Dartrey.
+
+'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself.  'But, believe me,
+I'm ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me.  It wouldn't so
+much matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and self-
+respect.  That little fellow Skepsey's closer to the right notion,
+and the right practice, too, than any of us.  With his Matilda Pridden!
+He has jumped out of himself to the proper idea of women, too.  And
+there's a man who has been up three times before the magistrates, and is
+considered a disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens,
+I declare!  I never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary,
+witless kind of envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once had
+and never quite got hold of again.  The match for him is Fredi.  She
+threatens to be just as devoted, just as simple, as he.  I positively
+doubt whether any of us could stop her, if she had set herself to do a
+thing she thought right.'
+
+'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said Dartrey.
+
+'All very well, but it's a rock ahead.  We shall have to alter our
+course, my friend.  You know, I dined with that couple, after the private
+twenty minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as we
+were close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the woman
+happy, besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good intentions--
+politic!  And subsequently I heard from her, that--you'll think nothing
+of it!--Fredi promised to stand by her at the altar.'
+
+Dartrey said, shrugging: 'She needn't do that.'
+
+'So we may say.  You're dealing with Nesta Victoria.  Spare me a contest
+with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.'
+
+'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'
+
+'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?'
+
+'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
+would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.'
+
+'Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
+Sowerby!  I don't complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!'
+
+'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
+women rooted to the bed of the river, they'll veer with the tides, like
+water-weeds, and no wonder.'
+
+'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey.  We can't have
+women independent.'
+
+'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'
+
+Victor mused: 'It's wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
+now: but what a head she has!  Oh, she'll listen to reason: only mark
+what I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow,
+will imagine she's the most docile of wives in the world.  And as to
+wife, I'm not of the contrary opinion.  But qua individual female,
+supposing her to have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it's he who'll
+have to turn the corner second, if they're to trot in the yoke together.
+Or it may be an idea of service to a friend--or to her sex!  That Mrs.
+Marsett says she feels for--"bleeds" for her sex.  The poor woman didn't
+show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks
+in jerks, hot phrases.  She holds herself well.  At the end of the dinner
+she behaved better.  Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead.  But
+Marsett 's Marsett to the end.  Rather touching!--the poor fellow said:
+Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child!  First-
+rate sportsman, I hear.  He should have thought of his family earlier.
+You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as well.  You
+won't listen.  And for Society too!  Off you go.'
+
+A battery was opened on that wall of composite.
+
+'Ah, well,' said Victor.  'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
+so-called promise to stand at the altar.  I don't mention it upstairs.'
+
+He went to Nataly's room.
+
+She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
+might have sleep.
+
+She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade us
+--we cannot keep them out!  was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
+the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!
+
+Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
+girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct.  She
+thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a
+moral insensibility to the offence?
+
+This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
+travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
+sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door.  Or
+sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
+withdraw from the alliance.  Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
+her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
+her.  The girl was visioned as deadly.  She might be indifferent to the
+protection of Dudley's name.  Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
+might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
+at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body.  No, but the world would
+bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
+would say.  Would it say falsely?  Nataly harped on the interrogation
+until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and
+she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
+would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
+breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
+across the moors!  her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of
+the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.  Nature thereat
+renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by
+Dr. Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the
+yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal.
+Nataly's brain had a short gallop over moorland.  It brought her face to
+face with Victor's girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in
+herself and her reproaches of Nesta.  The girl had inherited from her
+father something of the cataract's force which won its way by catching or
+by mastering, uprooting, ruining!
+
+In the morning she was heavily asleep.  Victor left word with Nesta,
+that the dear mother was not to be disturbed.  Consequently, when Dudley
+called to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would
+receive him.
+
+Their interview lasted an hour.
+
+Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.
+
+His perplexity of countenance was eloquent.  He had, before seeing the
+young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
+English gentleman should be asked to consume.  She now referred him to
+her father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said, explain
+whatever there was to be explained.  But she added, that if she was
+expected to abandon a friend, she could not.  Dudley had argued with her
+upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues; he
+had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
+ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
+friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
+stamp of honourable families.
+
+'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.
+
+'Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the precepts
+were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees.  When it is a question of a
+young lady associating with a notorious woman!'
+
+'Not notorious.  You spoil your case if you "speak extremely," as a
+friend says.  I saw her yesterday.  She worships "Miss Radnor."'
+
+Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,' said Dudley
+hurriedly.  'As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
+association ceases.  Her name: I have to consider my family.'
+
+'Good anchorage!  You must fight it out with the girl.  And depend upon
+this--you're not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character;
+unless you try to bridle her.  She belongs to her time.  I don't mind
+owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi 'll be merry to-night.
+Here's a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this
+morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May;
+desirous to embrace her.  She wrote to the office.  Not a word of her
+duque.  She has pitched him to the winds.  You may like to carry it off
+to Fredi and please her.'
+
+'I have business,' Dudley replied.
+
+'Away to it, then!' said Victor.  'You stand by me?--we expect our South
+London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
+February.  You have family interest there.'
+
+'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
+with the universal censor's angry spite, that the revolutions of the
+world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
+Bohemians.  And there are eulogists of the modern time!  And the man's
+daughter was declared to belong to it!  A visit in May to the Italian
+cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
+accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.
+
+At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
+between Nesta and Nataly.  He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison,
+and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:
+particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after
+opposing, strongly favoured.  How are we ever to get a clue to the
+labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex!  Dartrey's
+theories were absurd.  Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?
+The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.
+
+'Mr. Sowerby!  My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart.
+You did not dismiss him?'
+
+'I repeated the word he used.  I thought of mother.  The blood leaves her
+cheeks at a disappointment now.  She has taken to like him.'
+
+'Why, you like him!'
+
+'I could not vow.'
+
+'Tush.'
+
+'Ah, don't press me, dada.  But you will see, he has disengaged himself.'
+
+He had done it, though not in formal speech.  Slow digestion of his
+native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
+condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
+letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
+told him he had the strongest hold.
+
+She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley's
+grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.
+But Nataly was not the weeper.
+
+Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor.  Dudley bore no
+resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
+had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
+Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her
+mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
+actually supplicating.  So that the reality of Dudley's love rose to
+conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
+positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
+She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
+thoughts.  Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
+thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of
+her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her
+whole being in charge accept or reject her.  Nothing else appeared in
+prospect.  Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
+the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
+depart with it.  But always he returned.  At last, as if under tuition,
+he refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
+terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be
+increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
+distasteful to her.  The slight cast of sourness on his lower features
+had almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged.  He complimented
+her for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident
+sincereness; he admitted, that the modern world is 'attempting
+difficulties with at least commendable intentions'; and that the position
+of women demands improvement, consideration for them also.  He said
+feelingly: 'They have to bear extraordinary burdens!' There he stopped.
+
+The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
+ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt.  He had,
+however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
+pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
+beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
+tolerance.  Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
+being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
+affected her.  Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
+of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society to
+its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under cloak;--
+not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the vitiation
+of the soul.  He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning her.
+It followed, that he had the lover's desire for assurance of exclusive
+possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he grew
+exacting.  He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's
+ideas.
+
+Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.'
+
+A provoking evasion.  He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
+stiffen her figure.  'Is one of them from that gentleman?'
+
+'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles.  She comes to me early
+next month.'
+
+'The other?'
+
+'The other is also from a friend.'
+
+'A dear friend?'
+
+'Not so dear.  Her letter gives me happiness.'
+
+'She writes--not from France: from .  .  .?  you tempt me to guess.'
+
+'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a way
+to make her eternally thankful.'
+
+'The place she writes from is .  .  . ?'
+
+The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting.
+He demanded assurance.
+
+'It matters in no degree,' she said.
+
+Dudley 'thought himself excusable for inquiring.'
+
+She bowed gently.
+
+The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
+Bohemians enraged him.
+
+'Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--
+I surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother's
+consent:--in communication, in correspondence with .  .  . ?'
+
+Again she bowed her head; saying: 'It is true.'
+
+'With that person?'
+
+He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
+conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
+only to be bitten.  'I decline to believe it,' he said with forcible
+sound.
+
+'She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.
+
+'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have borne--.  These may be
+Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas; they are not mine.  I have--Something at
+least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen
+who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to call one of
+them a friend!  Ask any lady, any!  Your mother .  .  .'
+
+'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.
+
+'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?' said Dudley.
+
+'All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'
+
+'You are.'  He added hastily: 'Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
+living who would tell you otherwise.  At all events, in public opinion,
+if it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or
+spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
+defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with .  .  .  hard
+words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes!  My sense is
+coherent.'
+
+'Quite,' said Nesta.
+
+'And you do not agree with me?'
+
+'I do not.'
+
+'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'
+
+'In this instance, better.'
+
+'Then I retire.  I cannot retain my place here.  You may depend upon it,
+the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of
+women leading disorderly lives.'
+
+'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'
+
+'Men, too, of course.'
+
+'You do not exclude the men from Society.'
+
+'Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.'
+
+'Oh! the worthy books, then.  I would read them, if I could find them.'
+
+'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'
+
+'It grieves me to think differently.'
+
+Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
+her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him,
+that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish,
+was in a state of liquefaction.
+
+Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: 'I do hope you
+may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
+erroneous.'
+
+'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him.  'She is not well.  When
+she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady,
+so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women.  I shall
+hope she will not disapprove of me.  I cannot forsake a friend.'
+
+'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.
+
+She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
+was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
+herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.
+
+He 'wished her prudent advisers.'
+
+She thanked him.  'In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.'
+
+A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.
+
+Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
+under a salutation regretful in frostiness.
+
+A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
+happy with a piece of Parisian riband.
+
+Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and
+House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman
+was the sole exception.  To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner
+to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an
+instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we
+standing if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.
+
+February went by.  And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
+from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman.  That is to say,
+the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
+acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
+they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
+one of our fixtures.  On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
+from her.  Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
+for the middle of April.  Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman
+and nourished her on comfortable fiction.  So the death of the member for
+the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in
+maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility
+lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his
+vacant seat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+AN EXPIATION
+
+Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
+save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
+So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
+impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
+could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
+Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
+Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
+Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
+preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
+of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as
+hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness.  Mademoiselle's
+occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
+tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
+young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
+very happily boasted.  The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
+for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
+generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
+persons.
+
+Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
+her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
+Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
+see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
+unexamining hard eyes.  Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
+honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
+the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded.
+Otherwise her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion
+over some lost Idea he had often touched on latterly.  And she was the
+one who sent him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would
+found a new and more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when
+he talked of combatting the Jews with a superior weapon.  That being, in
+fact, as Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-
+conquest used by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.'  Was it
+his Idea?  He fancied an aching at the back of his head when he
+speculated.  But his Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a
+creation; and this came before him with the yellow skin of a Theory,
+bred, born of books.  Though Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of
+self-denying discipline struck a Lucifer in his darkness.
+
+Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
+she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
+alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
+dealings with Dudley and with himself.  She so quietly displaced the lady
+visiting him at the City offices.  His girl's disregard of hostile
+weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
+at her coming daily.  She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
+of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
+she met the dreadful Brighton woman.  His Fredi drove constantly to walk
+back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
+and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
+conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
+and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
+advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera.  The lady resisted; she was
+vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.
+
+His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
+mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
+but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a
+ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
+reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge
+of a doubt.  Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we
+yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence?  Is she, when
+translated into us, solely the imperious appetite?  Here was Fredi, his
+little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
+her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by
+clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent,
+appeals to Nature.  They could be vindicated.  Or could they, when they
+would not bear a statement of the case?  He could not imagine himself
+stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan.  As
+for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley
+would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the
+Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's infatuation for
+the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right
+enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an
+unseemly acquaintance.  He had called at the office to say so.  Victor
+stammered the plea for him.
+
+'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in
+contrast with the tones.  Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she
+continued up to the shock she dealt: 'Do not encourage a good man to
+waste his thoughts upon me.  I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry
+him.  I do not know whether he would marry me.  He has my soul.  I have
+no shame in saying I love him.  It is to love goodness, greatness of
+heart.  He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate.
+He is the friend of the weaker everywhere.  He has been proved in fire.
+He does not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people
+for doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly.  He is not
+one of the unwise advocates.  He measures the forces against them.  He
+reads their breasts.  He likes me.  He is with me in my plans.  He has
+not said, has not shown, he loves me.  It is too high a thought for me
+until I hear it.'
+
+'Has your soul!' was all that Victor could reply, while the whole
+conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.
+
+Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank
+in dumbness.  Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the
+point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his
+character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
+fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly damnatory for being
+recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel.  He tried to
+think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world.  An effort
+to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her
+deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance,
+Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly
+backing her, upholding her.  Victor could no longer so naturally name her
+Fredi.
+
+He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he
+ventured.  When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the
+candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might
+regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor
+as audacious.  It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the
+earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch.  He
+appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he
+offered himself; he made but one stipulation.  Victor regretfully assured
+him, he feared he could do nothing.  The thought of his entry into
+Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the
+place, grew dim.
+
+But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as
+the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in
+view to be gained.
+
+Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to
+be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room
+alone.  'Nesta was tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses
+Mr. Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest,
+painfully; she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right
+course:--a mother reads her daughter!  If my girl has not guidance!--
+she means rightly, she is rash.'
+
+Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think
+with regard to Victor's daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her
+hard conscience accused of inflammability.  'Here is a note from Dr.
+Themison, dear.'
+
+Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.
+
+'From Themison,' he said; he coughed.
+
+'Don't think to deceive me,' said she.  'I have not read the contents,
+I know them.'
+
+'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four P.M.  Odd, that next
+day at eight of the evening I shall be addressing our meeting in the
+Theatre.  Simeon speaks.  Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though
+he is.  Those Tories are jollier fellows than--well, no wonder!  There
+will be no surgical .  .  .  the poor woman is very low.  A couple of
+days at the outside.  Of course, I go.'
+
+'Hand me the note, dear.'
+
+It had to be given up, out of the pocket.
+
+'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely formal.'
+
+She needed sleep: she bowed her head.
+
+Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morning, a fair Sunday
+morning.  She was going to Mrs. John Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta
+to come with her.
+
+She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch, having left Nesta
+with Mrs. John.  Louise de Seilles undertook to bring Nesta home at the
+time she might choose.  Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin,
+lunched and chatted.  Nataly chatted.  At a quarter to three o'clock
+Victor's carriage was at the door.  He rose: he had to keep an
+appointment.  Nataly said to him publicly: 'I come too.'  He stared and
+nodded.  In the carriage, he said: 'I'm driving to the Gardens, for a
+stroll, to have a look at the beasts.  Sort of relief.  Poor crazy woman!
+However, it 's a comfort to her: so .  .  .  !'
+
+'I like to see them,' said Nataly.  'I shall see her.  I have to do it.'
+
+Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dissuade his dear
+soul from this very foolish, totally unnecessary, step.  Alighting, he
+put the matter aside, for good angels to support his counsel at the final
+moment.
+
+Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys: they suggested no more than he
+would have had from prints; they sprang no reflection, except, that the
+coming hour was a matter of indifference to them.  They were about him,
+and exercised so far a distraction.  He took very kindly to an old mother
+monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of Nataly's heave of the
+bosom.  Southward, across the park, the dread house rose.  He began
+quoting Colney Durance with relish while sarcastically confuting the
+cynic, who found much pasture in these Gardens.  Over Southward, too, he
+would be addressing a popular assembly to-morrow evening.  Between now
+and then there was a ditch to jump.  He put on the sympathetic face of
+grief.  'After all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said.
+--To be well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release from the
+maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition of wealthy people:--
+creatures of prey? horrible thought! yet allied to his Idea, it seemed.
+Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not
+troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp!  Mrs.
+Burman's invitation loomed as monstrous--a final act of her cruelty.
+His skin pricked with dews.  He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping
+the ditch with him, as a relief--if she insisted on doing it.  He hoped
+she would not, for the sake of her composure.
+
+It was a ditch void of bottom.  But it was a mere matter of an hour,
+less.  The state of health of the invalid could bear only a few minutes.
+In any case, we are sure that the hour will pass.  Our own arrive?
+Certainly.
+
+'Capital place for children,' he exclaimed.  And here startlingly before
+him in the clusters of boys and girls, was the difference between young
+ones and their elders feeling quite as young: the careless youngsters
+have not to go and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
+penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after their holiday
+scamper and stare at the caged beasts.
+
+Attention to the children precipitated him upon acquaintances, hitherto
+cleverly shunned.  He nodded them off, after the brightest of greetings.
+
+Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated wild creatures,
+was exhausted.  He fell to work at Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt
+of luxury'; signifying, that we the wealthy will not exist to pamper
+flesh, but we live for the promotion of brotherhood:--ay, and that our
+England must make some great moral stand, if she is not to fall to the
+rear and down.  Unuttered, it caught the skirts of the Idea: it
+evaporated when spoken.  Still, this theme was almost an exorcism
+of Mrs. Burman.  He consulted his watch.  'Thirteen minutes to four.
+I must be punctual,' he said.  Nataly stepped faster.
+
+Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the horror of that
+place before.  'Put me down at the corner of the terrace, dear: I won't
+drive to the door.'
+
+'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.
+
+After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her resolve, he saw she
+was firm: and he asked himself, whether he might not be constitutionally
+better adapted to persuade than to dissuade.  The question thumped.
+Having that house of drugs in view, he breathed more freely for the
+prospect of feeling his Nataly near him beneath the roof.
+
+'You really insist, dear love?' he appealed to her: and her answer: 'It
+must be,' left no doubt: though he chose to say: 'Not because of standing
+by me?' And she said: 'For my peace, Victor.'  They stepped to the
+pavement.  The carriage was dismissed.
+
+Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to the funereal
+one: and the bell was tolled in the breast of each of the couple
+advancing with an air of calmness to the inevitable black door.
+
+Jarniman opened it.  'His mistress was prepared to see them.'--Not like
+one near death.--They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore.  'You will find a welcome,' was his reassurance to them:
+gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person.  His whispered tones
+were more agreeably deadening than his words.
+
+Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.
+
+'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard: 'Her wish ten minutes.'
+
+'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for
+the invalid.
+
+They rounded the open door.  They were in the drawing-room.  It was
+furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same
+as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale
+blue: the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom.  He glanced at the
+ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory.  Here she lived,--
+here she slept, behind the hangings.  There was refreshingly that little
+difference in the arrangement of the room.  The corner Northward was
+occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:--tuned?
+He sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings.  Sensible that
+Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
+heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.
+
+Mrs. Burman was present; seated.  People may die seated; she had always
+disliked the extended posture; except for the night's rest, she used to
+say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in
+her attitude when seated by day:--and often at night the poor woman had
+to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!--But I 'm bound to think
+humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched
+the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk
+veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
+morning.
+
+Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.
+
+Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was
+distinguishable as the one once known.  If the world could see it and
+hear, that it called itself a man's wife!  She looked burnt out.
+
+Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa.  Execution there!  Victor
+thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling
+devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.
+
+'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on
+the chairs.
+
+He went.  They were alone with Mrs. Burman.
+
+No voice came.  They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of
+eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance.  Big drops fell from
+Nataly's.  Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a
+familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds: his own purchase.  The time of
+day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.
+
+Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments.  More than a
+minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:
+two, if not three.
+
+A quaver sounded.  'You have come.'  The voice was articulate, thinner
+than the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by deep-sea cable.
+
+Victor answered: 'We have.'
+
+Another minute must have gone in the silence.  And when we get to five
+minutes we are on the descent, rapidly counting our way out of the house,
+into the fresh air, where we were half an hour back, among those happy
+beasts in the pleasant Gardens!
+
+Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut.  'I said you would come.'
+
+Victor started to the fire-screen.  'Your sight requires protection.'
+
+She dozed.  'And Natalia Dreighton !' she next said.
+
+They were certainly now on the five minutes.  Now for the slide downward
+and outward!  Nataly should never have been allowed to come.
+
+'The white waistcoat!' struck his ears.
+
+'Old customs with me, always!' he responded.  'The first of April,
+always.  White is a favourite.  Pale blue, too.  But I fear--I hope you
+have not distressing nights?  In my family we lay great stress on the
+nights we pass.  My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of
+the condition of health by the nightly record.'
+
+'Your daughter was in their house.'
+
+She knew everything!
+
+'Very fond of my daughter--the ladies,' he remarked.
+
+'I wish her well.'
+
+'You are very kind.'
+
+Mrs. Burman communed within or slept.  'Victor, Natalia, we will pray,'
+she said.
+
+Her trembling hands crossed their fingers.  Nataly slipped to her knees.
+
+The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush.  It
+acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church.  He forgot his
+estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
+swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears.  Ideas of
+eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds.  Death was a black bird
+among them.  The piano rang to Nataly's young voice and his.  The gold
+and white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the
+wealthy by an enamoured old lady on his arm.  Cupid tick-ticked.--Poor
+soul! poor woman!  How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury!
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top.  We get
+on fairly at the centre.  Yet it is there that we do the mischief making
+such a riddle of the bottom and the top.  What is to be said!  Prayer
+quiets one.  Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs.
+Burman bowed over her knotted fingers.  The earnestness of both enforced
+an effort at a phrased prayer in him.  Plungeing through a wave of the
+scent of Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and
+forward, he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive
+thin black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper
+emotion; and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of
+his chair, with split knees.  At once the figure vanished.  By merely
+looking at Nataly, he passed into her prayer.  A look at Mrs. Burman made
+it personal, his own.  He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from
+him.  After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he
+thanked himself with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on our
+human susceptibility to the influence of posture.  We are such creatures.
+
+Nataly resumed her seat.  Mrs. Burman had raised her head.  She said: 'We
+are at peace.'  She presently said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me.
+I die in nature's way.  I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have
+it above.  I give it here, to you, to all.  My soul is cleansed, I trust.
+Much was to say.  My strength will not.  Unto God, you both!'
+
+The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on slippered step to the back of
+the sofa.  Nataly dropped before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for
+an instant.  Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
+ceremonial shake of hands.  He turned away, then turned back, praying for
+power to speak, to say that he had found his heart, was grateful, would
+hold her in memory.  He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had done
+so when he had risen.  They were conducted by the Rev. gentleman to the
+hall-door: he was not speechless.  Jarniman uttered something.
+
+That black door closed behind them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
+
+To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be
+restorative as air of Summer Alps.  It is by contrast blooming life.
+Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
+straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
+policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
+families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea; here
+and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay
+visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip him of
+the shroud, sing of the sweet old world.  He cannot but be moved to the
+extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.
+
+A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
+still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
+interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
+silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
+human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
+as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
+him for any utterance of penitence.  That worm-like thread of voice came
+up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
+without the word.  He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at
+the same time bidding her smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.'  He
+declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.
+
+She slightly pressed his arm for answer.  Perhaps she did not feel so
+deeply?  She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
+Marechale.  At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!
+
+Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
+door, who was almost now seeing his mistress's ghost--would have the
+privilege to-morrow.  He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's,
+at Nataly's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
+odour of the cab.  Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
+eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him.  He talked of the
+gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
+mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
+the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt figure
+symbolized!  .  .  .  And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
+imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he had
+the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's hand and hold it until they
+reached home.  Those two talking together in the brief words of their
+deep feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano
+filial to the divine maternal contralto.  Those two dear ones mounted to
+Nataly's room.
+
+The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
+each looked the happier for it.  Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
+and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed.  He
+did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to keep
+her from excitement.  'My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
+Burman!'  Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness.  She was never
+below a situation, he affirmed.
+
+He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly.  She began panting at a
+word about Mr. Barmby's ready services.  When, however, she related the
+state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
+to her, he said, embracing her: 'Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,'
+and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.
+
+She sighed: 'If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's revolutionary
+ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
+rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in
+the ideas he entertains!'
+
+Victor sighed too.  He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
+crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.
+
+She was distressed; she moaned: 'My girl!  my girl: I should wish to
+leave her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband.  New
+ideas must come in politics, but in Society!--and for women!  And the
+young having heads, are the most endangered.  Nesta vows her life to it!
+Dartrey supports her!'
+
+'See Colney,' said Victor.  'Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
+has.  Though you don't care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
+was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
+farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and the
+blue hand of his nation's protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
+failure with the public, of course!  However, he seems to seem wise with
+you.  The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly.
+See Colney to-morrow, my love.  Now go to sleep.  We have got over the
+worst.  I speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of
+notes and points for them.'
+
+His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
+to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
+pride of simple manhood.  But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
+and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
+Future.  It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
+Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
+the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
+He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than
+a skirt of the robe of his Idea.  For let none think him a mere City
+merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
+He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
+of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
+jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
+America, all over our habitable sphere.  Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way
+to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show
+himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
+enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
+upon the world as a factory of ideas.  Colney's insolent charge, that
+the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be
+confuted.  For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
+into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
+benevolent aim.  And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
+of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
+future solved.
+
+Surely he had here the Idea?  He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
+heated.  Only the vision was wanted.
+
+On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
+brilliant results.  That was after a fall.
+
+There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.
+
+Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
+significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
+fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
+Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
+from falling further.  His bath-water chilled.  He jumped out and rubbed
+furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
+warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with
+the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly!  And he tested it to
+prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than
+the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
+for surpassing the latter tedious performance.
+
+His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces.  Except for the making of
+money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
+uninterrupted successes, was a blank.  Or rather we have to wish it were
+a blank.  The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it is
+in prospect.  A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to
+proofs of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we
+owe him nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding
+of Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we
+are astonished to find we have in our daylight house.  How is it?  Would
+other men be so sensitive to him?  Victor was appeased by the assurance
+of his possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he
+settled the debate by thinking: 'After all, for a man like me, battling
+incessantly, a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can't be starved, must be
+fed--though, pah!  But I'm not to be questioned like other men.--But how
+about an aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is no
+escaping distinctions!  my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And
+indulges?--Say, an exceptional nature!  Supposing a certain beloved woman
+to pronounce on the case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of
+it.'---He cried: My love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy to
+right her to-day, tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the hour
+of my release!
+
+Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure.  Victor entered into
+it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall.  His intensity of sensation
+launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness to
+the measure of time gone crazy.  He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
+Burman, as the cause of the nonsense.  He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
+he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.
+
+Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her villa
+over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner.  'We
+go,' Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips--too
+much a resurrection smile.  There was talk of the Meeting at the theatre:
+Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the deceased Member, was
+known, and was likely to have a good reception.  Fun and enthusiasm might
+be expected.
+
+'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,' he whispered as he
+was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy knot
+crossed Nataly's forehead, she seemed paler.  He sent back Nesta and
+mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.
+
+Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Mr.
+Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
+fortress--were the only guests.  When they rose, Nataly drew Victor
+aside.  He came dismayed to Nesta.  She ran to her mother.  'Not hear
+papa speak?  Oh, mother, mother!  Then I stay with her.  But can't she
+come?  He is going to unfold ideas to us.  There!'
+
+'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,' Nataly said.
+'No, dearest; it would agitate me to go.  I'm better here.  I shall be at
+peace when the night is over.'
+
+'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'
+
+Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney.  He proposed to give her his
+company.  She declined it.  Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
+she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.
+
+'My love,' Nataly said, 'the thought of the Meeting--' She clasped at her
+breast; and she murmured: 'I shall be comforted by your being with him.
+There is no danger there.  But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
+this night is over.'
+
+Colney persuaded her to have him for companion.  Mr. Peridon, who was to
+have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
+stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces.  Nesta
+and Victor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's generosity.  So
+Mr. Peridon was left.  Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the
+carriage to kiss her mother again, saying: 'Just one last kiss, my own!
+And she's not to look troubled.  I shall remember everything to tell my
+own mother.  It will soon be over.'
+
+Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.
+
+Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
+delivery to her mother of news at the door.  'She is easily startled now
+by trifles--you have noticed?'
+
+Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
+believed he had 'The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
+over!  And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands.  A fortnight, and
+we have our first Concert.  Durandarte!  Oh, the dear heart 'll be at
+peace when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting.  Not a doubt of that, even
+though Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.'
+
+'One critic the less for you!' said Nesta.  Skepsey was to meet her
+carriage at the theatre.
+
+Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding thitherward
+on foot.
+
+'I have my speech,' said Victor.  'You prepare the way for me, following
+our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else they
+shout for.  We shall have a great evening.  I suspect I shall find
+Themison or Jarniman when I get home.  You don't believe in intimations?
+I've had crapy processions all day before my eyes.  No wonder, after
+yesterday!'
+
+'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said Fenellan.
+
+'We 'll drop a hint.  Where's Dartrey?'
+
+'He'll come.  He's in one of his black moods: not temper.  He's got a
+notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him.  She was
+not only ready to go, she was glad to go.  She had a bit of the heroine
+in her and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to
+herself.'
+
+'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor.  'And tell her about Dartrey.  Harp on
+it.  Once she was all for him and our girl.  But it's a woman--though the
+dearest!  I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes.  We must
+make the best of things, if we're for swimming.  The task for me to-night
+will be, to keep from rolling out all I've got in my head.  And I'm not
+revolutionary, I'm for stability.  Only I do see, that the firm stepping-
+place asks for a long stride to be taken.  One can't get the English to
+take a stride--unless it's for a foot behind them: bother old Colney!
+Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.  There!--But I
+want to say it!  I want to save the existing order.  I want,
+Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with.
+Great fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
+mediaeval Barons.  Dispersion of wealth, is the secret.  Nataly's of that
+mind with me.  A decent poverty!  She's rather wearying, wants a change.
+I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean.  All
+our set.  She likes quiet.  I believe in my political recipe for it.'
+
+He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
+aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.
+
+'It appears to me, you're on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,'
+observed Simeon.  'Strike off Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's
+couple of glasses, and there's your aristocracy established; but with
+rather a dispersed recognition of itself.'
+
+'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your own,'
+said Victor.  'Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial.  The
+last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so
+bad.  The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
+vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
+the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness.  And Bobinikine
+turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
+discovered in an emigrant's house-to-let!  And Semhians--I forget what
+and Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
+vulture on the skull of a desert camel!  But, I complain, there's nothing
+to make the English love the author; and it's wasted, he's basted, and
+the book 'll have no sale.  I hate satire.'
+
+'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor.  Does it hurt our people much?'
+
+'Not a bit; doesn't touch them.  But I want my friends to succeed!'
+
+Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme.  Victor wished
+the Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset.  He deferred to
+the suggestion, that the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.
+
+'I'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,' he said.  Then
+he queried: 'But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
+She may be going--or she's gone already, poor woman!  I shall have that
+scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
+Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel the end, as we in health imagine.
+Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace.  I 've a mind to
+send up to Regent's Park with inquiries.  It would look respectful.  God
+forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn.  Though I will
+say, a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out of it yesterday.
+I don't feel it any longer.  What are you jerking at?'
+
+'Only to remark, that if the thing's done for us, we haven't it so much
+on our sensations.'
+
+'More, if we're sympathetic.  But that compels us to be philosophic--or
+who could live!  Poor woman!'
+
+'Waft her gently, Victor!'
+
+'Tush!  Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
+what I can't mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
+on their forsaken South of the City.  I 've my scheme.  Elected or not,
+I shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first
+instalment.'
+
+Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he was
+to deliver.  He could not but reflect on the genial man's willingness and
+capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position
+into which he had plunged himself.
+
+They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors by
+Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
+obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged.  When finally they reached
+the stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the rounds of
+applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham Quatley,
+Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a politician 'never
+of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow!--go anywhere to hear
+hhm,' he vowed.
+
+'Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,' said
+Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
+in it.
+
+Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence.  Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
+chairman, the 'gentleman of local influence,' had animated the drowsed
+wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
+Simeon, did Dartrey appear.  Simeon's name was shouted, in proof of the
+happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind Nesta.
+'Half an hour with the dear mother,' he said.
+
+Nesta's eyes thanked him.  She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
+sitting close behind.  Louise de Seilles.  'You know Matilda Pridden.'
+
+Dartrey held his hand out.  'Has she forgiven me?'
+
+Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the no
+need for it, with perfect good breeding.  Dartrey was moved to think
+Skepsey's choice of a woman to worship did him honour.  He glanced at
+Louise.  Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with
+Nesta.  He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear
+that the great speech of the evening is done; it's nothing else.  I'll
+run to her as soon as it's over.'
+
+'Oh, good of you!  And kind of Mr. Peridon!'  She turned to Louise, who
+smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.
+
+Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand
+to them, and his delight at Simeon's ringing points: which were, to
+Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty.  Dartrey despised effects
+of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
+nerved to stand for their country.
+
+Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
+by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
+and another cheer rang round.  He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
+hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
+winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own.  One
+fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
+permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
+mildly amused him.  He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as
+Louise de Seilles observed.  She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
+machinery of Freedom.
+
+Skepsey entered the box.
+
+'We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,' he said, after a look at Matilda
+Pridden.
+
+There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.
+
+'And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
+promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have his word, my friends!'  And he
+told the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned
+the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand
+on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
+white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
+as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'
+
+Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
+question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
+good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
+would hear the enemy say he did.  Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
+if we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
+specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish,
+who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
+anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
+nostrum.  So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
+dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors.  And sure enough his patient
+came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
+deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons.  Any one
+at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
+exclusively to eat for a fortnight.  And that the good physician did.
+Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and
+with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices.  He vowed he
+was the man.  Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his
+tender parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten
+nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized
+on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
+surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the
+felicity of exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under
+dissecting hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for
+him.  All to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all
+the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
+scaffold, poor gentleman!  But we know politics to be no such empirical
+science.
+
+Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy.  He brought it home to Beaves
+Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it.  Yet the orator
+was asked: 'Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'
+
+He countered his questioner: 'Just to liberate you from your moribund
+state, my friend.'  And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
+lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
+captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit for
+interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
+ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
+her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
+feathers, and shouting: 'Polly tho dram dry!'--which struck on the nob of
+Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
+Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
+and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
+cried; 'That did it!  Now to business!' for he was hungry.  'And when I
+catch the ring of this world's laugh from you, my friend .  .  .  !'
+Simeon's application of the story was drowned.
+
+After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: 'You keep
+that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the old
+widow woman for her money, Simmy !'
+
+Victor leaned forward.  Simeon towered.  He bellowed
+
+'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!'
+
+It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre.  The man went under.
+Simeon flowed.  Conscience reproached him with the little he had done for
+Victor, and he had now his congenial opportunity.
+
+Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed.
+To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the
+devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort.  Dartrey sat
+rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap.  Nesta looked at Louise
+when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It was
+Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face.  Apparently he was not
+intelligible or audible but the next moment Victor sprang erect.  Dartrey
+quitted the box.  Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried words to right
+and left.  He passed from sight, Mr. Peridon with him; and Dartrey did
+not return.
+
+Nesta felt her father's absence as light gone: his eyes rayed light.
+Besides she had the anticipation of a speech from him, that would win
+Matilda Pridden.  She fancied Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the
+spell of the hilarity he roused.  A gentleman behind him spoke in his
+ear; and Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his flow.  Matilda Pridden's
+gaze on him and the people was painful to behold: Nesta saw her mind.
+She set herself to study a popular assembly.  It could be serious to the
+call of better leadership, she believed.  Her father had been telling her
+of late of a faith he had in the English, that they (or so her
+intelligence translated his remarks) had power to rise to spiritual
+ascendancy, and be once more the Islanders heading the world of a new
+epoch abjuring materialism--some such idea; very quickening to her, as it
+would be to this earnest young woman worshipped by Skepsey.  Her father's
+absence and the continued shouts of laughter, the insatiable thirst for
+fun, darkened her in her desire to have the soul of the good working
+sister refreshed.  They had talked together; not much: enough for each to
+see at either's breast the wells from the founts of life.
+
+The box-door opened, Dartrey came in.  He took her hand.  She stood-up to
+his look.  He said to Matilda Pridden: 'Come with us; she will need you.'
+
+'Speak it,' said Nesta.
+
+He said to the other: 'She has courage.'
+
+'I could trust to her,' Matilda Pridden replied.
+
+Nesta read his eyes.  'Mother?'
+
+His answer was in the pressure.
+
+'Ill?'
+
+'No longer.'
+
+'Oh!  Dartrey.'  Matilda Pridden caught her fast.
+
+'I can walk, dear,' Nesta said.
+
+Dartrey mentioned her father.
+
+She understood: 'I am thinking of him.'
+
+The words of her mother: 'At peace when the night is over,' rang.  Along
+the gassy passages of the back of tie theatre, the sound coming from an
+applausive audience was as much a thunder as rage would have been.  It
+was as void of human meaning as a sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE LAST
+
+In the still dark hour of that April morning, the Rev. Septimus Barmby
+was roused by Mr. Peridon, with a scribbled message from Victor, which he
+deciphered by candlelight held close to the sheet of paper, between short
+inquiries and communications, losing more and more the sense of it as his
+intelligence became aware of what dread blow had befallen the stricken
+man.  He was bidden come to fulfil his promise instantly.  He remembered
+the bearing of the promise.  Mr. Peridon's hurried explanatory narrative
+made the request terrific, out of tragically lamentable.  A semblance of
+obedience had to be put on, and the act of dressing aided it.  Mr. Barmby
+prayed at heart for guidance further.
+
+The two gentlemen drove Westward, speaking little; they had the dry sob
+in the throat.
+
+'Miss Radnor?'  Mr. Barmby asked.
+
+'She is shattered; she holds up; she would not break down.'
+
+'I can conceive her to possess high courage.'
+
+'She has her friend Mademoiselle de Seilles.'
+
+Mr. Barmby remained humbly silent.  Affectionate deep regrets moved him
+to say: 'A loss irreparable.  We have but one voice of sorrow.  And how
+sudden!  The dear lady had no suffering, I trust.'
+
+'She fell into the arms of Mr. Durance.  She died in his arms.  She was
+unconscious, he says.  I left her straining for breath.  She said
+"Victor"; she tried to smile:--I understood I was not to alarm him.'
+
+'And he too late!'
+
+'He was too late, by some minutes.'
+
+'At least I may comfort.  Miss Radnor must be a blessing to him.'
+
+'They cannot meet.  Her presence excites him.'
+
+That radiant home of all hospitality seemed opening on from darker
+chambers to the deadly dark.  The immorality in the moral situation could
+not be forgotten by one who was professionally a moralist.  But an
+incorruptible beauty in the woman's character claimed to plead for her
+memory.  Even the rigorous in defence of righteous laws are softened by a
+sinner's death to hear excuses, and may own a relationship, haply
+perceive the faint nimbus of the saint.  Death among us proves us to be
+still not so far from the Nature saying at every avenue to the mind:
+'Earth makes all sweet.'
+
+Mr. Durance had prophesied a wailful end ever to the carol of Optimists!
+Yet it is not the black view which is the right view.  There is one
+between: the path adopted by Septimus Barmby:--if he could but induce his
+brethren to enter on it!  The dreadful teaching of circumstances might
+help to the persuading of a fair young woman, under his direction .  .  .
+having her hand disengaged.  Mr. Barmby started himself in the dream of
+his uninterred passion for the maiden: he chased it, seized it, hurled it
+hence, as a present sacrilege:--constantly, and at the pitch of our
+highest devotion to serve, are we assailed by the tempter!  Is it, that
+the love of woman is our weakness?  For if so, then would a celibate
+clergy have grant of immunity.  But, alas, it is not so with them!  We
+have to deplore the hearing of reports too credible.  Again we are pushed
+to contemplate woman as the mysterious obstruction to the perfect purity
+of soul.  Nor is there a refuge in asceticism.  No more devilish
+nourisher of pride do we find than in pain voluntarily embraced.  And
+strangely, at the time when our hearts are pledged to thoughts upon
+others, they are led by woman to glance revolving upon ourself, our vile
+self!  Mr. Barmby clutched it by the neck.
+
+Light now, as of a strong memory of day along the street, assisted him to
+forget himself at the sight of the inanimate houses of this London, all
+revealed in a quietness not less immobile than tombstones of an unending
+cemetery, with its last ghost laid.  Did men but know it!--The habitual
+necessity to amass matter for the weekly sermon, set him noting his
+meditative exclamations, the noble army of platitudes under haloes, of
+good use to men: justifiably turned over in his mind for their good.  He
+had to think, that this act of the justifying of the act reproached him
+with a lack of due emotion, in sympathy with agonized friends truly dear.
+Drawing near the hospitable house, his official and a cordial emotion
+united, as we see sorrowful crape-wreathed countenances.  His heart
+struck heavily when the house was visible.
+
+Could it be the very house?  The look of it belied the tale inside.  But
+that threw a ghostliness on the look.
+
+Some one was pacing up and down.  They greeted Dudley Sowerby.  His
+ability to speak was tasked.  They gathered, that mademoiselle and 'a
+Miss Pridden' were sitting with Nesta, and that their services in a
+crisis had been precious.  At such times, one of them reflected, woman
+has indeed her place: when life's battle waxes red.  Her soul must be
+capable of mounting to the level of the man's, then?  It is a lesson!
+
+Dudley said he was waiting for Dr. Themison to come forth.  He could not
+tear himself from sight of the house.
+
+The door opened to Dr. Themison departing, Colney Durance and Simeon
+Fenellan bare-headed.  Colney showed a face with stains of the lashing of
+tears.
+
+Dr. Themison gave his final counsels.  'Her father must not see her.  For
+him, it may have to be a specialist.  We will hope the best.  Mr. Dartrey
+Fenellan stays beside him:--good.  As to the ceremony he calls for, a
+form of it might soothe:--any soothing possible!  No music.  I will
+return in a few hours.'
+
+He went on foot.
+
+Mr. Barmby begged advice from Colney and Simeon concerning the message he
+had received--the ceremony requiring his official presidency.  Neither of
+them replied.  They breathed the morning air, they gave out long-drawn
+sighs of relief, looking on the trees of the park.
+
+A man came along the pavement, working slow legs hurriedly.  Simeon ran
+down to him.
+
+'Humour, as much as you can,' Colney said to Mr. Barmby.  'Let him
+imagine.'
+
+'Miss Radnor?'
+
+'Not to speak of her.'
+
+'The daughter he so loves?'
+
+Mr. Barmby's tender inquisitiveness was unanswered.  Were they inducing
+him to mollify a madman?  But was it possible to associate the idea of
+madness with Mr. Radnor?
+
+Simeon ran back.  'Jarniman,' he remarked.  'It's over!'
+
+'Now!' Colney's shoulders expressed the comment.  'Well, now, Mr. Barmby,
+you can do the part desired.  Come in.  It's morning!' He stared at the
+sky.
+
+All except Dudley passed in.
+
+Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being acute.  It was
+moderated, though not more than moderated, when he was informed of the
+death of Mrs. Burman Radnor; an event that occurred, according to
+Jarniman's report, forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time
+called for information of it at the house in Regent's Park--five hours
+and a half, as Colney made his calculation, after the death of Nataly.
+He was urged by some spur of senseless irony to verify the calculation
+and correct it in the minutes.
+
+Dudley crossed the road.  No sign of the awful interior was on any of the
+windows of the house either to deepen awe or relieve.  They were blank as
+eyeballs of the mindless.  He shivered.  Death is our common cloak; but
+Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded speculating whether indeed
+a stricken man, who has become the cause of woeful trouble, may not be
+pointing a moral.  Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey
+drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor's lawyer.  Could it
+be, that there was no Will written?  Could a Will be executed now?  The
+moral was more forcibly suggested.  Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor
+successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular, brightest of the
+elect of Fortune, felled to the ground within an hour, he and all his
+house!  And if at once to pass beneath the ground, the blow would have
+seemed merciful for him.  Or if, instead of chattering a mixture of the
+rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to rave like the utterly
+distraught.  Recollection of some of the things he shouted, was an
+anguish: A notion came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the
+two, and he cried out: 'Cremation?  No, Colney's right, it robs us of our
+last laugh.  I lie as I fall.'  He 'had a confession for his Nataly, for
+her only, for no one else.'  He had 'an Idea.'  His begging of Dudley to
+listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before it), was the
+sole piece of unreasonableness in the explanation of the idea: and that
+was not much wilder than the stuff Dudley had read from reports of
+Radical speeches.  He told Dudley he thought him too young to be 'best
+man to a widower about to be married,' and that Barmby was 'coming all
+haste to do the business, because of no time to spare.'
+
+Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey Fenellan his task
+of watching over the wreck of a splendid intelligence, humouring and
+restraining.  According to the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the
+symptoms before the appearance of his daughter.  For awhile he hung, and
+then fell, like an icicle.  Nesta came with a cry for her father.  He
+rose: Dartrey was by.  Hugged fast in iron muscles, the unhappy creature
+raved of his being a caged lion.  These things Dudley had heard in the
+house.
+
+There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.
+
+Nataly's dead body was her advocate with her family, with friends, with
+the world.  Victor had more need of a covering shroud to keep calamity
+respected.  Earth makes all sweet: and we, when the privilege is granted
+us, do well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered to the
+bosom of earth.
+
+That night's infinite sadness was concentrated upon Nesta.  She had need
+of her strength of mind and body.
+
+The night went past as a year.  The year followed it as a refreshing
+night.  Slowly lifting her from our abysses, it was a good angel to the
+girl.  Permission could not be given for her to see her father.  She had
+a home in the modest home of Louise de Seilles on the borders of
+Dauphins; and with French hearts at their best in winningness around her,
+she learned again, as an art, the natural act of breathing calmly; she
+had by degrees a longing for the snow-heights.  When her imagination
+could perch on them with love and pride, she began to recover the throb
+for a part in human action.  It set her nature flowing to the mate she
+had chosen, who was her counsellor, her supporter, and her sword.  She
+had awakened to new life, not to sink back upon a breast of love, though
+thoughts of the lover were as blows upon strung musical chords of her
+bosom.  Her union with Dartrey was for the having an ally and the being
+an ally, in resolute vision of strife ahead, through the veiled dreams
+that bear the blush.  This was behind a maidenly demureness.  Are not
+young women hypocrites?  Who shall fathom their guile!  A girl with a
+pretty smile, a gentle manner, a liking for wild flowers up on the rocks;
+and graceful with resemblances to the swelling proportions of garden-
+fruits approved in young women by the connoisseur eye of man; distinctly
+designed to embrace the state of marriage, that she might (a girl of
+singularly lucid and receptive eyes) the better give battle to men
+touching matters which they howl at an eccentric matron for naming.
+So it was.  And the yielding of her hand to Dartrey, would have appeared
+at that period of her revival, as among the baser compliances of the
+fleshly, if she had not seen in him, whom she owned for leader, her
+fellow soldier, warrior friend, hero, of her own heart's mould, but a
+greater.
+
+She was on Como, at the villa of the Signora Giulia Sanfredini, when
+Dudley's letter reached her, with the supplicating offer of the share of
+his earldom.  An English home meanwhile was proposed to her at the house
+of his mother the Countess.  He knew that he did not write to a brilliant
+heiress.  The generosity she had always felt that he possessed, he thus
+proved in figures.  They are convincing and not melting.  But she was
+moved to tears by his goodness in visiting her father, as well as by the
+hopeful news he sent.  He wrote delicately, withholding the title of her
+father's place of abode.  There were expectations of her father's perfect
+recovery; the signs were auspicious; he appeared to be restored to the
+'likeness to himself' in the instances Dudley furnished:--his appointment
+with him for the flute-duet next day; and particularly his enthusiastic
+satisfaction with the largeness and easy excellent service of the
+residence 'in which he so happily found himself established.'  He held it
+to be, 'on the whole, superior to Lakelands.'  The smile and the tear
+rolled together in Nesta reading these words.  And her father spoke
+repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter
+had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he
+showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post.  He talked of
+public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the
+views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey.  He
+said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw fair
+prospects in it.
+
+Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that was perforce
+ungentle, in the signature of the name of Nesta Victoria Fenellan:--
+a name he was to hear cited among the cushioned conservatives, and plead
+for as he best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and compelled
+esteem, and regrets.
+
+The day following the report of her father's wish to see her, she and her
+husband started for England.  On that day, Victor breathed his last.
+Dudley had seen the not hopeful but an ominous illumination of the
+stricken man; for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth.  Often did
+Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the beloved mother
+with her hand at her mortal wound in secret through long years of the
+wearing of the mask to keep her mate inspirited.  Her gathered knowledge
+of things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes hard for her
+to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of the infinitely evil stamped
+blotches on its face and shrieked in stains across the skin beneath its
+gallant garb.  That was only when she thought of it as the world
+condemning her mother.  She had a husband able and ready, in return for
+corrections of his demon temper, to trim an ardent young woman's
+fanatical overflow of the sisterly sentiments; scholarly friends, too,
+for such restrainings from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of
+History exhibiting man's original sprouts to growth and fitful
+continuation of them.  Her first experience of the grief that is in
+pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was when the old Concert-
+set assembled round her.  When she heard from the mouth of a living
+woman, that she had saved her from going under the world's waggon-wheels,
+and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good living of a
+shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest happiness richer than her
+recollection of the bride's, though never was bride in fuller flower to
+her lord than she who brought the dower of an equal valiancy to Dartrey
+Fenellan.  You are aware of the reasons, the many, why a courageous young
+woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a
+doughty husband.  She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world,
+which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not
+blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her
+character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage.
+Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the world
+respectful to any brave woman.  This one was his wife.
+
+Daniel Skepsey rejoices in service to his new master, owing to the
+scientific opinion he can at any moment of the day apply for, as to the
+military defences of the country; instead of our attempting to arrest the
+enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer:--the sole point of
+difference between him and his Matilda; and it might have been fatal but
+that Nesta's intervention was persuasive.  The two members of the Army
+first in the field to enrol and give rank according to the merits of
+either, to both sexes, were made one.  Colney Durance (practically
+cynical when not fancifully, men said) stood by Skepsey at the altar.
+His published exercises in Satire produce a flush of the article in the
+Reviews of his books.  Meat and wine in turn fence the Hymen beckoning
+Priscilla and Mr. Pempton.  The forms of Religion more than the Channel's
+division of races keep Louise de Seilles and Mr. Peridon asunder: and in
+the uniting of them Colney is interested, because it would have so
+pleased the woman of the loyal heart no longer beating.  He let Victor's
+end be his expiation and did not phrase blame of him.  He considered the
+shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in Victor's history.
+He was reconciled to it when, looking on their child, he discerned, that
+for a cancelling of the errors chargeable to them, the father and mother
+had kept faith with Nature.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
+Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
+Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
+Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
+How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
+Nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
+No companionship save with the wound they nurse
+Not always the right thing to do the right thing
+The night went past as a year
+Universal censor's angry spite
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+*********************************************************************
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of One of Our Conquerors, v5,
+by George Meredith
+
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