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+Project Gutenberg’s One of Our Conquerors, Complete, by George Meredith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: One of Our Conquerors, Complete
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #4476]
+Last Updated: August 25, 2016
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, Complete
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+
+  BOOK 1.
+  I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
+  II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
+  III.      OLD VEUVE
+  IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
+  V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
+  VI.       NATALY
+  VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
+  VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
+  IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
+  X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION
+  XI.       WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF
+            THEIR SCOURGE
+
+  BOOK 2.
+  XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+            HAVING ONE HEART
+  XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+  XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+  XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
+  XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY’S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+            NATALY
+  XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID’S IMAGININGS
+  XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+  BOOK 3.
+  XIX.      TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN
+            THEM AND OF A SATIRIST’S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
+            COUNTRY
+  XX.       THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELAND
+  XXI.      DARTREY FENELLAN
+  XXII.     CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
+  XXIII.    TREATS OF THE LADIES’ LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS
+            EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
+  XXIV.     NESTA’S ENGAGEMENT
+
+  BOOK 4.
+  XXV.      NATALY IN ACTION
+  XXVI.     IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE MAN ENDEAVOURING TO
+            EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
+  XXVII.    CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE
+            CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
+  XXVIII.   MRS. MARSETT
+  XXIX.     SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN’S MIND
+  XXX.      THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
+  XXXI.     SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR’S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO
+            DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
+  XXXII.    SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET
+            HER WEAPON
+  XXXIII.   A PAIR OF WOOERS
+  XXXIV.    CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
+  XXXV.     IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN
+            ABYSMAL DARKNESS
+
+  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 I. ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
+
+A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to
+match it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was
+almost magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly
+strip of slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which
+had more or less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers,
+and now laid this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the
+moment as the uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides.
+He was unhurt, quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply to
+the inquiries of the first kind helper at his elbow; and it appeared an
+acceptable statement of his condition. He laughed, shook his coat-tails,
+smoothed the back of his head rather thoughtfully, thankfully received
+his runaway hat, nodded bright beams to right and left, and making light
+of the muddy stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another
+shower of his nods and smiles around, to signify, that as his good
+friends would wish, he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided.
+And he was in the act of doing it, questioning his familiar behind
+the waistcoat amazedly, to tell him how such a misadventure could have
+occurred to him of all men, when a glance below his chin discomposed his
+outward face. ‘Oh, confound the fellow!’ he said, with simple frankness,
+and was humorously ruffled, having seen absurd blots of smutty knuckles
+distributed over the maiden waistcoat.
+
+His outcry was no more than the confidential communication of a genial
+spirit with that distinctive article of his attire. At the same time,
+for these friendly people about him to share the fun of the annoyance,
+he looked hastily brightly back, seeming with the contraction of his
+brows to frown, on the little band of observant Samaritans; in the
+centre of whom a man who knew himself honourably unclean, perhaps
+consequently a bit of a political jewel, hearing one of their number
+confounded for his pains, and by the wearer of a superfine dashing-white
+waistcoat, was moved to take notice of the total deficiency of gratitude
+in this kind of gentleman’s look and pocket. If we ask for nothing for
+helping gentlemen to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect
+civility into the bargain. Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we
+choose to give sign of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors
+would have us think their condescending grins are cordials.
+
+The gentleman’s eyes were followed on a second hurried downward grimace,
+the necessitated wrinkles of which could be stretched by malevolence to
+a semblance of haughty disgust; reminding us, through our readings in
+journals, of the wicked overblown Prince Regent and his Court, together
+with the view taken of honest labour in the mind of supercilious
+luxury, even if indebted to it freshly for a trifle; and the hoar-headed
+nineteenth-century billow of democratic ire craved the word to be set
+swelling.
+
+‘Am I the fellow you mean, sir?’ the man said.
+
+He was answered, not ungraciously: ‘All right, my man.’
+
+But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic
+bobbings on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall
+appear disdainful our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not
+usurped command of one of the scales: thus a fairly pleasant answer,
+cast in persuasive features, provoked the retort:
+
+‘There you’re wrong; nor wouldn’t be.’
+
+‘What’s that?’ was the gentleman’s musical inquiry.
+
+‘That’s flat, as you was half a minute ago,’ the man rejoined.
+
+‘Ah, well, don’t be impudent,’ the gentleman said, by way of amiable
+remonstrance before a parting.
+
+‘And none of your dam punctilio,’ said the man.
+
+Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the
+gentleman stepped forward.
+
+It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers
+on the back of his head.
+
+They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap. But,
+in fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the
+pavement or damage to his waistcoat’s whiteness: he abominated the
+thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that
+enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides
+he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
+country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed: he
+was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never
+for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to
+exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
+dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
+punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
+him susceptible. Headache threatened--and to him of all men! But was
+there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium? Puzzles are presented
+to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they
+are the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in
+rattle-boxes, they are actually children’s toys, for what they contain,
+but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they
+break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in
+hollowness. Or does this happen to us only after a fall?
+
+He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
+clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
+in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
+any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London
+Bridge, of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his
+affability, his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs,
+entirely the reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and
+accustomed to receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a
+hint to bring on him the charge of punctilio?
+
+‘But I am treating it seriously!’ he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
+fixing a button of his coat.
+
+That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
+cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of
+his physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
+acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
+among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
+attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
+that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
+word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
+drum-notes; it deafened reason. And was it a London cockney crow-word of
+the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow’s head from the perusal
+of his pothouse newspaper columns?
+
+Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
+required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
+him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
+collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using
+a friend’s term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with
+Victor Radnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it
+on his friend Fenellan, and little else. Simeon Fenellan could clap the
+halter on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and
+stilled it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him;
+and the effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the
+gift of repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was
+permitted to tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let
+it only be explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to
+the stone, echo round the horn. Fenellan, would have discharged an
+extinguisher on punctilio in emission. Victor Radnor was unable to cope
+with it reflectively.
+
+No, but one doesn’t like being beaten by anything! he replied to an
+admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
+significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head,
+and checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike
+himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
+smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
+bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
+his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
+shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.
+
+Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
+engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
+friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him
+Colney; and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between
+them upon man’s present achievements and his probable destinies:
+especially upon England’s grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent
+appreciation of her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic
+dignity of London City. Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he
+fled, but managed, with two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a
+cuttle-fish fight of it, that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher:
+
+The Daniel Lambert of Cities: the Female Annuitant of Nations:--and such
+like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed and
+out-laughed when we have our vigour. We have as much as we need of it
+in summoning a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug at venomous
+dyspepsia.
+
+Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney’s, in the which Hengist
+and Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and
+gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown
+blacking Ben-Israel’s boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew,
+had come so near to Victor Radnor’s apprehensions of a possible, if not
+an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant
+in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture
+drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang neck population
+uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty
+master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son
+and daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on
+the most mercurial of patriotic men, and gave him a whole-length plunge
+into despondency.
+
+It lasted nearly a minute. His recovery was not in this instance due
+to the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious
+country; nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the
+parapet, to his right: the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant
+river; London’s unrivalled mezzotint and the City’ rhetorician’s
+inexhaustible argument: he gained it rather from the imperious demand of
+an animated and thirsty frame for novel impressions. Commonly he was
+too hot with his business, and airy fancies above it when crossing the
+bridge, to reflect in freshness on its wonders; though a phrase could
+spring him alive to them; a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous,
+condemned to admire in despair of outstripping, like Satan worsted;
+or when a Premier’s fine inflation magnified the scene at City
+banquets--exciting while audible, if a waggery in memory; or when
+England’s cherished Bard, the Leading Article, blew bellows, and wind
+primed the lieges.
+
+That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in
+relation to it, may be owned; he was lightly kindled. The scene,
+however, had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant. Down went
+the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the
+bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
+of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and
+the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
+descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
+slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
+and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
+an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
+wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
+and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
+undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and
+dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.
+
+Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?
+
+Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
+citizen of good estate has reproached his country’s poets for not
+pouring out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of
+notions begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would, pay
+to have them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their
+bulk; they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them
+scored on the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can
+promise to his poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce
+invoked is a Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her
+nostrils, and poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime,
+she leads them, after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive
+into the turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!
+
+And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood
+of meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway
+North-eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait’s
+bow-window by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league
+or so down stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of
+Commerce: frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre
+of old Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the
+market for the purchase of a costlier mullet!
+
+But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?
+
+In that case, we do not ask our country’s poets to compose a single
+stanza of eulogy’s rhymes--far from it. Far to the contrary, we bid
+ourselves remember the sons of whom we are; instead of revelling in
+the fruits of Commerce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied
+windows of the aromatic dinners, and beyond Thames, away to the
+fishermen’s deeps, Old England’s native element, where the strenuous
+ancestry of a race yet and ever manful at the stress of trial are heard
+around and aloft whistling us back to the splendid strain of muscle,
+and spray fringes cloud, and strong heart rides the briny scoops and
+hillocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul.
+
+There we find our nationality, our poetry, no Hebrew competing.
+
+We do: or there at least we left it. Whether to recover it when wanted,
+is not so certain. Humpy Hengist and dumpy Horsa, quitting ledger and
+coronet, might recur to their sea bowlegs and red-stubble chins, might
+take to their tarpaulins again; they might renew their manhood on the
+capture of cod; headed by Harald and Hardiknut, they might roll surges
+to whelm a Dominant Jew clean gone to the fleshpots and effeminacy.
+Aldermen of our ancient conception, they may teach him that he has been
+backsliding once more, and must repent in ashes, as those who are for
+jewels, titles, essences, banquets, for wallowing in slimy spawn of
+lucre, have ever to do. They dispossess him of his greedy gettings.
+
+And how of the Law?
+
+But the Law is always, and must ever be, the Law of the stronger.
+--Ay, but brain beats muscle, and what if the Jew should prove to have
+superior power of brain? A dreaded hypothesis! Why, then you see the
+insurgent Saxon seamen (of the names in two syllables with accent on
+the first), and their Danish captains, and it may be but a remnant of
+high-nosed old Norman Lord de Warenne beside them, in the criminal box:
+and presently the Jew smoking a giant regalia cigar on a balcony giving
+view of a gallows-tree. But we will try that: on our side, to back a
+native pugnacity, is morality, humanity, fraternity--nature’s rights,
+aha! and who withstands them? on his, a troop of mercenaries!
+
+And that lands me in Red Republicanism, a hop and a skip from Socialism!
+said Mr. Radnor, and chuckled ironically at the natural declivity he had
+come to. Still, there was an idea in it....
+
+A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended in pain to
+his head near the spot where the haunting word punctilio caught at any
+excuse for clamouring.
+
+Yet we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours; we are vowed to the
+pursuit of it. Mr. Radnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought
+flung at his partner Mr. Inchling’s dread of the Jews. Inchling dreaded
+Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly
+Germans hardly less; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying
+subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor
+Radnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that
+something of the idea must have struck Inchling when he shrugged:
+the idea being... he had lost it again. Definition seemed to be an
+extirpation enemy of this idea, or she was by nature shy. She was very
+feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted. Not until
+nigh upon the close of his history did she return, full-statured and
+embraceable, to Victor Radnor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
+
+The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narrative shall not
+proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still
+but little more than midway across London Bridge. But if a man’s mind is
+to be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to
+an army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses
+for tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of
+matter you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to
+have made his acquaintance. This it is not necessary to do when you are
+set astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s
+mind at home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be
+rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the
+governing element in the composition of man, and of hid present business
+here. The Tale inspirits one’s earlier ardours, when we sped without
+baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic
+sculpture the simplest act of the chisel. It does not advance, ‘tis
+true; it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing
+central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of
+both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their
+honours on its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which
+signalizes us while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows.
+One may sigh for it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful
+direction been brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much
+comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the
+task of the fuller portraiture.
+
+After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found
+repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had begged
+him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief
+for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
+boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal
+month, the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light
+overcoat to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to
+wear it for protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever
+the tender request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to
+the control of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over
+the couple beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced
+waistcoat, exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on
+Norwegian peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the
+whistling clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved them; he starved
+the profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile
+elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled
+host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets. The coursing of his
+blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,
+other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick
+was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three
+successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and
+a gamester’s daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him
+and his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.
+
+Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
+with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
+reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small
+band of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish
+in their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke
+discord, with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad
+step chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall
+we not have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
+buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it
+was not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us
+explain to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried
+in; a step deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed:
+it was a step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step;
+and having youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and
+ignorance; and secondly, and O how deeply truly! Love. Deep true love,
+proved by years, is the advocate.
+
+He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate’s
+exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
+only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
+those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.
+
+To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.
+
+As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
+do, acquit they justify.
+
+Whom they justify, they compliment.
+
+They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as
+the world is.
+
+What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error.
+They know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature. We stand forth to
+plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature’s laws: we affirm, that far
+from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility. On the
+beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility.
+Our world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot
+brand an angel.
+
+This was another favourite sentence of Love’s grand oration for the
+defence. So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the
+case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,
+and they smiled.
+
+They do not smile on the condemnable.
+
+She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And who,
+calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!
+
+Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he
+flew to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted
+celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He
+knew, for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield
+him subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had
+pushed him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing
+so; creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
+daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
+lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the
+good example to shine in the sun.
+
+He had a secret for them.
+
+Nesta’s promising soprano, and her mother’s contralto, and his
+baritone--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate
+notes--should be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that
+secret: there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation
+in it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once
+cast thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning’s
+expedition and a long year’s prospect of the present day! It seemed to
+have been knocked clean out of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say.
+Nor had any combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just
+before the fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was
+brilliant to his eyes as a scene on a stage.
+
+He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
+that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
+the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define
+as feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
+globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does
+not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.
+
+Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
+little while threading his way to a haberdasher’s shop for new white
+waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
+Corporations and London’s majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
+its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas
+of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he
+stood contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic
+countenance, from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a
+novelty to him; unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often
+traversed, equally careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A
+trifle more impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and
+magnum of pursiness barring the City against him. He could have laughed
+aloud at the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment
+at London’s sculptor’s art; and he was partly tickled as well by the
+singular fit of timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van,
+barrow, donkey-tray, went by in strings, broken here and there, and he
+could not induce his legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened
+to a warning that he would be down again if he tried it, among those
+wheels; and his nerves clutched him, like a troop of household women, to
+keep him from the hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless
+as tiger’s teeth; and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of
+the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the
+world will have you in their mandibles.
+
+An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.
+
+‘A pretty scud overheard?’ said a voice at his ear.
+
+‘For fine!--to-day at least,’ Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;
+and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and
+laughed: ‘You?’ He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
+dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
+‘Anything doing in the City?’ For Mr. Fenellan’s proper station faced
+Westward.
+
+The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
+Fenellan said: ‘I’ll tell you,’ and looked a dubious preface, to his
+friend’s thinking.
+
+But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on
+the coat.
+
+‘We’ll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,’ said Mr. Radnor,
+adding within himself: ‘Emptiness! want of food!’ to account for recent
+ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours.
+
+Fenellan’s tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment,
+that the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic
+affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were
+having a fall.
+
+He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a
+haberdasher’s shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the ‘Poor virgin of the smoky city!’
+
+‘They have their ready-made at these shops--last year’s: perhaps, never
+mind, do for the day,’ said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that
+he had spoken of it. ‘A basin of turtle; I can’t wait. A brush of the
+coat; mud must be dry by this time. Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle
+of the Old Veuve. Not bad news to tell? You like that Old Veuve?’
+
+‘Too well to tell bad news of her,’ said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to
+reassure his friend, as he intended. ‘You wouldn’t credit it for the
+Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?’
+
+‘Something of that, I suppose.’ And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the
+shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the
+attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,
+on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to
+hear; for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy
+tone to this brightly-constituted gentleman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. OLD VEUVE
+
+They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old
+Veuve: a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
+counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
+and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
+of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
+will lead to, well you wot. The silly girly sugary crudity his given
+way to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
+ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
+there. It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
+philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
+about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries. It presents us with
+a sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most. It bubbles over
+mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
+individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it
+not for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and
+good things unite. There should be somewhere legends of him and the
+wine-flask. There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology,
+awaiting unravelment. For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and
+is a tree with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth,
+whereon half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal
+and Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
+harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the
+white; and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow. Tell us of a
+certainty that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted
+(assuming the great year for the wine, i.e. combinations above) that
+a speck of the white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main
+ascension over volumes of the black. It may, at a greater venture, but
+confidently, be said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious
+birth induces ever to the worship of the loftier Deities.
+
+Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
+in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
+moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning,
+in tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of
+the reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a
+most magnetic polarity. Take it for not worse than accompanying choric
+flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at
+their sipping of the venerable wine.
+
+Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty
+maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine; that for
+the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle: not as poets hymning;
+it was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men
+travelling to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite
+nether), and still masters of themselves and at home.
+
+Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a
+time a theme.
+
+‘I wonder!’ said Mr. Radnor, completely restored, eyeing his
+half-emptied second glass and his boon-fellow.
+
+‘Low!’ Mr. Fenellan shook his head.
+
+‘Half a dozen dozen left?’
+
+‘Nearer the half of that. And who’s the culprit?’
+
+‘Old days! They won’t let me have another dozen out of the house now.’
+
+‘They’ll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless
+they unearth a fifth corner.’
+
+‘I don’t blame them for making the price prohibitive. And sound as
+ever!’
+
+Mr. Radnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through
+their rose-topaz transparency. He drank. That notion of the dish of
+turtle was an inspiration of the right: he ought always to know it for
+the want of replenishment when such a man as he went quaking. His latest
+experiences of himself were incredible; but they passed, as the dimples
+of the stream. He finished his third glass. The bottle, like the
+cellar-wine, was at ebb: unlike the cellar-wine, it could be set flowing
+again: He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion:
+
+‘Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine--to the best I
+could get; and this Old Veuve, more than any other, is a bridal wine! We
+heard of Giulia Sanfredini’s marriage to come off with the Spanish Duke,
+and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta’s godmother. I ‘ve told
+you. We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one--that
+high:--and I declare to you, it was marvellous! Next morning after
+breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes
+her attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini’s
+voice--illusion of it, you know,--trills us out more than I could have
+believed credible to be recollected by a child. But I’ve told you the
+story. We called her Fredi from that day. I sent the diva, with
+excuses and compliments, a nuptial present-necklace, Roman goldwork,
+locket-pendant, containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl; really
+pretty; telling her our grounds for the liberty. She replied, accepting
+the responsible office; touching letter--we found it so; framed in
+Fredi’s room, under her godmother’s photograph. Fredi has another
+heroine now, though she worships her old one still; she never abandons
+her old ones. You’ve heard the story over and over!’
+
+Mr. Fenellan nodded; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve,
+and for the damsel. Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their
+entertainment.
+
+Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book,
+bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office. He was now fully himself,
+benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probeing of
+schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his
+fine touch on proportion.
+
+‘City dead flat? A monotonous key; but it’s about the same as fetching a
+breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long--not healthy! Skepsey
+will bring me my letters. I was down in the country early this morning,
+looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly
+well of the contractors. Yes, down at Lakelands; and saw my first lemon
+butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind
+to catch it for Fredi,--and should have caught it myself, if I had! The
+truth is, we three are country born and bred; we pine in London. Good
+for a season; you know my old feeling. They are to learn the secret of
+Lakelands to-morrow. It ‘s great fun; they think I don’t see they’ve had
+their suspicion for some time. You said--somebody said--“the eye of a
+needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it
+for penetrating yours”:--women. But no; my dear souls didn’t prick
+and bother. And they dealt with a man in armour. I carry them down to
+Lakelands to-morrow, if the City’s flat.’
+
+‘Keeping a secret’s the lid on a boiling pot with you,’ Mr. Fenellan
+said; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips.
+
+‘I do it.’
+
+‘You do: up to bursting at the breast.’
+
+‘I keep it from Colney!’
+
+‘As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him.’
+
+‘Has old Colney an idea of it?’
+
+‘He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice.’
+
+The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness.
+
+Mr. Fenellan’s delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal
+the one hateful topic; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of
+size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it.
+
+‘Come!’ said Mr. Radnor.
+
+The appeal was understood.
+
+‘Nothing very particular. I came into the City to look at a warehouse
+they want to mount double guard on. Your idea of the fireman’s
+night-patrol and wires has done wonders for the office.’
+
+‘I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed.’
+
+Mr. Fenellan’s remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell,
+reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has
+to endure in the ears at times; but it may be postponed. So Mr. Radnor
+encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment. Where it is
+all bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a
+step, they agreed. Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut
+of the markets, or apprehension of a panic, had to be considered. Both
+gentlemen were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations,
+which would not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposefully. Incessantly
+they scream and sharpen talons.
+
+‘They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events,’ Mr. Fenellan
+said. ‘But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape
+of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the
+game with our loss of the covey. An unstable London’s no world’s
+market-place.’
+
+‘No, no; it’s a niggardly national purse, not the journals,’ Mr. Radnor
+said. ‘The journals are trading engines. Panics are grist to them; so
+are wars; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing
+Parliament. Dr. Schlesien’s right: we go on believing that our God
+Neptune will do everything for us, and won’t see that Steam has
+paralyzed his Trident: good! You and Colney are hard on Schlesien--or
+at him, I should say. He’s right: if we won’t learn that we have become
+Continentals, we shall be marched over. Laziness, cowardice, he says.’
+
+‘Oh, be hanged!’ interrupted Fenellan. ‘As much of the former as you
+like. He ‘s right about our “individualismus” being another name for
+selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it’s
+an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each
+fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and they’ll be all of a
+better pattern. The only thing to do, and the cheapest. By heaven! it’s
+the only honourable thing to do.’
+
+Mr. Radnor disapproved. ‘No conscription here.’
+
+‘Not till you’ve got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an
+army landed. That will teach you to catch at the drug.’
+
+‘No, Fenellan! Besides they’ve got to land. I guarantee a trusty army
+and navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost. We’ll
+start a National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic.’
+
+‘During,’ said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the
+unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood.
+
+Both dropped a sigh.
+
+‘But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow,’ Mr.
+Radnor resumed on a cheerfuller theme. ‘You have not yet seen all I
+‘ve done there. And it ‘s a castle with a drawbridge: no exchangeing
+of visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt; we are there for
+country air; we don’t court neighbours at all--perhaps the elect; it
+will depend on Nataly’s wishes. We can accommodate our Concert-set, and
+about thirty or forty more, for as long as they like. You see, that was
+my intention--to be independent of neighbouring society. Madame Callet
+guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty--and Armandine is the last
+person to be recklessly boasting.--When was it I was thinking last of
+Armandine?’ He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend’s character by the light of his
+remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of
+intimates who know as well as hear: but it was amiably and trippingly,
+on the dance of the wine in his veins.
+
+His look, however, was one that reminded; and Mr. Radnor cried: ‘Now!
+whatever it is!’
+
+‘I had an interview: I assure you,’ Mr. Fenellan interposed to pacify:
+‘the smallest of trifles, and to be expected: I thought you ought to
+know it:--an interview with her lawyer; office business, increase of
+Insurance on one of her City warehouses.’
+
+‘Speak her name, speak the woman’s name; we’re talking like a pair of
+conspirators,’ exclaimed Mr. Radnor.
+
+‘He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion.’
+
+‘My place at Lakelands?’
+
+Mr. Radnor’s clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran
+along the consequences of her having heard it.
+
+‘Earlier this time!’ he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with
+knuckles. ‘I make my stand at Lakelands for good! Nothing mortal moves
+me!’
+
+‘That butler of hers--’
+
+‘Jarniman, you mean: he’s her butler, yes, the scoundrel--h’m-pah!
+Heaven forgive me! she’s an honest woman at least; I wouldn’t rob her of
+her little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month!
+with the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul! She hears
+everything from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything. All foreseen,
+Fenellan, foreseen. I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there’s my
+flag till it’s hauled down over Victor Radnor. London kills Nataly as
+well as Fredi--and me: that is--I can use the words to you--I get back
+to primal innocence in the country. We all three have the feeling.
+You’re a man to understand. My beasts, and the wild flowers,
+hedge-banks, and stars. Fredi’s poetess will tell you. Quiet waters
+reflecting. I should feel it in Paris as well, though they have
+nightingales in their Bois. It’s the rustic I want to bathe me; and I
+had the feeling at school, biting at Horace. Well, this is my Sabine
+Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the sake of friends. Come, and pure
+air, water from the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand-lanes;
+Nataly loves them; Fredi worships the old roots of trees: she calls them
+the faces of those weedy sandy lanes. And the two dear souls on their
+own estate, Fenellan! And their poultry, cows, cream. And a certain
+influence one has in the country socially. I make my stand on a
+home--not empty punctilio.’
+
+Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, ‘Punctilio,’ and not emphatically.
+
+‘Don’t bawl the word,’ said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it
+rang and sang. ‘Here in the City the woman’s harmless; and here,’ he
+struck his breast. ‘But she can shoot and hit another through me. Ah,
+the witch!--poor wretch! poor soul! Only, she’s malignant. I could
+swear! But Colney ‘s right for once in something he says about
+oaths--“dropping empty buckets,” or something.’
+
+‘“Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as
+heavily as the ready devil himself,”’ Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.
+‘Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he’s what the critics call
+sententious. We’ve all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.’
+
+‘Come, Fenellan, I don’t think...’
+
+‘Oh, yes, but it’s true of me too.’
+
+‘You reserve it for your enemies.’
+
+‘I ‘d like to distract it a bit from the biggest of ‘em.’ He pointed
+finger at the region of the heart.
+
+‘Here we have Skepsey,’ said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach
+of a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed
+javelin’s cast, shot from the doorway to the table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE SECOND BOTTLE
+
+This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
+his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean
+slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest
+of prominent large eyes. He placed his master’s letters legibly on the
+table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
+hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.
+
+Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.
+
+‘How about the Schools for Boxing?’ that gentleman said.
+
+Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: ‘I
+have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
+station:--it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against.
+They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
+of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
+it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be
+unaware of their own interests--ladies. The contention all around us is
+with ignorance. My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures
+of gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
+gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical
+profession are quite with me.’
+
+‘The surgical, perhaps you mean?’
+
+‘Also, sir. The clergy strongly.’
+
+‘On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?’
+
+‘Morality. I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
+all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must
+have it. I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
+places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of
+instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would
+delight him more than excesses-beer and tobacco. The female in her right
+place, certainly.’ Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his
+hearer, and pursued,
+
+‘It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
+sense of personal dignity.’
+
+‘Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their
+frivolities?’
+
+‘That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them
+than using their nails.’
+
+‘I don’t know, Skepsey: I’m rather a Conservative there.’
+
+‘Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
+include them. They dance; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to
+say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency.
+I look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
+of--I have to say--sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for
+training. I hope my meaning is clear?’
+
+‘Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
+recreation.’
+
+‘Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,’ said Skepsey,
+blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.
+
+‘I was a bit of a boxer once,’ Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height
+and breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.
+
+‘Something might be done with you still, sir.’
+
+Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
+a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.
+
+Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
+perused.
+
+‘Skepsey’s craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
+a national army?’
+
+‘To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir. I have always
+been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And
+setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
+citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
+examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.’
+
+‘One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,’ said Mr. Fenellan.
+
+Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion
+of the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.
+
+‘Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
+say, sir? I venture my word that a decent lad, with science, would beat
+him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.’
+
+‘If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?’ Skepsey
+conjured the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if
+over spectacles.
+
+‘I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.’
+
+Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.
+
+‘My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first
+principles, I think?’
+
+‘Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a
+hard boxer to beat.’
+
+‘You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
+army.’
+
+‘I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey
+Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
+I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey
+says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
+not given: whereas the fists...’
+
+‘So,’ Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: ‘No sign of life?’
+
+‘It is not yet seen in the City, sir.’
+
+‘The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth’s
+maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?’ said
+Mr. Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been
+restrained by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the
+guest in the earlier process of his magnification and illumination by
+virtue of a grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate
+may be a stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of
+his florid face now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy
+jack-o’-lanterning over it. ‘Business hangs to swing at every City door,
+like a ragshop Doll, on the gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares
+are hollow nuts not a squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight
+of the milky kernel mouldered to beard.
+
+Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
+vehicle. Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
+heels over the far horizon. Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
+bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
+poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
+ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o’ the
+passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them
+to lie their length in fifteen minutes.’
+
+‘And you, Fenellan?’ cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
+lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.
+
+‘Doctor of the ship! with this prescription!’ Mr. Fenellan held up his
+glass.
+
+‘Empty?’
+
+Mr. Fenellan made it completely so. ‘Confident!’ he affirmed.
+
+An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their
+lips in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
+narrow list.
+
+‘At the office in forty minutes,’ Skepsey’s master nodded to him and
+shot him forth, calling him back: ‘By the way, in case a man named
+Jarniman should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.’
+
+Skepsey repeated: ‘Jarniman!’ and flew.
+
+‘A good servant,’ Mr. Radnor said. ‘Few of us think of our country
+so much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers. Colney has
+impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
+improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.’
+
+The second bottle appeared. The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
+executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
+couple.
+
+‘Take heart, Benjamin,’ said Mr. Fenellan; ‘it’s only the bottle dies;
+and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.’
+
+‘I’m thinking of the house,’ Benjamin replied. He told them that again.
+
+‘It ‘s the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns. But,
+Benjamin,’ said Mr. Fenellan, ‘the fame enters into the partakers of it,
+and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.’
+
+‘That don’t keep a house upright,’ returned Benjamin.
+
+Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: ‘True enough, it ‘s elegy--though we
+perform it through a trumpet; and there’s not a doubt of our being down
+or having knocked the world down, if we’re loudly praised.’
+
+Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a
+woman is a wine of ticklish age. The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.
+
+A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
+supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
+men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite. The effect
+was quite other. Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: ‘You told
+me All? tell me that!’
+
+Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
+bracing. But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it? Not
+likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along
+by Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
+‘According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
+blow.’
+
+‘Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?’
+
+‘The lady.’
+
+‘Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon? Is it a
+legal...? At last? Fenellan!’
+
+‘So I fancied I understood.’
+
+‘But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for
+a punishment?--that’s her one aim.’
+
+‘She may have her hallucinations.’
+
+‘But a blow--what a word for it! But it’s life to us life! It’s the blow
+we’ve prayed for. Why, you know it! Let her strike, we bless her. We’ve
+never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity, pity,
+pity! Let her do that, we’re at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you knew
+what my poor girl suffers! She ‘s a saint at the stake. Chiefly on
+behalf of her family. Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my
+fortune: I’ll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.’
+
+‘You’ve been a bulwark to your friends.’
+
+‘All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at
+home and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
+Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing! Ha! the
+woman has threatened it before. It’s probably feline play with us.’
+
+His chin took support, he frowned.
+
+‘You may have touched her.’
+
+‘She won’t be touched, and she won’t be driven. What ‘s the secret of
+her? I can’t guess, I never could. She’s a riddle.’
+
+‘Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
+ardently sought secret to reveal itself,’ said Mr. Fenellan.
+
+His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor’s
+eyes, they turned over. ‘Oh!--her charms! She had a desperate belief
+in her beauty. The woman ‘s undoubtedly charitable; she’s not without a
+mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it’s put to use. Heart!
+yes, against me she has plenty of it. They say she used to be courted;
+she talked of it: “my courtiers, Mr. Victor!” There, heaven forgive me,
+I wouldn’t mock at her to another.’
+
+‘It looks as if she were only inexorably human,’ said Mr. Fenellan,
+crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
+flavour. ‘We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
+recumbents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
+should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
+insane.’
+
+Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case. ‘For the sake of
+my sanity, it was! to preserve my.... but any word makes nonsense of
+it. Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
+days, horrible days! and never met her: I say, could you consent to
+be tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was
+barely twenty-one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an
+engagement--which is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good
+faith; that is, with capacity on both sides to keep the engagement:
+between the man you know I was in youth and a more than middle-aged
+woman crazy up to the edge of the cliff--as Colney says half the world
+is, and she positively is when her spite is roused. No, Fenellan, I have
+nothing on my conscience with regard to the woman. She had wealth: I
+left her not one penny the worse for--but she was not one to reckon it,
+I own. She could be generous, was, with her money. If she had struck
+this blow--I know she thought of it: or if she would strike it now, I
+could not only forgive her, I could beg forgiveness.’
+
+A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.
+
+‘You’ve borne your part bravely, my friend.’
+
+‘I!’ Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens. ‘Praise my
+Nataly if you like! Made for one another, if ever two in this world! You
+know us both, and do you doubt it? The sin would have been for us two to
+meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death and
+beyond it: that’s my firm faith. Nataly teaches me the religion of
+life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
+Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!’
+
+Tears fell from him, two drops. He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
+his watch, and smiled: ‘The finishing glass! We should have had to put
+Colney to bed. Few men stand their wine. You and I are not lamed by it;
+we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was,
+that the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
+business.’
+
+‘It’s a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.’
+
+‘If it doubles the energies, mind.’
+
+‘Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me. I’ve a
+waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and
+it won’t allow of a thought upon Investments.’
+
+‘Consult me to-morrow,’ said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
+inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided. ‘You’ve
+looked at the warehouse?’
+
+‘That’s performed.’
+
+‘Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
+morning as you well can.’
+
+Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
+the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would have been to have strained
+his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
+boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.
+
+He stopped, and laughed: ‘Now I ‘m pumping my pulpit-eh? You come with
+us to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it’s
+fine; train half-past. We take a basket. By the way, I had no letter
+from Dartrey last mail.’
+
+‘He has buried his wife. It happens to some men.’
+
+Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the
+burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum spectre-spark of
+hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening
+at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless
+envy. Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
+dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa
+to be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
+strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
+their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
+brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
+always in ambush. We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
+the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had
+the words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us,
+fret us, nevertheless.
+
+Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
+mind of shackled men.
+
+It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that
+Dartrey should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish
+man. He was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country
+for vigour, gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good
+fortune decked him as a prodigy.
+
+‘No harm to the head from that fall of yours?’ Mr. Fenellan said.
+
+‘None.’ Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
+cried cheerily: ‘Now to business’; as men may, who have confidence in
+their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
+‘You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
+Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
+wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
+Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression. In the course of the
+evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.’
+
+‘Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.’
+
+‘Fenellan,’ said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
+fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey’s, ‘I put it to
+you: would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
+Carling’s report?’
+
+Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan’s answering
+look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
+form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.
+
+Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled
+a past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in
+the times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
+reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
+of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
+bubbles. For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
+take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger;
+and you may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your
+reckonings, and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to
+doing profitable exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do
+the something more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the
+pilot of your blood if not the captain of your thoughts.
+
+Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor’s
+confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
+Victor’s manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
+such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.
+
+Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed
+apart with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the
+house, questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
+entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in
+the season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for
+a man of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an
+old-fashioned wedding-breakfast. For although he could stand his wine
+as well as his friend, his friend’s potent capacity martially after the
+feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him. It
+pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature’s workshop. It
+told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
+astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
+unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
+
+In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous,
+THE RAJAH IN LONDON (London, Limbo and Sons, 1889), now obliterated
+under the long wash of Press-matter, the reflection--not unknown to
+philosophical observers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental
+Prince--produced by his observation of the march of London citizens
+Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a
+survival of the Zoroastrian form of worship. His Minister, favourable
+to the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master’s head,
+remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her
+God. The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely
+fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech:--princes and the louder
+members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip
+of that which they do not immediately comprehend. It is explained by the
+Minister: not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they,
+to the constantly unseen--a trebly cataphractic Invisible. The Rajah
+professes curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish
+their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the
+object in which they put their faith. He is informed by his prostrate
+servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their
+Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses
+of what is denied to their external vision: thus they fortify credence
+chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors; fire they eat, and they
+drink fire; they become consequently instinct with fire. Necessarily
+therefore they believe in fire. Believing, they worship. Worshipping,
+they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve. For that way lies the key,
+this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel.
+
+According to Stage directions, THE RAJAH AND HIS MINISTER Enter a
+Gin-Palace.--It is to witness a service that they have learnt to
+appreciate as Anglicanly religious.
+
+On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the
+hatted sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened
+by our rule there: they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to
+‘Parsees beneath a cloud.’
+
+The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical
+pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots,
+diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused
+by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.
+
+‘But can they suffer so and live?’ exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the
+physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.
+
+‘Science,’ his Minister answers, ‘took them up where Nature, in pity
+of their martyrdom, dropped them. They do not live; they are engines,
+insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their
+infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing
+of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or
+stop: nor do they.’
+
+The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle
+of their power to vanquish. In some apparent allusion to an Indian story
+of a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for
+their solid and resistless advance, resembling that of--
+
+             The doubly-wedded man and wife,
+        Pledged to each other and against the world
+        With mutual union.
+
+One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
+citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
+our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
+after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
+smack-o’-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
+javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about
+the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
+Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
+chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
+pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
+they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
+No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from
+coal-dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an
+enormous engine’s centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is
+leisurely to meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God
+of Light in his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them
+is not roughened, as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the
+scrambler’s hand seen from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have
+all the appearance of sour scientific productions. And unhappily for
+the national portrait, in the Poem quoted, the Rajah’s Minister chose
+an hour between morning and meridian, or at least before an astonished
+luncheon had come to composure inside their persons, for drawing his
+Master’s attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the units of
+the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far to visit and to
+study:
+
+               These Britons wear
+        The driven and perplexed look of men
+        Begotten hastily ‘twixt business hours
+
+It could not have been late afternoon.
+
+These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
+fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of
+piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from
+all quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London,
+smoking royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray
+for possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion,
+collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
+idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
+inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the
+ripe kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of
+the works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or
+wilderness. Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ
+in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another
+harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a
+costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn. For
+the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths,
+the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City
+inspires none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An
+embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of
+the adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an
+angry irony ‘upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff.
+Song of praise she does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a
+striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this
+England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing
+for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too,
+streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled
+tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders,
+until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give
+gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain
+a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down
+beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to
+drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as
+might--as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of
+panegyric, to the Muse of Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the
+Spirit of Song.
+
+But first there must be the cleansing. When Night has fallen upon
+London, the Rajah remarks:
+
+        Monogamic Societies present
+        A decent visage and a hideous rear.
+
+His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would
+have them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the
+impression of their handsome frontage. Night, however, will come; and
+they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the
+Rajah sees. Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of
+his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them;
+his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people
+in their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the
+puzzle on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the
+Premier’s reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the
+Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their
+case, when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of
+these imputedly peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the
+mysterious contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they
+confound in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with
+the cat of the tiles at night.
+
+Granting all that, it being a transient novelist’s business to please
+the light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only
+chance of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to
+the quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.
+
+Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
+to lift the angry heroic head over human. They gloriously transfigure.
+A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
+streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun’s hand
+so speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of
+street-organs has quickened little children’s legs to rhythmic footing,
+they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Radnor, lover of
+the country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He
+would indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, to a
+citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused
+an orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
+reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.
+
+The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson’s
+cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of
+the irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having
+thoughts upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of
+the National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under
+Venetian brushes. His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest
+ventures. He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics;
+who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
+fatal. He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures do
+not ripen. They have a chance of it, if abused. But who thinks of
+buying the abused? Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days
+of Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where
+examination is close and constant, and the critic’s trumpet-note
+dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing. As to foreign
+pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a
+Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics
+to swarm: a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by
+the critics, universally derided. A real Raphael in your house is
+aristocracy to the roof-tree. But the wealthy trader will reach to title
+before he may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian. Yet he is the
+one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath it to
+the nation--PRESENTED TO THE NATION BY VICTOR MONTGOMERY RADNOR. There
+stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity;
+for few were the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object
+haunted the deed, it came of his trader’s habit of mind.
+
+He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which
+would coat a sensitive name. Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers,
+fountains, afternoon bands of music--comfortable seats in it, and a
+shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea. Tobacco? why
+not rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer. A
+volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending
+pile in his brain. London is at night a moaning outcast round the
+policeman’s’ legs. What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted,
+odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the
+hospitable Paduan? Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be rightly
+an outcast....
+
+Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial
+at the bar of benevolent intentions. But Victor was not the man to steal
+his refreshments in that known style. He meant to make deeds of them, as
+far as he could, considering their immense extension; and except for the
+sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose.
+
+Turning to the steps of a chemist’s shop to get a prescription made up
+for his Nataly’s doctoring of her domestics, he was arrested by a rap
+on his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of
+the blow--a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing. His
+head, at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively--owing to which
+or indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement,
+he pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty
+beach, who hears cannon across the waters.
+
+He certainly had felt it. He remembered the shock: he could not remember
+much of pain. How about intimations? His asking caused a smile.
+
+Very soon the riddle answered itself. He had come into view of the
+diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a
+couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of
+a fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.
+
+All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist’s
+shop: and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and
+the will. It passed like a giver’s wrinkle. He read the placards of the
+Opera; reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house;
+and now we have two-or three. We have also a distracting couple of
+Clowns and Pantaloons in our Pantomimes: though Colney says that the
+multiplication of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative
+truth--and bother Colney! Two Columbines also. We forbear to speak
+of men, but where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two
+Columbines at once! Victor felt the boy within him cold to both: and in
+his youth he had doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy.
+The tale of a delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut
+from the arms of Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer,
+and thenceforth living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy
+a matron, despite her starry past, as any to be shown in a country
+breeding the like abundantly, had always delighted him. It seemed a
+reconcilement of opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism. Ay, and poor
+women!--women in the worser plight under the Puritan’s eye. They may be
+erring and good: yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up! Read
+the history of the error. But presently we shall teach the Puritan to
+act by the standards of his religion. All is coming right--must come
+right. Colney shall be confounded.
+
+Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan’s hint regarding the designs of
+Mrs. Burman.
+
+His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of
+scorching--Godiva to the gossips.
+
+She would come out of it glorified. She would be reconciled with her
+family. With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world
+would know her for the heroine she was: a born lady, in appearance
+and manner an empress among women. It was a story to be pleaded in
+any court, before the sternest public. Mrs. Burman had thrown her into
+temptation’s way. It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever
+written of over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly!
+
+And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious:--she
+would inherit... he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of
+figures in addition, during three paces of his feet. Dartrey Fenellan
+had said of little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling
+as mid-sea foam. Happy he who wins her! But she was one of the young
+women who are easily pleased and hardly enthralled. Her father strained
+his mind for the shape of the man to accomplish the feat. Whether she
+had an ideal of a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing.
+She was not the damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical
+prince, and try it upon all comers to discover him: as is done by
+some; excuseably, if we would be just. Nesta was of the elect, for whom
+excuses have not to be made. She would probably like a flute-player
+best; because her father played the flute, and she loved him--laughably
+a little maiden’s reason! Her father laughed at her.
+
+Along the street of Clubs, where a bruised fancy may see black balls
+raining, the narrow way between ducal mansions offers prospect of the
+sweep of greensward, all but touching up to the sunset to draw it to the
+dance.
+
+Formerly, in his very early youth, he clasped a dream of gaining way
+to an alliance with one of these great surrounding houses; and he had
+a passion for the acquisition of money as a means. And it has to be
+confessed, he had sacrificed in youth a slice of his youth, to gain it
+without labour--usually a costly purchase. It had ended disastrously:
+or say, a running of the engine off the rails, and a speedy
+re-establishment of traffic. Could it be a loss, that had led to the
+winning of his Nataly? Can we really loathe the first of the steps when
+the one in due sequence, cousin to it, is a blessedness? If we have been
+righted to health by a medical draught, we are bound to be respectful to
+our drug. And so we are, in spite of Nature’s wry face and shiver at
+a mention of what we went through during those days, those horrible
+days:--hide them!
+
+The smothering of them from sight set them sounding he had to listen.
+Colney Durance accused him of entering into bonds with somebody’s
+grandmother for the simple sake of browsing on her thousands: a picture
+of himself too abhorrent to Victor to permit of any sort of acceptance.
+Consequently he struck away to the other extreme of those who have a
+choice in mixed motives: he protested that compassion had been the cause
+of it. Looking at the circumstance now, he could see, allowing for human
+frailty-perhaps a wish to join the ranks of the wealthy compassion for
+the woman as the principal motive. How often had she not in those old
+days praised his generosity for allying his golden youth to her withered
+age--Mrs. Burman’s very words! And she was a generous woman or had been:
+she was generous in saying that. Well, and she was generous in having
+a well-born, well-bred beautiful young creature like Nataly for
+her companion, when it was a case of need for the dear girl; and
+compassionately insisting, against remonstrances: they were spoken by
+him, though they were but partial. How, then, had she become--at least,
+how was it that she could continue to behave as the vindictive Fury who
+persecuted remorselessly, would give no peace, poisoned the wells round
+every place where he and his dear one pitched their tent!
+
+But at last she had come to charity, as he could well believe. Not too
+late! Victor’s feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Burman assured him it was
+genuine because of his genuine conviction, that she had determined to
+end her incomprehensibly lengthened days in reconcilement with him: and
+he had always been ready to ‘forget and forgive.’ A truly beautiful old
+phrase! It thrilled off the most susceptible of men.
+
+His well-kept secret of the spacious country-house danced him behind a
+sober demeanour from one park to another; and along beside the drive
+to view of his townhouse--unbeloved of the inhabitants, although by
+acknowledgement it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense
+of justice in depreciation, ‘good accommodation.’ Nataly was at home,
+he was sure. Time to be dressing: sun sets at six-forty, he said, and
+glanced at the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread
+primroses flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands.
+
+He crossed the road and rang.
+
+Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs.
+His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. NATALY
+
+‘Il segreto!’ the girl cried commandingly, with a forefinger at his
+breast.
+
+He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish, ‘Dove
+volare!’
+
+They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet.
+
+She flew to him, embraced and kissed.
+
+‘I must have it, my papa! unlock. I’ve been spying the bird on its
+hedgerow nest so long! And this morning, my own dear cunning papa,
+weren’t you as bare as winter twigs? “Tomorrow perhaps we will have a
+day in the country.” To go and see the nest? Only, please, not a big
+one. A real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid’s hat and apron
+all day--the style you like; and strike roots. We’ve been torn away two
+or three times: twice, I know.’
+
+‘Fixed, this time; nothing shall tear us up,’ said her father, moving on
+to the stairs, with an arm about her.
+
+‘So, it is...?’
+
+‘She’s amazed at her cleverness!’
+
+‘A nest for three?’
+
+‘We must have a friend or two.’
+
+‘And pretty country?’
+
+‘Trust her papa for that.’
+
+‘Nice for walking and running over fields? No rich people?’
+
+‘How escape that rabble in England! as Colney says. It’s a place for
+being quite independent of neighbours, free as air.’
+
+‘Oh! bravo!’
+
+‘And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi
+can have a swim every Summer morning.’
+
+‘A swim?’ Her note was dubious. ‘A river?’
+
+‘A good long stretch--fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the
+Naiad’s bower: pretty water to see.’
+
+‘Ah. And has the house a name?’
+
+‘Lakelands. I like the name.’
+
+‘Papa gave it the name!’
+
+‘There’s nothing he can conceal from his girl. Only now and then a
+little surprise.’
+
+‘And his girl is off her head with astonishment. But tell me, who has
+been sharing the secret with you?’
+
+‘Fredi strikes home! And it is true, you dear; I must have a confidant:
+Simeon Fenellan.’
+
+‘Not Mr. Durance?’
+
+He shook out a positive negative. ‘I leave Col to his guesses. He’d have
+been prophesying fire the works before the completion.’
+
+‘Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creckholt?’
+
+‘Wait and see to-morrow.’
+
+He spoke of the customary guests for concert practice; the music,
+instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be
+quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling
+into his dressing-room.
+
+Nesta signalled at her mother’s door for permission to enter. She
+slipped in, saw that the maid was absent, and said: ‘Yes, mama; and
+prepare, I feared it; I was sure.’
+
+Her mother breathed a little moan: ‘Not a cottage?’
+
+‘He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.’
+
+‘Why not?’
+
+‘Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.’
+
+‘My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking. You don’t
+know for certain yet?’
+
+‘It’s a large estate, mama, and a big new house.’
+
+Nataly’s bosom sank. ‘Ah me! here’s misery! I ought to have known.
+And too late now it has gone so far! But I never imagined he would be
+building.’
+
+She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty
+were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be looking in that
+manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish. But Nesta’s divinations
+were target-arrows; they flew to the mark. Could it have been expected
+that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale? O the dear little
+lost lost cottage! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
+womanhood’s longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For the secluded
+modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
+suspicions....
+
+‘My child, you won’t possibly have time before the dinner-hour,’ she
+said to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a
+short and straining look out of the depths.
+
+Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
+dislike, when one’s own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
+affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
+by a false position.
+
+She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position
+as women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them
+land to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more
+than the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl
+was older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful
+directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come,
+necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But
+if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave
+understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a
+case that could be pleaded!
+
+He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
+present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
+intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
+wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
+though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
+discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
+asked whether he was perfectly sane.
+
+Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke
+the glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had proved it; he proved it
+daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles
+like hers: yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times
+unbearable.
+
+But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than
+the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Whither he led,
+let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.
+
+Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
+into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
+therefore think it.
+
+This was the prudent woman’s clear deduction from the state wherein she
+found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman.
+Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
+river’s bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
+she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing
+fall, a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny
+whirling surface. Strange to think, she had not since then power to
+grasp in her abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.
+
+But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is a madness, having
+heaven’s wisdom in it--a spark. But even when it is driving us on the
+breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it. She and
+Victor had drunk of a cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
+directions of the rational mind.
+
+Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a
+racing charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious
+balloonist. For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor’s course
+was an ascension from heights to heights. He had ideas, he mastered
+Fortune. He conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his
+ambition; which was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim
+of his life was at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment. In spite
+of his fits of unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving
+him could trace them to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly
+innocent aim in life was of this very simplest; so wonderful, by
+contrast with his powers, that she, assured of it as she was by
+experience of him, was touched, in a transfusion of her feelings through
+lucent globes of admiration and of tenderness, to reverence. There
+had been occasions when her wish for the whole world to have proof and
+exhibition of his greatness, goodness, and simplicity amid his gifts,
+prompted her incitement of him to stand forth eminently: [‘lead a
+kingdom,’ was the phrase behind the curtain within her shy bosom;) and
+it revealed her to herself, upon reflection, as being still the Nataly
+who drank the cup with him, to join her fate with his.
+
+And why not? Was that regretted? Far from it. In her maturity, the woman
+was unable to send forth any dwelling thought or more than a flight
+of twilight fancy, that cancelled the deed of her youth, and therewith
+seemed to expunge near upon the half--of her term of years. If it came
+to consideration of her family and the family’s opinion of her conduct,
+her judgement did not side with them or with herself, it whirled, swam
+to a giddiness and subsided.
+
+Of course, if she and Victor were to inhabit a large country-house, they
+might as well have remained at Craye Farm or at Creckholt; both places
+dear to them in turn. Such was the plain sense of the surface
+question. And how strange it was to her, that he, of the most quivering
+sensitiveness on her behalf; could not see, that he threw her into
+situations where hard words of men and women threatened about her head;
+where one or two might on a day, some day, be heard; and where, in the
+recollection of two years back, the word ‘Impostor’ had smacked her on
+both cheeks from her own mouth.
+
+Now once more they were to run the same round of alarms, undergo the
+love of the place, with perpetual apprehensions of having to leave it:
+alarms, throbbing suspicions, like those of old travellers through the
+haunted forest, where whispers have intensity of meaning, and unseeing
+we are seen, and unaware awaited.
+
+Nataly shook the rolls of her thick brown hair from her forehead; she
+took strength from a handsome look of resolution in the glass. She could
+always honestly say, that her courage would not fail him.
+
+Victor tapped at the door; he stepped into the room, wearing his evening
+white flower over a more open white waistcoat; and she was composed and
+uninquiring. Their Nesta was heard on the descent of the stairs, with a
+rattle of Donizetti’s Il segreto to the skylights.
+
+He performed his never-omitted lover’s homage.
+
+Nataly enfolded him in a homely smile. ‘A country-house? We go and see
+it to-morrow?’
+
+‘And you’ve been pining for a country home, my dear soul.’
+
+‘After the summer six weeks, the house in London does not seem a home to
+return to.’
+
+‘And next day, Nataly draws five thousand pounds for the first sketch of
+the furniture.’
+
+‘There is the Creckholt...’ she had a difficulty in saying.
+
+‘Part of it may do. Lakelands requires--but you will see to-morrow.’
+
+After a close shutting of her eyes, she rejoined: ‘It is not a cottage?’
+
+‘Well, dear, no: when the Slave of the Lamp takes to building, he does
+not run up cottages. And we did it without magic, all in a year; which
+is quite as good as a magical trick in a night.’ He drew her close to
+him. ‘When was it my dear girl guessed me at work?’
+
+‘It was the other dear girl. Nesta is the guesser.’
+
+‘You were two best of souls to keep from bothering me; and I might have
+had to fib; and we neither of us like that.’ He noticed a sidling of her
+look. ‘More than the circumstances oblige:--to be frank. But now we
+can speak of them. Wait--and the change comes; and opportunely, I have
+found. It’s true we have waited long; my darling has had her worries.
+However, it ‘s here at last. Prepare yourself. I speak positively. You
+have to brace up for one sharp twitch--the woman’s portion! as Natata
+says--and it’s over.’ He looked into her eyes for comprehension; and not
+finding inquiry, resumed: ‘Just in time for the entry into Lakelands.
+With the pronouncement of the decree, we present the licence... at an
+altar we’ve stood before, in spirit... one of the ladies of your family
+to support you:--why not? Not even then?’
+
+‘No, Victor; they have cast me off.’
+
+‘Count on my cousins, the Duvidney ladies. Then we can say, that those
+two good old spinsters are less narrow than the Dreightons. I have to
+confess I rather think I was to blame for leaving Creckholt. Only, if
+I see my girl wounded, I hate the place that did the mischief. You and
+Fredi will clap hands for the country about Lakelands.’
+
+‘Have you heard from her... of her... is it anything, Victor?’ Nataly
+asked him shyly; with not much of hope, but some readiness to be
+inflated. The prospect of an entry into the big new house, among a new
+society, begirt by the old nightmares and fretting devils, drew her into
+staring daylight or furnace-light.
+
+He answered: ‘Mrs. Burman has definitely decided. In pity of us?--to be
+free herself?--who can say! She ‘s a woman with a conscience--of a kind:
+slow, but it brings her to the point at last. You know her, know her
+well. Fenellan has it from her lawyer--her lawyer! a Mr. Carting; a
+thoroughly trustworthy man--’
+
+‘Fenellan, as a reporter?’
+
+‘Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters. I understand that Mrs.
+Burman:--her health is awful: yes, yes; poor woman! poor woman! we feel
+for her:--she has come to perceive her duty to those she leaves behind.
+Consider: she HAS used the rod. She must be tired out--if human. And she
+is. One remembers traits.’
+
+Victor sketched one or two of the traits allusively to the hearer
+acquainted with them. They received strong colouring from midday’s Old
+Veuve in his blood. His voice and words had a swing of conviction: they
+imparted vinousness to a heart athirst.
+
+The histrionic self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another,
+who is again, though not ignorant of his character, tempted to swallow
+the nostrums which have made so gallant a man of him: his imperceptible
+sensible playing of the part, on a substratum of sincereness, induces
+fascinatingly to the like performance on our side, that we may be armed
+as he is for enjoying the coveted reality through the partial simulation
+of possessing it. And this is not a task to us when we have looked our
+actor in the face, and seen him bear the look, knowing that he is not
+intentionally untruthful; and when we incline to be captivated by his
+rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an outside thought
+striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the present
+instance; when suddenly an expectation of the thing desired is born and
+swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene: and when we
+are being kissed and the blood is warmed. In fine, here as everywhere
+along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the
+mind, we become drift-matter of tides, metal to magnets. And if we are
+women, who commonly allow the lead to men, getting it for themselves
+only by snaky cunning or desperate adventure, credulity--the continued
+trust in the man--is the alternative of despair.
+
+‘But, Victor, I must ask,’ Nataly said: ‘you have it through Simeon
+Fenellan; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer?’
+
+‘My knowledge of what she would do near the grave--poor soul, yes! I
+shall soon be hearing.’
+
+‘You do not, propose to enter this place until--until it is over?’
+
+‘We enter this place, my love, without any sort of ceremony. We live
+there independently, and we can we have quarters there for our friends.
+Our one neighbour is London--there! And at Lakelands we are able to
+entertain London and wife;--our friends, in short; with some, what
+we have to call, satellites. You inspect the house and grounds
+to-morrow--sure to be fair. Put aside all but the pleasant recollections
+of Craye and Creckholt. We start on a different footing. Really nothing
+can be simpler. Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in
+residence at Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel
+the charm of country life: we have everything about us; could have had
+our own milk and cream up to London the last two months. Was it very
+naughty?--I should have exploded my surprise! You will see, you will see
+to-morrow.’
+
+Nataly nodded, as required. ‘Good news from the mines?’ she said.
+
+He answered: ‘Dartrey is--yes, poor fellow! Dartrey is confident, from
+the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number
+of millions. The same with the gold. But gold-mines are lodgeings, not
+homes.’
+
+‘Oh, Victor! if money...! But why did you say “poor fellow” of Dartrey
+Fenellan?’
+
+‘You know how he’s...’
+
+‘Yes, yes,’ she said hastily. ‘But has that woman been causing fresh
+anxiety?’
+
+‘And Natata’s chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,’
+said he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them
+liked to touch.
+
+Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow;
+and he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon,
+but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy. He had
+also another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be
+mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.
+
+He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the robeing of her
+mistress. Nataly’s mind had turned to the little country cottage which
+would have given her such great happiness. She raised her eyes to him;
+she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
+moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.
+
+He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an impatient,
+‘There, there!’ and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in
+our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman’s
+mind without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts. Even
+the best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of
+supremest beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts. You must not
+expect to appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost
+appear that man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his
+mate, the fair, the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and
+purest of natures, cannot help being something of a groveller.
+
+Nataly had likewise her thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL.
+Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking
+of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of
+amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself
+whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his
+fellow-men like an owl all mad for the reveller’s hoots and flights
+and mice and moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping
+composure, chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln’s Inn
+pumps lawyers into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane.
+He was in the state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish
+sparkles to foam. Sight of Mrs. Burman’s legal adviser had instantly
+this effect upon him: his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and
+the desire of the voice in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the
+rush of two waves together, upon which he may be figured as the boat: he
+caught at Mr. Carling’s hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship
+quite sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were
+immediately privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman’s
+conversation as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the
+squeeze with a prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun
+from time to time.
+
+‘I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist: I
+don’t think she has done laughing since,’ Mr. Calling said.
+
+Fenellan fluted: ‘Ah?’ He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat
+as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two
+behind the man of the world. He expressed profound regret at not having
+heard the silvery ring of the lady’s laughter.
+
+Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his
+wife. ‘Perhaps you will some day honour us?’
+
+‘You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.’
+
+‘Now, if I might name the day?’
+
+‘You lump the gold and make it current coin;--says the blushing bride,
+who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten
+her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel,
+her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge,
+named the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the
+complimentary tyrant he was.’
+
+‘To-morrow, then!’ said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm,
+through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of
+friends at short notice. He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might
+indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.
+
+‘With happiness,’ Fenellan responded.
+
+Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.
+
+‘To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what
+we can. You go Westward?’
+
+‘To bed with the sun,’ said the reveller.
+
+‘Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there.’
+
+‘Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the
+domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter! Ah, dear me! Is
+there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?’
+
+‘I was married at four and twenty,’ said Carling, as one taking up
+the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and
+necessary: ‘my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children;
+two sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby. So we are
+grandfather and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may
+say for both of us.’
+
+‘Think of it! Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day
+you proposed to the lady: and I’d say, that all the credit is with her,
+but that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.’
+
+‘She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.’
+
+‘True of all good women! You encourage me, touching a matter of deep
+interest, not unknown to you. The lady’s warm heart will be with us.
+Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?’
+
+‘Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.’
+
+A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially
+accepted by Fenellan.
+
+‘Pardon. She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has,
+queerly, the right. So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one,
+might be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable
+harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours. But she has the
+indubitable legal right to fly them--to proclaim it; for it means little
+else.’
+
+‘You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?’
+
+‘Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the
+legal sort! I have wit enough to escape you there. She is no doubt an
+estimable person.’
+
+‘Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.’
+
+‘Ah. You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside
+another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will
+forgive me if I say, that your word “good” has a look of being stuck
+upon the features we know of her, like a coquette’s naughty patch; or
+it’s a jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I’ve heard tell she
+performs her charities.’
+
+‘I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.’
+
+‘Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.’
+
+‘Compare her with other wealthy people.’
+
+‘And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.
+
+Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife
+to separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought
+Fenellan’s nearest ear, emitting the sound of ‘hum.’
+
+‘In other respects, unimpeachable!’
+
+‘Oh! quite!’
+
+‘There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her
+husband’s nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the
+magistrate, that the man hadn’t a crease to complain of in her
+character. We are condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the
+flesh for the assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral
+fortifications.’
+
+‘Character, yes, valuable--I do wish you had named to-night for doing me
+the honour of dining with me!’ said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture
+of the appetite for anecdotes. ‘I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, ‘65.’
+
+‘A fine wine. Seductive to hear of. I dine with my friend Victor Radnor.
+And he knows wine.--There are good women in the world, Mr. Carling,
+whose characters...’
+
+‘Of course, of course there are; and I could name you some. We
+lawyers...!’
+
+‘You encounter all sorts.’
+
+‘Between ourselves,’ Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where
+it mingled with the roar of London.
+
+‘You do?’ Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal
+opinions regarding the sex. ‘Right!’
+
+‘Many!’
+
+‘I back you, Mr. Carling.’
+
+The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the
+verge of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences.
+Fenellan backed him further.
+
+‘Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.’
+
+‘Professional, but charitable; I am with you.’
+
+‘Poor things! we--if we have to condemn--we owe them something.’
+
+‘A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her! She
+doesn’t hear it often.’
+
+‘A real service,’ Carling’s voice deepened to the legal ‘without
+prejudice,’--‘I am bound to say it--a service to Society.’
+
+‘Ah, poor wench! And the kind of reward she gets?’
+
+‘We can hardly examine... mysterious dispensations... here we are to
+make the best we can of it.’
+
+‘For the creature Society’s indebted to? True. And am I to think there’s
+a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an
+Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and
+win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time,
+that Society’s indebted to for whatever it’s indebted for?’
+
+‘Scarcely that,’ said Carling, contracting.
+
+‘But you ‘re for great Reforms?’
+
+‘Gradual.’
+
+‘Then it’s for Reformatories, mayhap.’
+
+‘They would hardly be a cure.’
+
+‘You ‘re in search of a cure?’
+
+‘It would be a blessed discovery.’
+
+‘But what’s to become of Society?’
+
+‘It’s a puzzle to the cleverest.’
+
+‘All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.
+
+‘Establishments must have their sacrifices. Beware of interfering: eh?’
+
+‘By degrees, we may hope....’
+
+‘Society prudently shuns the topic; and so ‘ll we. For we might tell of
+one another, in a fit of distraction, that t’ other one talked of it,
+and we should be banished for an offence against propriety. You should
+read my friend Durance’s Essay on Society. Lawyers are a buttress of
+Society. But, come: I wager they don’t know what they support until they
+read that Essay.’
+
+Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to
+read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to
+him.
+
+He said: ‘Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?’
+
+‘Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years. I
+was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!’
+
+‘Followed by a second, not less...?’
+
+‘In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to
+make it so!’
+
+‘The Law must be vindicated.’
+
+‘The law is a clumsy bludgeon.’
+
+‘We think it the highest effort of human reason--the practical
+instrument.’
+
+‘You may compare it to a rustic’s finger on a fiddlestring, for the
+murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.
+
+‘I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.’
+
+‘You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by
+chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.--Here’s a peep
+of Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows. I like these
+old streets!’
+
+‘Hum,’ Carling hesitated. ‘I can remember when the dirt at the windows
+was appalling.’
+
+‘Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster’s
+green-scum eye: it was. And there your Law did good work.--You’re for
+Bordeaux. What is your word on Burgundy?’
+
+‘Our Falernian!’
+
+‘Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom. But he will have the best
+of everything. A Romanee! A Musigny! Sip, my friend, you embrace the
+Goddess of your choice above. You are up beside her at a sniff of that
+wine.--And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a
+bit by our feelings of our first love, who hadn’t the cleanest of faces
+or nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we
+were boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.’
+
+Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not
+share. He said urgently: ‘Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray,
+believe I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor’s abilities. He is
+one of our foremost men... proud of him. Mr. Radnor has genius; I
+have watched him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the
+memorable men of our times. I can admire him, independent of--well,
+misfortune of that kind... a mistaken early step. Misfortune, it is to
+be named. Between ourselves--we are men of the world--if one could
+see the way! She occasionally... as I have told you. I have ventured
+suggestions. As I have mentioned, I have received an impression...’
+
+‘But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn’t release him and will keep
+his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.’
+
+‘Can you trace them?’
+
+‘Undisguised!’
+
+‘Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout. I should not exactly say revengeful.
+We have to discriminate. I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty,
+directed at the--I quote--state of sin. We are mixed, you know.’
+
+The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap. ‘But, fifty thousand
+times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she
+calls it, if it pleased her.’
+
+‘She might try. Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions.
+And there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble.
+She has had to combat that scruple.’
+
+‘Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!--well. But put a
+by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin. Where, do you imagine,
+she would lay it? You’ll say, that Nature and Law never agreed. They
+ought.’
+
+‘The latter deferring to the former?’
+
+‘Moulding itself on her swelling proportions. My dear dear sir, the
+state of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of,
+in violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.’
+
+‘He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.’
+
+‘He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley
+sugar in her pockets;--and she already serving as a test-vessel or
+mortar for awful combinations in druggery! Gilt widows are equal to
+decrees of Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites,
+and the Law that sanctions, they’re the criminals. Victor Radnor is the
+noblest of fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell
+you: he saved me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of
+my pen--which means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of
+yourself to the level of the round middle of the public: saved me from
+that! Yes, Mr. Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of
+the pen; and it is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts
+as an individual man again before I blacken paper. Owing to him, I have
+a tenderness for mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how
+little we can help it. He is an Olympian--who thinks of them below.
+The lady also is an admirable woman at all points. The pair are a mated
+couple, such as you won’t find in ten households over Christendom. Are
+you aware of the story?’
+
+Carling replied: ‘A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two
+very distinct versions.’
+
+‘Hear mine.--And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all right. But a crazy cab
+it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury. Except that it’s sheer
+riff-raff here to knock over.’
+
+‘Hulloa?--come!’ quoth the wary lawyer.
+
+‘There’s the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me! One may be sure that
+the man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal
+practices; a dear good spherical fellow! Some day, we’ll hope, you will
+be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor’s Romance Conti aged
+thirty-one: a wine, you’ll say at the second glass, High Priest for the
+celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of
+man.’
+
+‘You hit me rightly,’ said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually
+excited by the bouquet of Victor Radnor’s hospitality and companionship,
+which added flavour to Fenellan’s compliments. These came home to him
+through his desire to be the ‘good spherical fellow’; for he, like
+modern diplomatists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of
+the time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft
+in reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by
+no means to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his
+professional duty was unprofitable nowadays. Wariness, however, was not
+somnolent, even when he said: ‘You know, I am never the lawyer out of my
+office. Man of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by
+it. I am Mrs. Barman Radnor’s legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor’s
+friend. They are, as we see them, not on the best of terms. I would
+rather--at its lowest, as a matter of business--be known for having
+helped them to some kind of footing than send in a round bill to my
+client--or another. I gain more in the end. Frankly, I mean to prove,
+that it’s a lawyer’s interest to be human.’
+
+‘Because, now, see!’ said Fenellan, ‘here’s the case. Miss Natalia
+Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family--a large one, reads an
+advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it, and
+engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband. Miss
+Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive. She has a glorious
+contralto voice. Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman to sing
+duets together. Well?
+
+Why, Euclid would have theorem’d it out for you at a glance at the trio.
+You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a
+Drama without a stop. If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has
+only to hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think ‘s the
+name.’
+
+Carting shrugged.
+
+‘Let her keep from striking, if she’s Christian,’ pursued Fenetlan,
+‘and if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better
+thing for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion,
+to rise the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the
+devil’s own testimony to her attractions--thousands in the Funds, houses
+in the City. She threw the young couple together. And my friend Victor
+Radnor is of a particularly inflammable nature. Imagine one of us in
+such a situation, Mr. Carting!’
+
+‘Trying!’ said the lawyer.
+
+‘The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the
+sweetness of a woman’s call to him to live. And here’s London’s garden
+of pines, bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here! We
+don’t reflect on it, Mr. Carling.’
+
+‘Not enough, not enough.’
+
+‘I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading
+Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you’re bending over the
+baskets. I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter
+a garden. Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck. Well, and
+just the same there; and no end to the payment either. We’re always
+paying! By the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor’s dinner-table’s a spectacle. Her
+taste in flowers equals her lord’s in wine. But age improves the wine
+and spoils the flowers, you’ll say. Maybe you’re for arguing that lovely
+women show us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the
+course of time. I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant she
+is. We reconcile it, Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape’s
+her spirit, the flower her body. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps an
+intertwining. But look upon bouquets and clusters, and the idea of
+woman springs up at once, proving she’s composed of them. I was about
+to remark, that with deference to the influence of Mrs. Burman’s
+legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent sinner’s pastor, the Reverend
+gentleman ministering to her spiritual needs, would presumptively
+exercise it, in this instance, in a superior degree.’
+
+Carling murmured: ‘The Rev. Groseman Buttermore’; and did so for
+something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections: as,
+that he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day;
+which impression placed him on a decorous platform above the
+amusing gentleman; to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing
+consequently, that his exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that
+an indication here and there of a trap in his talk, must have been due
+rather to excess of wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man,
+whose incorrigibly impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a
+vigilant dexterity.
+
+‘Buttermore!’ ejaculated Fenellan: ‘Groseman Buttermore! Mrs.
+Victor’s Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Groseman
+Buttermore--Septimus Barmby. Is there anything in names? Truly, unless
+these clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads
+long after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them,
+and themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street
+placard-advertisements. Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a
+Groseman Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before
+their names without mention, I wager it’s about all we do know of them.
+They’re Society’s trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.’
+
+‘My respect for the cloth is extreme.’ Carling’s short cough prepared
+the way for deductions. ‘Between ourselves, they are men of the world.’
+
+Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp
+burst out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own
+small grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of
+the world. ‘You lawyers dress in another closet,’ he said. ‘The Rev.
+Groseman has the ear of the lady?’
+
+‘He has:--one ear.’
+
+‘Ah? She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.’
+
+‘Listens to him, listens to me, listens to Jarniman; and we neither of
+us guide her. She’s very curious--a study. You think you know her--next
+day she has eluded you. She’s emotional, she’s hard; she’s a woman,
+she’s a stone. Anything you like; but don’t count on her. And another
+thing--I’m bound to say it of myself,’ Carling claimed close hearing of
+Fenellan over a shelf of saladstuff, ‘no one who comes near her has any
+real weight with her in this matter.’
+
+‘Probably you mix cream in your salad of the vinegar and oil,’ said
+Fenellan. ‘Try jelly of mutton.’--‘You give me a new idea. Latterly,
+fond as I am of salads, I’ve had rueful qualms. We’ll try it.’
+
+‘You should dine with Victor Radnor.’
+
+‘French cook, of course!’
+
+‘Cordon bleu.’
+
+‘I like to be sure of my cutlet.’
+
+‘I like to be sure of a tastiness in my vegetables.’
+
+‘And good sauces!’
+
+‘And pretty pastry. I said, Cordon bleu. The miracle is, it ‘s a woman
+that Victor Radnor has trained: French, but a woman; devoted to him, as
+all who serve him are. Do I say “but” a woman? There’s not a Frenchman
+alive to match her. Vatel awaits her in Paradise with his arms extended;
+and may he wait long!’
+
+Carling indulged his passion for the genuine by letting a flutter of
+real envy be seen. ‘My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman. It
+must be a privilege to dine with him--to know him. I know what he has
+done for English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I
+said: and his donations to Institutions. Odd, to read his name and Mrs.
+Burman Radnor’s at separate places in the lists! Well, we’ll hope. It’s
+a case for a compromise of sentiments and claims.’
+
+‘A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there’s always an
+amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.’
+
+Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he
+saw none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell
+property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day.
+He then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
+‘Well?’ that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward. His leave of
+people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the
+curious end things come to.
+
+Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than
+the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side
+of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man
+of the world:--as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to
+mount for a look out over their own and the world’s pedestrian tracks.
+I could spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion
+of the man he mused. But you’re right in what you mean to say of
+yourself: you’re a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage
+somehow to score a point of service to Victor Radnor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS
+
+Nesta read her mother’s face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room
+to receive the guests. She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as
+much required by her father’s eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils: and
+it was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear
+man happy over his volcano. Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with
+whom her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her
+station: they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home
+with herself and be herself: a rarer condition with us all than is
+generally supposed. So she could determine to be cheerful in the
+anticipation of an evening that would at least be restful to the outworn
+sentinel nerve of her heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling
+to the great organ; often colouring the shows and seems of adverse
+things for an apeing of reality with too cruel a resemblance. One of the
+scraps of practical wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from
+spying at horizons when they drop into a pleasant dingle. Such is the
+comfort of it, that we can dream, and lull our fears, and half think
+what we wish: and it is a heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided
+from our wishes.
+
+Nesta wondered at her mother’s complacent questions concerning this
+Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features
+of the country. Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden
+three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display
+a shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon
+her thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the
+aristocratic iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them
+off; as they had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she
+remembered it, of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved
+the dear home she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty
+surrounding people--or no, not all, but some of them. And what had
+roused their pride?
+
+Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
+supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had
+hit on her father’s profession of merchant. It accounted to her for the
+behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families. But certain
+of the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the
+families were avowedly commercial. ‘They follow suit,’ her father
+said at Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided
+instantly to quit and fly once more. But if they followed suit in such
+a way, then Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English
+the most sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel
+verdict, she adored her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her
+by the suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a
+merchant, was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not
+liked by merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like
+his being both.
+
+She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
+high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
+rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description
+of gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
+enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in
+the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling,
+a beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
+dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
+his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and
+the Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O
+and he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest,
+the very brightest of parents: he was his girl’s playmate. She could be
+critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet
+if he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
+young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
+accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred. Designedly,
+frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
+incomprehensible baseness. The dropping of acquaintanceship with him,
+after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any
+better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit. It drove her,
+despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could
+find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed
+her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be
+shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked
+semblance of shielding each by turns.
+
+The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady
+Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his
+class. Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume,
+appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal
+to the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the
+commoners. Her father accused her of snubbing him. She reproduced her
+famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby’s closed mouth: a
+sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion;
+deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled
+exhibition: the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born
+mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so
+was her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness. He charged her with
+encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the
+nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England,
+possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly
+possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.
+Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon. Dudley’s expressive lineaments
+showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated,
+centrally. And he was not a particularly dull fellow ‘for his class and
+country,’ Colney admitted; adding: ‘I hit his thought and out he came.’
+One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man’s
+topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep
+from coming out:--we have won a right to him.
+
+‘Only, it’s too bad; it ‘s a breach of hospitality,’ Victor said, both
+to Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney’s ironic
+handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would
+attack, and Nataly would not defend.
+
+They were alive at a signal to protect the others. Miss Priscilla
+Graves, an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant’alcoholic
+exclusiveness and scorn: Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud
+extravagantly the more transparent purity of vegetarianism. Dr. Peter
+Yatt jeered at globules: Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures
+treated as cattle by big doses. The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily
+smoked: Mr. Peridon traced mortal evil to that act. Dr. Schlesien had
+his German views, Colney Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and
+free-lance. And here was an optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank
+Radical, the rigid Conservative, were not wanting. All of them were
+pointedly opposed, extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly,
+it might be thought: but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the
+exclamation: ‘They are dears!’ They were the dearer for their fads and
+foibles.
+
+Music harmonized them. Music, strangely, put the spell on Colney
+Durance, the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer of prickly balls, in
+the form of Discord’s apples of whom Fenellan remarked, that he took to
+his music like an angry little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl
+and a grunt. All these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor’s
+Concert-room with an easy homely recognition of one another’s musical
+qualities, at times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies and
+occasional clashes added a salient tastiness to the group of whom Nesta
+could say: ‘Mama, was there ever such a collection of dear good souls
+with such contrary minds?’ Her mother had the deepest of reasons for
+loving them, so as not to wish to see the slightest change in their
+minds, that the accustomed features making her nest of homeliness and
+real peace might be retained, with the humour of their funny silly
+antagonisms and the subsequent march in concord; excepting solely as
+regarded the perverseness of Priscilla Graves in her open contempt
+of Mr. Pempton’s innocent two or three wine-glasses. The vegetarian
+gentleman’s politeness forbore to direct attention to the gobbets of
+meat Priscilla consumed, though he could express disapproval in general
+terms; but he entertained sentiments as warlike to the lady’s habit of
+‘drinking the blood of animals.’ The mockery of it was, that Priscilla
+liked Mr. Pempton and admired his violoncello-playing, and he was
+unreserved in eulogy of her person and her pure soprano tones. Nataly
+was a poetic match-maker. Mr. Peridon was intended for Mademoiselle de
+Seilles, Nesta’s young French governess; a lady of a courtly bearing,
+with placid speculation in the eyes she cast on a foreign people, and
+a voluble muteness shadowing at intervals along the line of her closed
+lips.
+
+The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
+Halley. Nataly’s provincial gentlewoman’s traditions of the manners
+indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
+who, in allusion to Hymen’s weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
+of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
+mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were
+from the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it
+conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
+twisting shape; a ballerina’s expressiveness; and her tongue dashed
+half sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
+candid. Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and
+that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck she
+had come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist, had
+plucked her out of the mire, the miraculous man! And she had vowed to
+him, never again to run doing the like without his approval.
+
+The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
+brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
+was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, ‘an excellent
+man.’ For the not colloquial do not commit themselves. But one wants a
+little animation in a husband. She called on bell-motion of the head
+to toll forth the utter nightcap negative. He had not any: out of the
+saddle, he was asleep:--‘next door to the Last Trump,’ Colney Durance
+assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after
+wooing her to unbosom herself. She was awake to his guileful arts,
+and sailed along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one;
+prankishly exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a
+grinding world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim. So to
+refresh ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we
+shock our hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a
+dexterous merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice
+than her nature that she indulged, ‘A woman must have some excitement.’
+The most innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange. The opinions of
+husbands who are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.
+
+Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride,
+but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
+decorous, it was great gain. Her supple person, pretty lips, the
+style she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for
+masculine ears, whatever the sex. Nataly might share in them, but women
+did not lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted
+class: Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts. She
+had a special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her
+exquisite French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the
+young Frenchwoman’s air of high breeding that won her esteem. Girls were
+spring frosts to her. Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or
+wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl
+sang. Music she loved. She said it was the saving of poor Dudley. It
+distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family;
+and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly,
+it contributed to his comelier air. Flute [This would be the German
+Blockeflute or our Recorder. D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop
+was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved
+a gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken
+of all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor’s punctuating
+trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in
+energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound. Too methodical one, too
+fiery the other.
+
+In duets of Hauptmann’s, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
+smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
+fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
+she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from
+lips that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
+damsel’s present pressing ambitions. She found nothing to correct in
+Mr. Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
+could plead vitality, passion. He held his performances cheap after the
+vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of
+his ‘dear old Corelli,’ or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and
+swaying forests of Beethoven.
+
+His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
+the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of
+a soul at holiday. Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures
+and reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny
+within, issues to all the outer Edens. Few of us possess that double
+significance of the pure sparkle. It captivated Lady Grace. She said a
+word of it to Fenellan: ‘There is a man who can feel rapture!’ He had
+not to follow the line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening,
+in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very
+emphasis, was quaint. She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs
+were in motion to designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had
+the instinct to be dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and
+delighted in its effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle
+of eyes did an idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being
+surpassed; and it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to
+express. Such a reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally
+sensible that they are the feminine of him.
+
+‘His girl has the look,’ Fenellan said in answer.
+
+She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.
+
+And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
+father’s vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child. The mother gave
+richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
+brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
+the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
+manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
+with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
+qualities, moral if you like. But vividness was Lady Grace’s admirable
+meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
+value of obscurer lights. Under the charm of Nataly’s rich contralto
+during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
+uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations,
+they would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology
+for language, beside Victor’s gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of
+the notes.
+
+Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
+next day.
+
+Her anxieties were at once running about to gather provisions for the
+baskets. She spoke of them at night. But Victor had already put the
+matter in the hands of Madame Callet; and all that could be done, would
+be done by Armandine, he knew. ‘If she can’t muster enough at home,
+she’ll be off to her Piccadilly shop by seven A.M. Count on plenty for
+twice the number.’
+
+Nataly was reposing on the thought that they were her friends, when
+Victor mentioned his having in the afternoon despatched a note to his
+relatives, the Duvidney ladies, inviting them to join him at the station
+to-morrow, for a visit of inspection to the house of his building on his
+new estate. He startled her. The Duvidney ladies were, to his knowledge,
+of the order of the fragile minds which hold together by the cement of
+a common trepidation for the support of things established, and have
+it not in them to be able to recognize the unsanctioned. Good women,
+unworldly of the world, they were perforce harder than the world, from
+being narrower and more timorous.
+
+‘But, Victor, you were sure they would refuse!’
+
+He answered: ‘They may have gone back to Tunbridge Wells. By the way,
+they have a society down there I want for Fredi. Sure, do you say, my
+dear? Perfectly sure. But the accumulation of invitations and refusals
+in the end softens them, you will see. We shall and must have them for
+Fredi.’
+
+She was used to the long reaches of his forecasts, his burning activity
+on a project; she found it idle to speak her thought, that his ingenuity
+would have been needless in a position dictated by plain prudence, and
+so much happier for them.
+
+They talked of Mrs. Burman until she had to lift a prayer to be saved
+from darker thoughts, dreadfully prolific, not to be faced. Part of her
+prayer was on behalf of Mrs. Burman, for life to be extended to her, if
+the poor lady clung to life--if it was really humane to wish it for her:
+and heaven would know: heaven had mercy on the afflicted.
+
+Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to
+pray.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
+
+One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a
+semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner
+of the place: ‘There you see Lakelands.’
+
+The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
+fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect’s fantasia
+in crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
+crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
+away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious
+in irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about it, the
+pines beside it, the clouds above it. Not many palaces would be reckoned
+as larger. The folds and swells and stream of the building along the
+roll of ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind.
+Nataly looked. Her next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the
+expected nods to Victor’s carriage. She would have given the whole
+prospect for the covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude of
+clashing sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled
+her to summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger,
+directed against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only
+resource for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.
+
+Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations
+encircling him. He led through the straight passage of the galleried
+hall, offering two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to
+the lake, Fredi’s lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district
+not abounding in the commodity. He would have it a feature of the
+district; and it had been deepened and extended; up rose the springs,
+many ran the ducts. Fredi’s pretty little bathshed or bower had a space
+of marble on the three-feet shallow it overhung with a shade of carved
+woodwork; it had a diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and
+small row-boat of elegant build hard by. Green ran the banks about, and
+a beechwood fringed with birches curtained the Northward length: morning
+sun and evening had a fair face of water to paint. Saw man ever the like
+for pleasing a poetical damsel? So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the
+party hitherto, and dreaming a preference of ‘old places’ like Creckholt
+and Craye Farm, ‘captured to be enraptured,’ quite according to man’s
+ideal of his beneficence to the sex. She pressed the hand of her young
+French governess, Louise de Seilles. As in everything he did for his
+girl, Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience
+and her tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her
+books, pegs to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a
+window to conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on
+her book; and the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because
+Fredi bathed in any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings
+of doves, tits, fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was
+to choose, and have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.
+
+‘Fredi’s Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or
+Signor Ruderi,’ said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm;
+‘and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them
+puffing; she’s a dolphin. That water has three springs and gets all the
+drainage of the upland round us. I chose the place chiefly on account of
+it and the pines. I do love pines!’
+
+‘But, excellent man! what do you not love?’ said Lady Grace, with the
+timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.
+
+‘It saves him from accumulation of tissue,’ said Colney.
+
+‘What does?’ was eagerly asked by the wife of the homoeopathic Dr. John
+Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset with fears of stoutness.
+
+Victor cried: ‘Tush; don’t listen to Colney, pray.’
+
+But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more immediately
+effective than an abjuration of potatoes and sugar. She was obliged by
+her malady to listen, although detesting the irreverent ruthless man,
+who could direct expanding frames, in a serious tone, to love; love
+everybody, everything; violently and universally love; and so without
+intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
+nutriment. Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments: probably as
+being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos is ever smothered in
+its pudding-bed of the grotesque. She was pained, and showed it, and
+was ashamed of herself for showing it; and that very nearly fetched the
+tear.
+
+‘Our host is an instance in proof,’ Colney said. He waved hand at the
+house. His meaning was hidden; evidently he wanted victims. Sight
+of Lakelands had gripped him with the fell satiric itch; and it is a
+passion to sting and tear, on rational grounds. His face meanwhile,
+which had points of the handsome, signified a smile asleep, as if
+beneath a cloth. Only those who knew him well were aware of the
+claw-like alertness under the droop of eyelids.
+
+Admiration was the common note, in the various keys. The station
+selected for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on
+its white shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded
+and full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and
+in volleys. Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow
+to have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
+workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
+unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number
+of them; and the most glorious of sights--O the grand old English
+working with a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat;
+and they conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer. So
+the conqueror said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three
+long lines, one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical
+growths. And the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish
+junipers bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent
+from the three green terrace banks to the grassy slopes over the lake.
+Again the lake was admired, the house admired. Admiration was evoked for
+great orchid-houses ‘over yonder,’ soon to be set up.
+
+Off we go to the kitchen-garden. There the admiration is genial,
+practical. We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus,
+and the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the
+French system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to
+win length and catch sun, we much admire. We admire the gardener. We are
+induced temporarily to admire the French people. They are sagacious
+in fruit-gardens. They have not the English Constitution, you think
+rightly; but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor
+quotes a friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve. We hear
+and we see examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to
+the old confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we
+have not studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward
+step by step until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen
+tapers, carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious
+images of our national selves for admiration. Something surely we do, or
+we should not be where we are. But what is it we do (excepting cricket,
+of course) which others cannot do? Colney asks; and he excludes cricket
+and football.
+
+An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the
+fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused
+in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly
+tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities,
+as he takes them to be. They give him so many opportunities. They are
+angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw. Their instinct to make
+use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat
+of civilization, is amusing, inviting. Colney Durance allured them to
+the quag’s edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and
+although it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he
+the venom they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort.
+But these good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical
+country; and as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an
+irrational man, he selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his
+honest spite.
+
+The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than
+the illogical old motherland. This house of Lakelands, the senselessness
+of his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after
+experiences of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the
+world he challenged, excited Colney’s wasp. He was punished, half way
+to frenzy behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for
+chorus. And here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which
+stirred his wrath. A German on English soil should remember the dues of
+a guest. At the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation
+of an observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first
+enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women. ‘Ah, ya,
+it is true, what you say: “The English grow as fast as odders, but
+they grow to corns instead of brains.” They are Bull. Quaat true.’ He
+bellowed on a laugh the last half of the quotation.
+
+Colney marked him. His encounters with Fenellan were enlivening
+engagements and left no malice; only a regret, when the fencing passed
+his guard, that Fenellan should prefer to flash for the minute. He would
+have met a pert defender of England, in the person of Miss Priscilla
+Graves, if she had not been occupied with observation of the bearing
+of Lady Grace Halley toward Mr. Victor Radnor; which displeased her on
+behalf of Mrs. Victor; she was besides hostile by race and class to an
+aristocratic assumption of licence. Sparing Colney, she with some scorn
+condemned Mr. Pempton for allowing his country to be ridiculed without
+a word. Mr. Pempton believed that the Vegetarian movement was
+more progressive in England than in other lands, but he was at the
+disadvantage with the fair Priscilla, that eulogy of his compatriots
+on this account would win her coldest approval. ‘Satire was never an
+argument,’ he said, too evasively.
+
+The Rev. Septimus Barmby received the meed of her smile, for saying in
+his many-fathom bass, with an eye on Victor: ‘At least we may boast of
+breeding men, who are leaders of men.’
+
+The announcement of luncheon, by Victor’s butler Arlington, opportunely
+followed and freighted the remark with a happy recognition of that which
+comes to us from the hands of conquerors. Dr. Schlesien himself, no
+antagonist to England, but like Colney Durance, a critic, speculated in
+view of the spread of pic-nic provision beneath the great glass dome, as
+to whether it might be, that these English were on another start out of
+the dust in vigorous commercial enterprise, under leadership of one of
+their chance masterly minds-merchant, in this instance: and be debated
+within, whether Genius, occasionally developed in a surprising superior
+manner by these haphazard English, may not sometimes wrest the prize
+from Method; albeit we count for the long run, that Method has assurance
+of success, however late in the race to set forth.
+
+Luncheon was a merry meal, with Victor and Nataly for host and hostess;
+Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Lady Grace Halley for the talkers. A gusty
+bosom of sleet overhung the dome, rattled on it, and rolling Westward,
+became a radiant mountain-land, partly worthy of Victor’s phrase: ‘A
+range of Swiss Alps in air.’
+
+‘With periwigs Louis Quatorze for peaks,’ Colney added.
+
+And Fenellan improved on him: ‘Or a magnified Bench of Judges at the
+trial of your caerulean Phryne.’
+
+The strip of white cloud flew on a whirl from the blue, to confirm it.
+
+But Victor and Lady Grace rejected any play of conceits upon nature.
+Violent and horrid interventions of the counterfeit, such mad similes
+appeared to them, when pure coin was offered. They loathed the Rev.
+Septimus Barmby for proclaiming, that he had seen ‘Chapters of Hebrew
+History in the grouping of clouds.’
+
+His gaze was any one of the Chapters upon Nesta. The clerical
+gentleman’s voice was of a depth to claim for it the profoundest which
+can be thought or uttered; and Nesta’s tender youth had taken so strong
+an impression of sacredness from what Fenellan called ‘his chafer
+tones,’ that her looks were often given him in gratitude, for the mere
+sound. Nataly also had her sense of safety in acquiescing to such a
+voice coming from such a garb. Consequently, whenever Fenellan and
+Colney were at him, drawing him this way and that for utterances
+cathedral in sentiment and sonorousness, these ladies shed protecting
+beams; insomuch that he was inspired to the agreeable conceptions
+whereof frequently rash projects are an issue.
+
+Touching the neighbours of Lakelands, they were principally enriched
+merchants, it appeared; a snippet or two of the fringe of aristocracy
+lay here and there among them; and one racy-of-the-soil old son of
+Thames, having the manners proper to last century’s yeoman. Mr. Pempton
+knew something of this quaint Squire of Hefferstone, Beaves Urmsing by
+name; a ruddy man, right heartily Saxon; a still glowing brand amid the
+ashes of the Heptarchy hearthstone; who had a song, The Marigolds, which
+he would troll out for you anywhere, on any occasion. To have so near
+to the metropolis one from the centre of the venerable rotundity of
+the country, was rare. Victor exclaimed ‘Come!’ in ravishment over the
+picturesqueness of a neighbour carrying imagination away to the founts
+of England; and his look at Nataly proposed. Her countenance was
+inapprehensive. He perceived resistance, and said: ‘I have met two
+or three of them in the train: agreeable men: Gladding, the banker; a
+General Fanning; that man Blathenoy, great billbroker. But the fact
+is, close on London, we’re independent of neighbours; we mean to be.
+Lakelands and London practically join.’
+
+‘The mother city becoming the suburb,’ murmured Colney, in report of the
+union.
+
+‘You must expect to be invaded, sir,’ said Mr. Sowerby; and Victor
+shrugged: ‘We are pretty safe.’
+
+‘The lock of a door seems a potent security until some one outside is
+heard fingering the handle nigh midnight,’ Fenellan threw out his airy
+nothing of a remark.
+
+It struck on Nataly’s heart. ‘So you will not let us be lonely here,’
+she said to her guests.
+
+The Rev. Septimus Barmby was mouthpiece for congregations. Sound of a
+subterranean roar, with a blast at the orifice, informed her of their
+‘very deep happiness in the privilege.’
+
+He comforted her. Nesta smiled on him thankfully.
+
+‘Don’t imagine, Mrs. Victor, that you can be shut off from neighbours,
+in a house like this; and they have a claim,’ said Lady Grace, quitting
+the table.
+
+Fenellan and Colney thought so:
+
+‘Like mice at a cupboard.’
+
+‘Beetles in a kitchen.’
+
+‘No, no-no, no!’ Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened
+to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he
+scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter
+moods of late. ‘No, but it’s a rapture to breathe the air here!’ His
+lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar
+beside him.
+
+She summoned her smile and nodded.
+
+He spoke aside to Lady Grace: ‘The dear soul wants time to compose
+herself after a grand surprise.’
+
+She replied: ‘I think I could soon be reconciled. How much land?’
+
+‘In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres... in all
+at present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake,
+outhouses.’
+
+‘Large enough; land paying as it does--that is, not paying. We shall be
+having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.’
+
+‘You will not so much as jest on the subject.’
+
+Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder. The lady played
+it off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his
+masterfulness, not so volatile.
+
+She said to Nataly: ‘Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size,
+if as much. Large enough when we’re not crowded out with gout and can
+open to no one. Some day you will visit us, I hope.’
+
+‘You we count on here, Lady Grace.’
+
+It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman;
+and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate. The lady
+resumed: ‘I value the favour. We’re in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down
+there. We want enlivening. If we had your set of musicians and talkers!’
+
+Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a
+compliment to a person she measured. Lady Grace also was an amiable
+hostile reviewer. Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects
+common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal
+quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the
+apology proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it,
+under an implied appeal to benevolence. When we have not a liking for
+the creature whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely
+just.
+
+During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney
+Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking,
+striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was
+not perpetually at the gape in laudation. Colney was heard to say:
+‘No doubt: the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might
+challenge aboriginals for that. Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia
+for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition! How would you explain it?’
+
+Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the
+insensately infantile interrogation.
+
+He in turn was presently heard.
+
+‘But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin. I must beg of you
+you write it down. It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.’
+
+‘We are Islanders!’ Colney shrugged in languishment.
+
+‘Oh, you do great things...’ Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness, making
+his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.
+
+‘We build great houses, to employ our bricks’
+
+‘No, Colney, to live in,’ said Victor.
+
+‘Scarcely long enough to warm them.’
+
+‘What do you... fiddle!’
+
+‘They are not Hohenzollerns!’
+
+‘It is true,’ Dr. Schlesien called. ‘No, but you learn discipline; you
+build. I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build! But you shall look
+above: Eyes up. Ire necesse est. Good, but mount; you come to something.
+Have ideas.’
+
+‘Good, but when do we reach your level?’
+
+‘Sir, I do not say more than that we do not want instruction from
+foreigners.’
+
+‘Pupil to paedagogue indeed. You have the wreath in Music, in
+Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer, Arms, Manners.’
+
+Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.
+
+‘He is chiselling for wit in the Teutonic block,’ Colney said, falling
+back to Fenellan.
+
+Fenellan observed: ‘You might have credited him with the finished
+sculpture.’
+
+‘They’re ahead of us in sticking at the charge of wit.’
+
+‘They’ve a widening of their swallow since Versailles.’
+
+‘Manners?’
+
+‘Well, that’s a tight cravat for the Teutonic thrapple! But he’s off by
+himself to loosen it.’
+
+Victor came on the couple testily. ‘What are you two concocting! I
+say, do keep the peace, please. An excellent good fellow; better up in
+politics than any man I know; understands music; means well, you can
+see. You two hate a man at all serious. And he doesn’t bore with his
+knowledge. A scholar too.’
+
+‘If he’ll bring us the atmosphere of the groves of Academe, he may swing
+his ferule pickled in himself, and welcome,’ said Fenellan.
+
+‘Yes!’ Victor nodded at a recognized antagonism in Fenellan; ‘but
+Colney’s always lifting the Germans high above us.’
+
+‘It’s to exercise his muscles.’
+
+Victor headed to the other apartments, thinking that the Rev. Septimus
+and young Sowerby, Old England herself, were spared by the diversion
+of these light skirmishing shots from their accustomed victims to the
+‘masculine people of our time. His friends would want a drilling to be
+of aid to him in his campaign to come. For it was one, and a great one.
+He remembered his complete perception of the plan, all the elements of
+it, the forward whirling of it, just before the fall on London Bridge.
+The greatness of his enterprise laid such hold of him that the smallest
+of obstacles had a villanous aspect; and when, as anticipated, Colney
+and Fenellan were sultry flies for whomsoever they could fret, he was
+blind to the reading of absurdities which caused Fredi’s eyes to stream
+and Lady Grace beside him to stand awhile and laugh out her fit. Young
+Sowerby appeared forgiving enough--he was a perfect gentleman: but
+Fredi’s appalling sense of fun must try him hard. And those young
+fellows are often more wounded by a girl’s thoughtless laughter than by
+a man’s contempt. Nataly should have protected him. Her face had the
+air of a smiling general satisfaction; sign of a pleasure below the
+mark required; sign too of a sleepy partner for a battle. Even in the
+wonderful kitchen, arched and pillared (where the explanation came to
+Nesta of Madame Callet’s frequent leave of absence of late, when an
+inferior dinner troubled her father in no degree), even there his Nataly
+listened to the transports of the guests with benign indulgence.
+
+‘Mama!’ said Nesta, ready to be entranced by kitchens in her bubbling
+animation: she meant the recalling of instances of the conspirator her
+father had been.
+
+‘You none of you guessed Armandine’s business!’ Victor cried, in a glee
+that pushed to make the utmost of this matter and count against chagrin.
+‘She was off to Paris; went to test the last inventions:--French brains
+are always alert:--and in fact, those kitchen-ranges, gas and coal, and
+the apparatus for warming plates and dishes, the whole of the battery is
+on the model of the Duc d’Ariane’s--finest in Europe. Well,’ he agreed
+with Colney, ‘to say France is enough.’
+
+Mr. Pempton spoke to Miss Graves of the task for a woman to conduct a
+command so extensive. And, as when an inoffensive wayfarer has chanced
+to set foot near a wasp’s nest, out on him came woman and her champions,
+the worthy and the sham, like a blast of powder.
+
+Victor ejaculated: ‘Armandine!’ Whoever doubted her capacity, knew not
+Armandine; or not knowing Armandine, knew not the capacity in women.
+
+With that utterance of her name, he saw the orangey spot on London
+Bridge, and the sinking Tower and masts and funnels, and the rising of
+them, on his return to his legs; he recollected, that at the very edge
+of the fall he had Armandine strongly in his mind. She was to do her
+part: Fenellan and Colney on the surface, she below: and hospitality
+was to do its part, and music was impressed--the innocent Concerts; his
+wealth, all his inventiveness were to serve;--and merely to attract
+and win the tastes of people, for a social support to Lakelands! Merely
+that? Much more:--if Nataly’s coldness to the place would but allow him
+to form an estimate of how much. At the same time, being in the grasp of
+his present disappointment, he perceived a meanness in the result,
+that was astonishing and afflicting. He had not ever previously felt
+imagination starving at the vision of success. Victor had yet to learn,
+that the man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object;
+and the nearer to his mark, often the farther is he from a sober self;
+he is more the arrow of his bow than bow to his arrow. This we pay for
+scheming: and success is costly; we find we have pledged the better half
+of ourselves to clutch it; not to be redeemed with the whole handful of
+our prize! He was, however, learning after his leaping fashion. Nataly’s
+defective sympathy made him look at things through the feelings she
+depressed. A shadow of his missed Idea on London Bridge seemed to cross
+him from the close flapping of a wing within reach. He could say only,
+that it would, if caught, have been an answer to the thought disturbing
+him.
+
+Nataly drew Colney Durance with her eyes to step beside her, on the
+descent to the terrace. Little Skepsey hove in sight, coming swift as
+the point of an outrigger over the flood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. SKEPSEY IN MOTION
+
+The bearer of his master’s midday letters from London shot beyond
+Nataly as soon as seen, with an apparent snap of his body in passing. He
+steamed to the end of the terrace and delivered the packet, returning
+at the same rate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much
+respected. He had left the railway-station on foot instead of taking a
+fly, because of a calculation that he would save three minutes; which
+he had not lost for having to come through the raincloud. ‘Perhaps the
+contrary,’ Skepsey said: it might be judged to have accelerated his
+course: and his hat dripped, and his coat shone, and he soaped his
+hands, cheerful as an ouzel-cock when the sun is out again.
+
+‘Many cracked crowns lately, in the Manly Art?’ Colney inquired of him.
+And Skepsey answered with precision of statement: ‘Crowns, no, sir; the
+nose, it may happen; but it cannot be said to be the rule.’
+
+‘You are of opinion, that the practice of Scientific Pugilism offers us
+compensation for the broken bridge of a nose?’
+
+‘In an increase of manly self-esteem: I do, sir, yes.’
+
+Skepsey was shy of this gentleman’s bite; and he fancied his defence had
+been correct. Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took
+the attitude of a watchful dubiety.
+
+‘But, my goodness, you are wet through!’ cried Nataly, reproaching
+herself for the tardy compassion; and Nesta ran up to them and heaped
+a thousand pities on her ‘poor dear Skip,’ and drove him in beneath the
+glass-dome to the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
+‘lest his wife should have to doctor him for a cold,’ and poured afresh,
+when he had obeyed her: ‘for the toasting of Lakelands, dear Skepsey!’
+impossible to resist: so he drank, and blinked; and was then told, that
+before using his knife and fork he must betake himself to some fire
+of shavings and chips, where coffee was being made, for the purpose of
+drying his clothes. But this he would not hear of: he was pledged to
+business, to convey his master’s letters, and he might have to catch a
+train by the last quarter-minute, unless it was behind the time-tables;
+he must hold himself ready to start. Entreated, adjured, commanded,
+Skepsey commiseratingly observed to Colney Durance, ‘The ladies do not
+understand, sir!’ For Turk of Constantinople had never a more haremed
+opinion of the unfitness of women in the brave world of action. The
+persistence of these ladies endeavouring to obstruct him in the course
+of his duty, must have succeeded save that for one word of theirs he had
+two, and twice the promptitude of motion. He explained to them, as to
+good children, that the loss of five minutes might be the loss of a
+Post, the loss of thousands of pounds, the loss of the character of a
+Firm; and he was away to the terrace. Nesta headed him and waved him
+back. She and her mother rebuked him: they called him unreasonable;
+wherein they resembled the chief example of the sex to him, in a wife he
+had at home, who levelled that charge against her husband when most she
+needed discipline: the woman laid hand on the very word legitimately his
+own for the justification of his process with her.
+
+‘But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!’ said Nesta.
+
+She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the
+notion of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything
+consumption, with him. So the ladies had to keep down their anxious
+minds and allow him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and
+salad.
+
+Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
+seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.
+
+‘It is to warm him,’ they pleaded; and she said: ‘He must be warm from
+his walk’; and they said: ‘But he is wet’; and said she, without a show
+of feeling: ‘Warm water, then’; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
+of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
+consideration. Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in
+him; she remarked encouragingly:
+
+‘I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.’
+
+She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
+he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
+bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
+the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
+slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
+entering us to support. Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
+refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before
+the act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts
+which we have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when
+the smell of an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the
+threading of a London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral
+organ. It may be, that by the renunciation of any description of
+alcohol, a man will stand clearer-headed to serve his country. He may
+expect to have a clearer memory, for certain: he will not be asking
+himself, unable to decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or
+a Mr. Jarniman, as the person he declined to receive. Either of the
+two is repulsed upon his application, owing to the guilty similarity of
+sounds but what we are to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency
+in failing to remember; which accuses our physical condition, therefore
+our habits.--Thus the little man debated, scarcely requiring more than
+to hear the right word, to be a convert and make him a garland of the
+proselyte’s fetters.
+
+Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
+putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
+put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
+of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
+pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual
+appetites.
+
+But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who
+looked angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her
+he could not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the
+representative of a principle. He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and
+rushed forth; hearing shouts behind him.
+
+His master had a packet of papers ready, easy for the pocket.
+
+‘By the way, Skepsey,’ he said, ‘if a man named Jarniman should call at
+the office, I will see him.’
+
+Skepsey’s grey eyes came out.
+
+Or was it Journeyman, that his master would not see; and Jarniman that
+he would?
+
+His habit of obedience, pride of apprehension, and the time to catch
+the train, forbade inquiry. Besides he knew of himself of old, that his
+puzzles were best unriddled running.
+
+The quick of pace are soon in the quick of thoughts.
+
+Jarniman, then, was a man whom his master, not wanting to see, one day,
+and wanting to see, on another day, might wish to conciliate: a case of
+policy. Let Jarniman go. Journeyman, on the other hand, was nobody
+at all, a ghost of the fancy. Yet this Journeyman was as important an
+individual, he was a dread reality; more important to Skepsey in
+the light of patriot: and only in that light was he permitted of a
+scrupulous conscience and modest mind to think upon himself when the
+immediate subject was his master’s interests. For this Journeyman had
+not an excuse for existence in Mr. Radnor’s pronunciation: he was born
+of the buzz of a troubled ear, coming of a disordered brain, consequent
+necessarily upon a disorderly stomach, that might protest a degree of
+comparative innocence, but would be shamed utterly under inspection of
+the eye of a lady of principle.
+
+What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
+accurately recollect his master’s words! Miss Graves within him asked
+the rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after
+draughts of champagne.
+
+The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
+quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
+the green. Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
+to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
+the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol. Yes, and
+Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
+pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry,
+for the good of the country. Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision
+of his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld
+the creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
+mothers of our English young. Decidedly the women of principle are bound
+to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law. Whereas, in the opposing
+case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
+would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
+discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
+a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed. He had but a son for
+England’s defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
+thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
+not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
+out in the field. Offspring of a woman of principle!... but there is no
+rubbing out in life: why dream of it? Only that one would not have one’s
+country the loser!
+
+Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of
+the Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
+repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
+disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
+like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
+indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
+winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men
+who can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures. They receive
+fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
+and long reach of arm for their progeny.
+
+Down goes the world before them.
+
+And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
+Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood. Her
+age might count twenty-eight: too long! She should be taught that
+men can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths
+through the garden. An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a
+ticket marked ‘in moderation’ (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or
+fruit along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily,
+alas, exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They
+know not moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of
+Posterity will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun
+it.
+
+The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.
+
+But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a
+sex exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
+themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
+upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to
+the voluntary example we set them.
+
+The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
+conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
+Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
+mastered.
+
+Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
+devolves upon them. Let them at once take to rigorous physical
+training. Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
+patriotically, voluntarily.
+
+Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
+plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to
+escape without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
+consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon the
+bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten; and
+if beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case, nothing
+could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of his nature
+passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld himself
+wearing a detestable ‘ribbon,’ for sign of an oath quite needlessly
+sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler tongue),
+and blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners, howling
+hymns.
+
+Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
+in argument, always fell back, frightened him. As long as they had
+no opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
+intelligible, as the word ‘principle’ had become. But the appearance of
+one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes
+and counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce,
+to knock all comprehension out of Skepsey. Otherwise he would not
+unwillingly have inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the
+controversy between the waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared
+to walk over to the victorious, however objectionable that proceeding.
+He hoped to question his master some day except that his master would
+very naturally have a tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good
+wine, in moderation; just as Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so
+thoughtfully stipulating that it should be good and not too copious.
+Statistics are according to their conjurors; they are not independent
+bodies, with native colours; they needs must be painted by the different
+hands they pass through, and they may be multiplied; a nought or so
+counts for nothing with the teller. Skepsey saw that. Yet they can
+overcome: even as fictitious battalions, they can overcome. He shrank
+from the results of a ciphering match having him for object, and was
+ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to giants; nevertheless he
+acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss Graves should beat
+her master in her array of figures, to insist on his wearing it, as she
+would, she certainly would. And against his internal conviction perhaps;
+with the knowledge that the figures were an unfortified display, and his
+oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the silliest of ceremonies! He was
+shockingly feminine to Statistics.
+
+Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
+‘those emotional things,’ not comprehensibly to Skepsey. But Mr.
+Durance, a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything. He
+made strange remarks upon his country. Dr. Yatt attributed them to the
+state of ‘his digestion.
+
+And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as ‘a barrister wanting
+briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
+wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.’ Mr. Fenellan said it
+laughing, he meant no harm. Skepsey was sure he had the words. He heard
+no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
+on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
+fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of
+mind at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him. His master’s
+business and friends, his country’s welfare and advancement, these, with
+records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
+his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
+accordance by his fervour of velocity. And if you would like a further
+definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness. It is the
+lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
+mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
+motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof
+is multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your
+half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
+Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do you say?
+
+Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
+alive under strong illumination. In his heart, while doing penance for
+his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.
+He was not the army’s General, he was the General’s Lieutenant, now and
+then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief. On his own
+particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge
+of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
+rivers. He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
+his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
+and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
+flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
+the telling instant. Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick’s
+oblique attack, Napoleon’s employment of the artillery arm preparatory
+to the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington’s
+parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
+the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
+deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
+in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours. As to his men,
+of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
+sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
+smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this
+earth! They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair
+of bellows among them. They have their appetites in full control, to eat
+when they can, or cheerfully fast. They have healthy frames, you see;
+and as the healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that,
+under any title you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we
+go, we have got round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching
+and chanting people!
+
+Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
+country for habitation?
+
+Here was a knot.
+
+Skepsey’s head dropped lower, he went as a ram. The sayings of Mr.
+Durance about his dear England: that ‘her remainder of life is in the
+activity of her diseases’--that ‘she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise
+as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution’: that ‘she
+is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly’; and so forth:--charged
+on him during his wrestle with his problem. And the gentlemen had said,
+had permitted himself to say, that our England’s recent history was a
+provincial apothecary’s exhibition of the battle of bane and antidote.
+Mr. Durance could hardly mean it. But how could one answer him when he
+spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding Governments as
+a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string’s lacqueys? He said, that Old
+England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks it her whole
+business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself; and that, in the
+face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living on sufferance. Oh!
+
+Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.
+
+‘Feel quite up to it?’ he was asked by his neighbour.
+
+The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a
+third-class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations
+on the way to town. He was instantly up to the level of an external
+world, and fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man;
+located in London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral,
+as he thanked his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which
+succulent calling had carried him down to near upon the borders of
+Surrey and Sussex, some miles beyond the new big house of a Mister
+whose name he had forgotten, though he had heard it mentioned by an
+acquaintance interested in the gentleman’s doings. But his object was to
+have a look at a rare breed of swine, worth the journey; that didn’t
+run to fat so much as to flavour, had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump
+their hams; over from Spain, it seemed; and the gentleman owning
+them was for selling them, finding them wild past correction. But the
+acquaintance mentioned, who was down to visit t’ other gentleman’s big
+new edifice in workmen’s hands, had a mother, who had been cook to a
+family, and was now widow of a cook’s shop; ham, beef, and sausages,
+prime pies to order; and a good specimen herself; and if ever her son
+saw her spirit at his bedside, there wouldn’t be room for much else in
+that chamber--supposing us to keep our shapes. But he was the right sort
+of son, anxious to push his mother’s shop where he saw a chance, and
+do it cheap; and those foreign pigs, after a disappointment to their
+importer, might be had pretty cheap, and were accounted tasty.
+
+Skepsey’s main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.
+
+He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
+been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.
+
+How so? the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
+and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
+strife between man and man. For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
+Oh! possession! Why, we’ve heard of bloody battles for the possession of
+women! Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
+own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
+Skepsey nodded. How if war is forced on us? Then we fight. Suppose we
+are not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state
+the degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
+skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.
+
+‘Say, you!’ said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
+of size.
+
+‘I would give you two minutes,’ rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently
+and kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum
+vein.
+
+‘Rather short allowance, eh, master?’ said the bigger man. ‘Feel here’;
+he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
+muscle.
+
+Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.
+
+‘Twice that, would not help without the science,’ he remarked, and let
+his arm be gripped in turn.
+
+The pork-butcher’s throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
+punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
+iron lump. ‘Stringy. You’re a wiry one, no mistake.’ It was encomium.
+With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
+taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: ‘Weight tells.’
+
+‘In a wrestle,’ Skepsey admitted. ‘Allow me to say, you would not touch
+me.’
+
+‘And how do you know I’m not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?’
+
+‘You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.’
+
+The pork-butcher was flung backward. ‘Are you a Professor, may I
+inquire?’
+
+Skepsey rejected the title. ‘I can engage to teach young men, upon a
+proper observance of first principles.’
+
+‘They be hanged!’ cried the ruffled pork-butcher. ‘Our best men never
+got it out of books. Now, you tell me--you’ve got a spiflicating style
+of talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if
+you mean that: now, if I was one of ‘em, and I fetches you a bit of a
+flick, how then? Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?’
+
+‘I should claim a fair field,’ was the answer, made in modesty.
+
+‘And you’d expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?’
+
+‘I should expect to.’
+
+‘Bang me!’ was roared. After a stare at the mild little figure with the
+fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
+resumed: ‘Take you for the man you say you be, you’re just the man for
+my friend Jam and me. He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same.
+What prettier? And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us
+with a display, we’d head a cap conformably, whether you’d the best of
+it, according to your expectations, or t’ other way:--For there never
+was shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take
+it and make it appear jolly good. And find you an opponent meet and fit,
+never doubt. Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?’
+
+‘Often, Sir.’
+
+‘Well, that’s good. And it didn’t destroy your confidence?’
+
+‘Added to it, I hope.’
+
+At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from
+an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
+hastened to apologize ‘for his personal reference,’ that was intended
+for an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained
+picked soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp
+at the edge and knowing how to strike. Measure the axe, measure the
+tree; and which goes down first?
+
+‘Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we’re not to hit back?’ the
+pork-butcher bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from
+an audience of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and
+strengthened him in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever
+urging analogies of too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark.
+He had no longer a chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated
+invader, rolled away into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed
+up entire, and not a rag left of him, but John Bull tucking up his
+shirtsleeves on the shingle beach, ready for a second or a third; crying
+to them to come on.
+
+Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the
+pork-butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and
+introduced himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.
+
+They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
+like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
+stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
+it, no doubt. Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
+which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
+bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
+wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
+fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman. An unusual name yet more
+than one Jarniman might well exist. And unlikely that a friend of the
+pork-butcher would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and
+then desired to receive. It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch
+Navy did really, incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way
+up the River Thames, into the very main artery of Old England. And
+what thought the Tower of it? Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy,
+wondering whether the Tower had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people
+at home, he had heard. Mr. Shaplow’s Jarniman might actually be Mr.
+Radnor’s, he inclined to think. At any rate he was now sure of the name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT
+OF THEIR SCOURGE
+
+Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put
+a picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
+Lakelands upper terrace-walk.
+
+‘Queer little water-wagtail it is!’ And Lady Grace Halley and Miss
+Graves and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the
+pretty likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature
+the happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a
+Bewick tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day. It imbedded the
+day in an idea that it had been rural.
+
+We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
+briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of
+us until such a work of binding and labelling is done. And should the
+definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
+stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
+conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
+Anecdotes of England’s happiest man were related, outlines of
+his personal history requested. His nomination in chief among the
+traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale
+of his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
+version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
+carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories. Heroes conducted up Fame’s
+temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
+platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau
+of a final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
+pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
+provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
+humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from. Miss Priscilla Graves
+now fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.
+
+Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
+Nesta. She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
+the dear friend’s ear and tell her she loved her. The presence of the
+German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman,
+even to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise
+of her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise. She bore the
+national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not
+heal since her country was overthrown and dismembered. Colney Durance
+could excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
+controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
+concentrated aim of her France. In the Gallic mind of our time, France
+appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
+breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
+remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
+sepulture. Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by
+her speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
+Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his
+talk savoured of a German. Our holding of the balance, taking two sides,
+is incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body
+and soul. She was of Breton blood. Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch
+any thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or
+gay, and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.
+
+Nataly was not so sympathetic. Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick
+at the feelings of the Celtic French. Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock;
+she had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized
+North, and a taste for mademoiselle’s fine breeding, with a distaste
+for the singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
+mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
+the commercial boor was obtrusive. She said of her to Colney, as they
+watched the couple strolling by the lake below: ‘Nesta brings her out of
+her frosts. I suppose it’s the presence of Dr. Schlesien. I have known
+it the same after an evening of Wagner’s music.’
+
+‘Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,’
+said Colney. ‘She comes of a blood that never forgives.’
+
+‘“Never forgives” is horrible to think of! I fancied you liked your
+“Kelts,” as you call them.’
+
+Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
+coming. ‘You English won’t descend to understand what does not resemble
+you. The French are in a state of feverish patriotism. You refuse to
+treat them for a case of fever. They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
+to be at rest!’
+
+‘You know I am fond of them.’
+
+‘And the Kelts, as they are called, can’t and won’t forgive injuries;
+look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot. Have you heard them
+talk? It happened in the year 1400: it’s alive to them as if it were
+yesterday. Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
+They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
+titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
+uses of cattle. The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing
+than any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this
+day; the crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and
+denied, but they have it and betray the effects; and it’s patent in
+their Journals, all over their literature. Where it’s not seen, another
+blood’s at work. The Kelt won’t accept the form of slavery. Let him be
+servile, supple, cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving,
+he will always remember his day of manly independence and who robbed
+him: he is the poetic animal of the races of modern men.’
+
+‘You give him Pagan colours.’
+
+‘Natural colours. He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
+be kicked after a knock to the ground. Instead of asking him to forgive,
+which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire. A mercantile community
+guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
+by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult. However, there ‘s the secret
+of him; that I respect in him. His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
+doing great deeds, wins him entirely. He is an active spirit, not your
+negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults, short
+of ferocity, are amusing.’
+
+‘But the fits of ferocity!’
+
+‘They are inconscient, real fits. They come of a hot nerve. He is
+manageable, sober too, when his mind is charged. As to the French
+people, they are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are
+packed with contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply
+logical; free-thinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous,
+tenacious; the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these
+qualities; and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism. Below your
+level, they’re above it: a paradox is at home with them!’
+
+‘My friend, you speak seriously--an unusual compliment,’ Nataly said,
+and ungratefully continued: ‘You know what is occupying me. I want your
+opinion. I guess it. I want to hear--a mean thirst perhaps, and you
+would pay me any number of compliments to avoid the subject; but let me
+hear:--this house!’
+
+Colney shrugged in resignation. ‘Victor works himself out,’ he replied.
+
+‘We are to go through it all again?’
+
+‘If you have not the force to contain him.’
+
+‘How contain him?’
+
+Up went Colney’s shoulders.
+
+‘You may see it all before you,’ he said, ‘straight as the Seine
+chaussee from the hill of La Roche Guyon.’
+
+He looked for her recollection of the scene.
+
+‘Ah, the happy ramble that year!’ she cried. ‘And my Nesta just seven.
+We had been six months at Craye. Every day of our life together looks
+happy to me, looking back, though I know that every day had the same
+troubles. I don’t think I’m deficient in courage; I think I could
+meet.... But the false position so cruelly weakens me. I am no woman’s
+equal when I have to receive or visit. It seems easier to meet the worst
+in life-danger, death, anything. Pardon me for talking so. Perhaps we
+need not have left Craye or Creckholt...?’ she hinted an interrogation.
+‘Though I am not sorry; it is not good to be where one tastes poison.
+Here it may be as deadly, worse. Dear friend, I am so glad you remember
+La Roche Guyon. He was popular with the dear French people.’
+
+‘In spite of his accent.’
+
+‘It is not so bad?’
+
+‘And that you’ll defend!’
+
+‘Consider: these neighbours we come among; they may have heard...’
+
+‘Act on the assumption.’
+
+‘You forget the principal character. Victor promises; he may have learnt
+a lesson at Creckholt. But look at this house he has built. How can
+I--any woman--contain him! He must have society.’
+
+‘Paraitre!’
+
+‘He must be in the front. He has talked of Parliament.’
+
+Colney’s liver took the thrust of a skewer through it. He spoke as in
+meditative encomium: ‘His entry into Parliament would promote himself
+and family to a station of eminence naked over the Clock Tower of the
+House.’
+
+She moaned. ‘At the vilest, I cannot regret my conduct--bear what I may.
+I can bear real pain: what kills me is, the suspicion. And I feel it
+like a guilty wretch! And I do not feel the guilt! I should do the same
+again, on reflection. I do believe it saved him. I do; oh! I do, I do.
+I cannot expect my family to see with my eyes. You know them--my brother
+and sisters think I have disgraced them; they put no value on my saving
+him. It sounds childish; it is true. He had fallen into a terrible black
+mood.’
+
+‘He had an hour of gloom.’
+
+‘An hour!’
+
+‘But an hour, with him! It means a good deal.’
+
+‘Ah, friend, I take your words. He sinks terribly when he sinks at
+all.--Spare us a little while.--We have to judge of what is good in the
+circumstances: I hear your reply! But the principal for me to study is
+Victor. You have accused me of being the voice of the enamoured woman.
+I follow him, I know; I try to advise; I find it is wisdom to submit. My
+people regard my behaviour as a wickedness or a madness. I did save him.
+I joined my fate with his. I am his mate, to help, and I cannot oppose
+him, to distract him. I do my utmost for privacy. He must entertain.
+Believe me, I feel for them--sisters and brother. And now that my
+sisters are married... My brother has a man’s hardness.’
+
+‘Colonel Dreighton did not speak harshly, at our last meeting.’
+
+‘He spoke of me?’
+
+‘He spoke in the tone of a brother.’
+
+‘Victor promises--I won’t repeat it. Yes, I see the house! There appears
+to be a prospect, a hope--I cannot allude to it. Craye and Creckholt may
+have been some lesson to him. Selwyn spoke of me kindly? Ah, yes, it is
+the way with my people to pretend that Victor has been the ruin of me,
+that they may come round to family sentiments. In the same way,
+his relatives, the Duvidney ladies, have their picture of the woman
+misleading him. Imagine me the naughty adventuress!’--Nataly falsified
+the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding: ‘I do not say I am
+blameless.’ It was a concession to the circumambient enemy, of whom even
+a good friend was apart, and not better than a respectful emissary. The
+dearest of her friends belonged to that hostile world. Only Victor, no
+other, stood with her against the world. Her child, yes; the love of her
+child she had; but the child’s destiny was an alien phantom, looking at
+her with harder eyes than she had vision of in her family. She did not
+say she was blameless, did not affect the thought. She would have wished
+to say, for small encouragement she would have said, that her case could
+be pleaded.
+
+Colney’s features were not inviting, though the expression was not
+repellent. She sighed deeply; and to count on something helpful by
+mentioning it, reverted to the ‘prospect’ which there appeared to be.
+‘Victor speaks of the certainty of his release.’
+
+His release! Her language pricked a satirist’s gallbladder. Colney
+refrained from speaking to wound, and enjoyed a silence that did it.
+
+‘Do you see any possibility?--you knew her,’ she said coldly.
+
+‘Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is
+bound to believe it near at hand.’
+
+‘You don’t?’ she asked: her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for
+the answer: and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the
+answer herself.
+
+He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it,
+pitying the woman. ‘And you don’t,’ he said. ‘You catch at delusions,
+to excuse the steps you consent to take. Or you want me to wear the
+blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes. You see it as well as
+I: If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at
+Creckholt:--and he’ll be the first to take fright.’
+
+‘He finds you in tears: he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to
+protect “his Nataly.”’
+
+‘No: you are unjust to him. He would fling up all:’--
+
+‘But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire? As you please!’
+
+She bowed to her chastisement. One motive in her consultation with him
+came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in
+the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him;
+together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be
+read by the letter of his words: and in consequence, she could bear
+the lash from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an
+unjustly-treated self to cherish.--But in very truth she was a woman who
+loved to hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position
+reduced her to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her;
+she selected for counsellor him who would apply it: so far she went on
+the straight way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the
+mouth of a trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an
+anxious hope of the reverse of what was to come and what she herself
+apprehended, such as checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.
+The reason being, not that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical,
+but that, living at an intenser strain upon her nature than she or any
+around her knew, her strength snapped, she broke down by chance there
+where Colney was rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her
+inconsequent if not puling sex.
+
+She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing
+chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak: she
+felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her
+father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of
+Victor’s nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the
+necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme,
+and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection
+of those dear to him.
+
+At night he was particularly urgent with her for the harmonious duet in
+praise of Lakelands; and plied her with questions all round and about
+it, to bring out the dulcet accord. He dwelt on his choice of costly
+marbles, his fireplace and mantelpiece designs, the great hall, and
+suggestions for imposing and beautiful furniture; concordantly enough,
+for the large, the lofty and rich of colour won her enthusiasm; but
+overwhelmingly to any mood of resistance; and strangely in a man who had
+of late been adopting, as if his own, a modern tone, or the social and
+literary hints of it, relating to the right uses of wealth, and the duty
+as well as the delight of living simply.
+
+‘Fredi was pleased.’
+
+‘Yes, she was, dear.’
+
+‘She is our girl, my love. “I could live and die here!” Live, she may.
+There’s room enough.’
+
+Nataly saw the door of a covert communication pointed at in that remark.
+She gathered herself for an effort to do battle.
+
+‘She’s quite a child, Victor.’
+
+‘The time begins to run. We have to look forward now:--I declare, it’s I
+who seem the provident mother for Fredi!’
+
+‘Let our girl wait; don’t hurry her mind to... She is happy with her
+father and mother. She is in the happiest time of her life, before those
+feelings distract.’
+
+‘If we see good fortune for her, we can’t let it pass her.’
+
+A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which
+would be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden
+curtain opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in
+Nataly’s bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was
+not his match. To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the
+effort; and hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not the
+anticipation of a set contest to animate the woman’s naturally valiant
+heart; he was too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in
+advance, fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
+inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
+remembered how and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
+day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married
+sister, containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting. An
+unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
+would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
+of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
+truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
+world bestows on its orderly subjects.
+
+They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
+not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
+Victor Radnor’s name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
+used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it,
+the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was,
+that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving
+in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness. She was frigid
+because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power
+would never have struck so meanly. But the mainspring of the feeling
+in an almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of
+retrospective physical distaste on Victor’s part;--hard to keep from a
+short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant
+male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness,
+to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman’s unspoken pleading ideas
+of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of
+Nature.
+
+Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could
+argue her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where
+women under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do
+deliver their minds. She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature
+against the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of
+revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who
+was designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed
+them and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
+Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself
+holy--she had Nature’s logic, Nature’s voice, for self-defence. It was
+eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
+the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
+feel elementally. The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
+dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
+sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals. But the remembrance
+of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
+raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
+struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor
+were one at heart. The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and
+a thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
+abyss.
+
+Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
+governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
+therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a
+woman blindfold to follow his lead. But no; we may be rebels against
+our time and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.
+Nataly’s untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to
+plead for her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of
+a young man of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially
+insurgent-stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come. The
+Nature upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled. Pitiable
+to reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
+and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in
+a tolerating country! How was the young man to be warned? How, under the
+happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family! And such a family, if
+consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money. It
+was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord’s. Humiliation hung
+on the scheme; it struck to scorching in the contemplation of it. And it
+darkened her reading of Victor’s character.
+
+She did not ask for the specification of a ‘good fortune that might
+pass’; wishing to save him from his wonted twists of elusiveness, and
+herself with him from the dread discussion it involved upon one point.
+
+‘The day was pleasant to all, except perhaps poor mademoiselle,’ she
+said.
+
+‘Peridon should have come?’
+
+‘Present or absent, his chances are not brilliant, I fear.’
+
+‘And Pempton and Priscy!’
+
+‘They are growing cooler!’
+
+‘With their grotesque objections to one another’s habits at table!’
+
+‘Can we ever hope to get them over it?’
+
+‘When Priscy drinks Port and Pempton munches beef, Colney says.’
+
+‘I should say, when they feel warmly enough to think little of their
+differences.’
+
+‘Fire smoothes the creases, yes; and fire is what they’re both wanting
+in. Though Priscy has Concert-pathos in her voice:--couldn’t act a bit!
+And Pempton’s ‘cello tones now and then have gone through me--simply
+from his fiddle-bow, I believe. Don’t talk to me of feeling in a couple,
+within reach of one another and sniffing objections.--Good, then, for a
+successful day to-day so far?’
+
+He neared her, wooing her; and she assented, with a franker smile than
+she had worn through the day.
+
+The common burden on their hearts--the simple discussion to come of the
+task of communicating dire actualities to their innocent Nesta--was laid
+aside.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+HAVING ONE HEART
+
+Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
+leaf. Particularly when they love one another and the cause they have
+at heart is common to them in equal measure, the uses of a cordial
+familiarity forbid reserves upon important matters between them, as
+we think; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath the false
+external of submissiveness, which comes of an experience of repeated
+inefficiency to maintain a case in opposition, on the part of the
+loquently weaker of the pair. In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful
+Government needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively; it is more
+serviceable to party than agreeable to country; and where the alliance
+of men and women binds a loving couple, of whom one is a torrent of
+persuasion, their differings are likely to make the other resemble a log
+of the torrent. It is borne along; it dreams of a distant corner of the
+way for a determined stand; it consents to its whirling in anticipation
+of an undated hour when it will no longer be neutral.
+
+There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast, a
+mutually sensitive nerve to protest against intrusion of light or sound.
+The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and
+Victor dumb in their taking of counsel. She divined that his hint had
+encouraged him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her comprehension
+had become tremblingly awake. They shrank, each of them, the more from
+an end drawing closely into view. All subjects glooming off or darkening
+up to it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found themselves
+entering beneath that shadow, conversation passed to an involuntary
+gesture, more explicit with him, significant of the prohibited, though
+not acknowledging it.
+
+All the stronger was it Victor’s purpose, leaping in his fashion to the
+cover of action as an escape from perplexity, to burn and scheme for
+the wedding of their girl--the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her
+protected, secure, with the world warm about her. And he well knew why
+his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
+thunder upon Life) when he dropped his further hints. He chose to call
+it feminine inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a basket
+of marriage-ties for the market on her arm. He knew that she would soon
+have to speak the dark words to their girl; and the idea of any doing
+of it, caught at his throat. Reasonably she dreaded the mother’s task;
+pardonably indeed. But it is for the mother to do, with a girl. He
+deputed it lightly to the mother because he could see himself stating
+the facts to a son. ‘And, my dear boy, you will from this day draw your
+five thousand a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage,
+living at Lakelands or where you will.’
+
+His desire for his girl’s protection by the name of one of our great
+Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact, with the argument, that
+it was preferable for the girl to hear their story during her green
+early youth, while she reposed her beautiful blind faith in the
+discretion of her parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of
+her hand in a husband’s. He feared that her mother required schooling
+to tell the story vindicatingly and proudly, in a manner to distinguish
+instead of degrading or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.
+
+The world would weigh on her confession of the weight of the world on
+her child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of
+her capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he
+to do it! He could not imagine himself encountering the startled,
+tremulous, nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of
+Nesta; he pitied the poor mother. Fancifully directing her to say this
+and that to the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and
+left to wag dead colourless words.
+
+The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
+upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his
+vitals a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and
+scarless, a shining surface, like pure health’s, in the sight of men.
+Nevertheless he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand
+on the prominent places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived
+at the principal point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly
+interesting. This with Victor was the naming of Nesta’s bridal
+endowment. He rushed to it. ‘My girl will have ten thousand a year
+settled on her the day of her marriage.’ Choice of living at Lakelands
+was offered.
+
+It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview. At the
+same time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth. He had
+to conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
+sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would
+rectify such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer. He now came
+frequently of an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a
+Mercadante, honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as
+Fenellan characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat
+like an inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to
+the end of the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar,
+when it rather resembled a constable’s walk along the midnight streets
+into collision with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and
+the man of passion, true to the measure though they were, seeming to
+dissent, almost to wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the
+melody, on to the last movement; which was plainly a question between
+home to the strayed reveller’s quarters or off to the lockup. Victor was
+altogether the younger of the two. But his vehement accompaniment was
+a tutorship; Mr. Sowerby improved; it was admitted by Nesta and
+mademoiselle that he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that
+feeling was wanted. Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would
+not be delaying; the interview, dramatized by the father of the young
+bud of womanhood, would be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands
+calculable, for Nataly’s comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor
+earldom. Gossip flies to a wider circle round the members of a great
+titled family, is inaudible; or no longer the diptherian whisper the
+commonalty hear of the commonalty: and so we see the social uses of our
+aristocracy survive. We do not want the shield of any family; it is the
+situation that wants it; Nataly ought to be awake to the fact. One blow
+and we have silenced our enemy: Nesta’s wedding-day has relieved her
+parents.
+
+Victor’s thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him
+to suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young
+lady’s fortune. He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter
+Nataly’s conception of him. He talked of City affairs at table, as it
+had been his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note
+on mines, which have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent,
+casting a certain spell upon the mercantile understanding. ‘Fredi’s
+diamonds from her own mine, or what once was--and she still reserves a
+share,’ were to be shown to Mr. Sowerby.
+
+Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying avidity at the
+flourish of the bait, however it might be affecting him; and she fancied
+that he did laboriously, in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound
+for harmony between them, previous to a wooing. She was a closer reader
+of social character than Victor; from refraining to run on the broad
+lines which are but faintly illustrative of the individual one in
+being common to all--unless we have hit by chance on an example of the
+downright in roguery or folly or simple goodness. Mr. Sowerby’g bearing
+to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds. His next visit
+showed him livelier in courtliness, brighter, fresher; but that was
+always his way at the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections
+on the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and the labours
+of the new study of the maiden ensued again in due course to deaden him.
+
+Gentleman he was. In the recognition of his quality as a man of
+principle and breeding, Nataly was condemned by thoughts of Nesta’s
+future to question whether word or act of hers should, if inclination
+on both sides existed, stand between her girl and a true gentleman.
+She counselled herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be
+passive; and so doing, she more acutely than Victor--save in his chance
+flashes--discerned the twist of her very nature caused by their false
+position. And her panacea for ills, the lost little cottage, would not
+have averted it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to
+name a man of breeding, honour, station, for Nesta’s husband. Perhaps in
+the cottage, choosing at leisure, her consent to see the brilliant young
+creature tied to the best of dull men would have been unready, without
+the girl to push it. For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably her pupil in
+liveliness; he took the second part, as it is painful for a woman
+with the old-fashioned ideas upon the leading of the sexes to behold;
+resembling in his look the deaf, who constantly require to have an
+observation repeated; resembling the most intelligent of animals, which
+we do not name, and we reprove ourselves for seeing likeness.
+
+Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
+much to fear upon the day of the explanation to him. Some gain is there.
+Shameful thought! Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
+indications testifying to the sterling substance in young Mr. Sowerby,
+such as a mother would pray for her son-in-law to possess. She
+discovered herself feeling as the burdened mother, not providently for
+her girl, in the choice of a mate. The perception was clear, and not the
+less did she continue working at the embroidery of Mr. Sowerby on the
+basis of his excellent moral foundations, all the while hoping, praying,
+that he might not be lured on to the proposal for Nesta. But her
+subservience to the power of the persuasive will in Victor--which was
+like the rush of a conflagration--compelled her to think realizingly of
+any scheme he allowed her darkly to read.
+
+Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber
+before flame. Colney Durance had done her the mischief we take from the
+pessimist when we are overweighted: in darkening the vision of external
+aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered. Victor
+could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though
+the heart protested. His first conquest of her was in her blood, to
+weaken a spirit of resistance. For the precedent of submission is a
+charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them.
+Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and
+she had her moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting
+consciousness of material support in the thought, that the day was
+not present, was possibly distant, might never arrive. Would Victor’s
+release come sooner? And that was a prospect bearing resemblance to
+hopes of the cure of a malady through a sharp operation.
+
+These were matters going on behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
+and with him at times almost as dominant, as the spiritual in memory,
+when flesh has left but its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten;
+and all their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the expeditions
+to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of
+friends created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines,
+exhibitions of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable
+ever to mankind as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the
+envious!--in fine, whatsoever can entertain or affect the most social
+of couples, domestically without a care to appearance. And so far they
+partially--dramatically--deceived themselves by imposing on the world
+while they talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from a
+flowing purse is a cheerful occupation; also a City issuing out of
+hospital, like this poor City of London, inspires good citizens to
+healthy activity. But the silence upon what they were most bent on, had
+the sinister effect upon Victor, of obscuring his mental hold of the
+beloved woman, drifting her away from him. In communicating Fenellan’s
+news through the lawyer Carling of Mrs. Burman’s intentions, he was
+aware that there was an obstacle to his being huggingly genial,
+even candidly genial with her, until he could deal out further
+news, corroborative and consecutive, to show the action of things as
+progressive. Fenellan had sunk into his usual apathy:--and might plead
+the impossibility of his moving faster than the woman professing to
+transform herself into, beneficence out of malignity;--one could
+hear him saying the words! Victor had not seen him since last Concert
+evening, and he deemed it as well to hear the words Fenellan’s mouth
+had to say. He called at an early hour of the Westward tidal flow at the
+Insurance Office looking over the stormy square of the first of Seamen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+
+After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend’s
+contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for
+as long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
+duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
+Fenellan waited for him to lead.
+
+‘Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?’
+
+‘I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.’
+
+Emptiness was in the reply.
+
+Victor curbed himself and said: ‘By the way, you’re not likely to have
+dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
+eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the
+Board of my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at Wrensham. By
+the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her.
+You said of little Mabsy--“Here she comes into the room all pink and
+white, like a daisy.” She’s the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at
+that age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!’
+
+‘Well, no; it’s a chemist’s shop, if that helps us on,’ said Fenellan,
+settling to a new posture in his chair. ‘She’s there of an afternoon for
+hours.’
+
+‘You mean it’s she?’
+
+‘The lady. I ‘ll tell you. I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
+lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret. He’s a
+bit of a “Mackenzie Man,” as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a
+Man of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted
+a lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it’s an exposition
+of positive human nature when they’ve pulled down our noses to the worst
+parts--if there’s a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
+dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you’re
+fearfully credible! You don’t read that olfactory literature. However,
+friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week
+the lady, he says, drives to her chemist’s, and there she sits in the
+shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
+looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
+Carling’s picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
+striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
+shade over her forehead. Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders
+of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
+of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she ‘ll try
+it herself. It’s a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent’s Park
+pretty well every day.’
+
+‘Ha! Regent’s Park!’ exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
+district and the number of the house, dismal to him. London buried
+the woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London. ‘A
+chemist’s shop! She sits there?’
+
+‘Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.’
+
+‘She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say? And
+every day! under a green shade?’
+
+‘Dear fellow, don’t be suggesting ballads; we’ll go now,’ said Fenellan.
+‘It ‘s true it’s like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.’
+
+He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
+office.
+
+‘You’ve done nothing?’ Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
+
+‘Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.’
+
+‘Where did you hear?’
+
+‘Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady’s chemists. I
+called the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board
+Meeting.’
+
+‘The Themison?’
+
+‘The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much
+in request for it.’
+
+‘There’s one of your echoes of Colney!’ Victor cried. ‘One gets dead
+sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors. They don’t kill, you know
+very well. It ‘s not to their interest to kill. They may take the relish
+out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient
+living!’
+
+Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through
+his friend.
+
+‘The City’s mending; it’s not the weary widow woman of the day when we
+capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,’ he said, as they trod
+the pavement. ‘Funny people, the English! They give you all the primeing
+possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the
+exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you’re
+marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no philosophical
+appreciation of human nature.’
+
+‘We pass the shop?’ Victor interrupted him.
+
+‘You’re in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative
+dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
+agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it’s an
+endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney
+seems right now and then: they ‘re the offspring of pirates, and they
+‘ve got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
+quarrelling everlastingly over the booty. I ‘d have band-music here for
+a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
+East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
+too. But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
+London of ours, it ‘s only too sadly true that the people are in the
+first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now
+you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.’
+
+Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
+swelled it, ahemming. ‘That shop?’ said he. And presently: ‘Fenellan,
+I’m not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
+of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked
+home up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
+identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
+forgotten Nataly’s favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I’m
+stating a fact--I distinctly--I ‘m sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
+back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a
+foot backward to keep your equilibrium.’
+
+So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
+for the colouring of history.
+
+He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
+amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
+being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
+tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder’s
+experience.
+
+Fenellan smiled indulgently. ‘Queer things happen. I recollect reading
+in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where
+he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
+midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight
+of the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice,
+when at his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
+undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
+not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted
+twice; and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and
+he jumped up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them
+providentially over the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into
+the boat awaiting them, and had them safe on and polished the day he
+preached the sermon of gratitude for the special deliverance. There was
+a Warning! and it might well be called, as he called it, from within.
+We’re cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help
+yourself in a calamity, or you’ll not stand in boots at your next
+Sermon, contrasting with the burnt. That sounds like the moral.’
+
+‘She could have seen me,’ Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
+idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.
+
+‘Scarcely likely. I’m told she sits looking on her lap, under the
+beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
+mixture that strikes her fancy. It’s possible to do more suicidal things
+than sit the afternoons in a chemist’s shop and see poor creatures get
+their different passports to Orcus.’
+
+Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
+chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have
+seen his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all
+seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
+The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day’s
+immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have
+her choice of a central chemist’s shop, where she could feed a ghastly
+imagination on the various recipes... and while it would have been so
+much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!
+
+He muttered: ‘Diseases--drugs!’
+
+Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
+woman going.
+
+‘And deadly spite.’ That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
+conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.
+
+In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
+the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.
+
+A little further on, he said: ‘Poor soul!’ He confessed to himself, that
+latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous
+in thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
+tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
+Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
+him down to humanity’s lowest.
+
+But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.
+
+Her station in the chemist’s shop he passed almost daily, appeared to
+him as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a
+short drive from the house in Regent’s Park; but having shaken-off
+that house, he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman
+certainly had a power.
+
+He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for
+winning men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of
+his energies: men and, individually, women. Individually, the women were
+to be counted on as well; warm supporters.
+
+It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
+collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them. Glancing at
+congregated women, he had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
+judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective
+woman: that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of
+civilized life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the
+tolerable, the legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an
+aspect of the stand against him.
+
+Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
+not to be subdued? And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
+Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
+Nataly!
+
+Victor’s novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
+to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not
+many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
+index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure
+of value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.
+The passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to
+sit beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a
+henbane-visage!--had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the
+abstract verity: and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world
+to the practical mind. But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of
+sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a
+source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.
+
+In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school
+of its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums
+done on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip
+of the creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those
+who are guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth,
+they have made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in
+soul; and the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete
+burden is undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him
+diminishing, until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to
+humanity’s preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful
+outline on our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of
+things, he must from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive
+nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it
+again. There is a repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the
+traceing to springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out
+of the wood.
+
+Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every
+debt with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt
+apologies for a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience
+for the smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish
+to say a friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge,
+softened his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.
+Although this man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature
+which drives to unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen
+at its beating after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for
+the reverse of lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.
+So social a man could not otherwise incline. But when it came to the
+examination of accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of
+physical revulsion, loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out
+of Court. To men, it was impossible for him to speak the torments of
+those days of the monstrous alliance. The heavens were cognizant. He
+pleaded his case in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by
+wealth, attracted, besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs. Burman,
+when roused to jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of
+his admiration of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless
+fair woman living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the
+corpse and shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her
+breath about him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!
+
+He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the verdict was
+heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder. It was the sound, as
+when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we
+expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
+public?--Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours at a word--or at
+least a word of invitation. Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
+tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
+And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the
+poor racked wretch who so much as remembers them! She is the enemy of
+Nature.--Tell us how? She is the slave of existing conventions.--And
+from what cause? She is the artificial production of a state that exalts
+her so long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.
+
+Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with
+her arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
+worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.
+
+He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
+the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.
+
+What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
+situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
+it. He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
+imagination expired.
+
+But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then? It was the
+succour needed. Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
+Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
+might begin.
+
+The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly. It
+sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly’s want of common adventurous
+daring. She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
+from a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
+preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it
+was unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a
+strain and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.
+
+These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
+twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
+independent of the player’s cunning hand. He would have said, that he
+was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make
+him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him
+to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
+invoked. But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
+in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes. Men call
+on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of
+their rhetoric. They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not,
+as women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an effort
+at epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.
+
+An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.
+
+‘How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians! Well, now, the Germans
+have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
+emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
+has done. He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod’s Romeo
+et Juliette--and we don’t gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for
+the melody gone; think of the little shepherd’s pipeing in Mireille; and
+there’s another in Sapho-delicious. I held out against Wagner as long as
+I could. The Italians don’t much more than Wagnerize in exchange for
+the loss of melody. They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
+Campagnole. The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
+master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
+barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren’t you seduced by
+cadences? Never mind Wagner’s tap of his paedagogue’s baton--a cadence
+catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There’s a march
+in Verdi’s Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I’m in military step when
+I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi takes
+little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us old
+ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula, with
+me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
+you like--showing all that’s noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
+describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for
+a year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little
+Mabsy; but she’ll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to
+think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
+Meistersinger.’
+
+Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
+the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
+drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
+disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the
+yoke of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist’s
+shop; save that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the
+picture; she threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him
+through his nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need
+for it; singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour
+abreast with Armandine’s kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of
+sherry and bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a shower
+of black-balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on
+a certain past day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a
+wine-merchant’s office, where he was unknown, and stating his wish for
+bitters and dry sherry, presently received the glass, drank, nodded
+to the administering clerk, named the person whom he had obliged and
+refreshed, and passed out, remarking to Fenellan: ‘Colney on Clubs! he’s
+right; they’re the mediaeval in modern times, our Baron’s castles, minus
+the Baron; dead against public life and social duties. Business excuses
+my City Clubs; but I shall take my name off my Club up West.’
+
+‘More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for
+the services,’ Fenellan said. ‘Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and
+Grangousier playing Divinity behind the veil. Well, they’re social.’
+
+‘Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend. However--and
+the monastery had a bell for the wanderer! Say, I’m penniless or
+poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
+feel, these palaces--if we’re Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews are
+uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact....’
+
+He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
+of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.
+
+Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject. He
+was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.
+
+The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
+from his ineffectual chase. He had nought to deliver; on the contrary,
+a meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
+the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.
+
+He snatched at the name of Themison.
+
+With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to
+be made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.
+
+Themison, then: he leaned on Themison. The woman’s doctor should have an
+influence approaching to authority with her.
+
+Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
+Fenellan: let Banks beware.
+
+Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head. ‘Feel the wind?’
+he said.
+
+Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
+times he had: ‘No: don’t be alarmed; I feel the devil. If one has wealth
+and a desperate wish, he will speak. All he does, is to make me more
+charitable to those who give way to him. I believe in a devil.’
+
+‘Horns and tail?’
+
+‘Bait and hook.’
+
+‘I haven’t wealth, and I wish only for dinner,’ Fenellan said.
+
+‘You know that Armandine is never two minutes late. By the way, you
+haven’t wealth--you have me.’
+
+‘And I thank God for you!’ said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
+having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+
+A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
+Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner. But the
+surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at
+his watch, were not so profound as Fenellan’s, on finding himself
+exchangeing the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison.
+His friend’s rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was
+known: Fenellan’s wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished
+him again, as that he should be called upon again to wonder at his
+astonishment. He did; and he observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly:
+aided by dropping remarks. Before the evening was over, he gathered
+enough of the facts, and had to speculate only on the designs. Dr.
+Themison had received a visit from the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor
+concerning her state of health. At an interview with the lady, laughter
+greeted him; he was confused by her denial of the imputation of a single
+ailment: but she, to recompose him, let it be understood, that she was
+anxious about her husband’s condition, he being certainly overworked;
+and the husband’s visit passed for a device on the part of the wife. She
+admitted a willingness to try a change of air, if it was deemed good
+for her husband. Change of air was prescribed to each for both. ‘Why not
+drive to Paris?’ the doctor said, and Victor was taken with the phrase.
+
+He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by
+the sea, on the South coast. Which of her maladies might be in the
+ascendant, he did not know. He knew little. He fancied that Dr. Themison
+was unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
+Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
+private affairs. What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison? He
+treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could
+be expected to impose upon her conduct. Fenellan appreciated his own
+discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may
+be put, and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective
+reflection to ensue, that he had not done anything. It disposed him
+to think a happy passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.
+We should let Fortune perform her part at the wheel in working out her
+ends, should we not?--for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are
+thwarting her if we stretch out a hand. And with the range of enjoyments
+possessed by Victor, why this unceasing restlessness? Why, when we are
+not near drowning, catch at apparent straws, which may be instruments
+having sharp edges? Themison, as Mrs. Burman’s medical man, might tell
+the lady tales that would irritate her bag of venom.
+
+Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast
+over his negligent hedonism by Victor’s boiling pressure, drove him
+into the seat of judgement. As a consequence, he was rather a dull
+table-guest in the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked
+to anticipate high entertainment from him. He did nothing to bridge the
+crevasse and warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal
+intentionally to draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of
+one fair member of a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed
+establishment of our chain-mail marriage-tie. An anecdote of immediate
+diversion was wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating
+upon whether the doctor knew of a cupboard locked. So that Dr. Themison
+was carried on by Lady Grace Halley’s humourous enthusiasm for the
+subject to dilate and discuss and specify, all in the irony of a
+judicial leaning to the side of the single-minded social adventurers,
+under an assumed accord with his audience; concluding: ‘So there’s an
+end of Divorce.’
+
+‘By the trick of multiplication,’ Fenellan, now reassured, was content
+to say. And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
+carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
+women being present.
+
+Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by
+Mr. Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue. As regarded her
+personal feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about
+her to keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one
+of its culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from
+an infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
+mother’s lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind’s pudency
+in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much. Here
+was the mother’s dilemma: her girl--Victor’s girl, as she had to think
+in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
+seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off
+the table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific
+heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful
+healthiness brought her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice
+received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a
+seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal
+evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here
+and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in
+great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of
+anguish, how witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent
+creature shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a
+flameful soul, as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very
+princeliest of men in gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.
+And the provident mother knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his
+wife.
+
+Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
+imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
+perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
+nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
+to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
+before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
+her father’s child.
+
+At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
+so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
+maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
+simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
+partook of the French mother, Nesta’s Arcadian independence likened her
+somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
+high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
+carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
+set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
+various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
+praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
+tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
+of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly
+nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
+sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast
+of Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
+ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful
+serenader, that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their
+performances, and knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious
+show; a sciential rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern
+circles as Eve’s own old deuce from Eden’s garden whereupon, opportunity
+inviting, both the fool and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of
+insular eulogy, and the sham one, are in a perilous pass.
+
+Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly
+amid a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings;
+when vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming
+its existence with tableau and trumpet. Nataly encountered her girl’s
+questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy. The questions had soon
+ceased. Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to
+be learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only
+will keep the little out. Only stupidity will suppose that it can be
+done for the livelier young. English mothers forethoughtful for their
+girls, have to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble
+Old England, that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things,
+which can be had but in semblance under the conditions allowed by
+laziness to subsist, and so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to
+worship in the concrete an hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract. Nataly
+could smuggle or confiscate here and there a newspaper; she could not
+interdict or withhold every one of them, from a girl ardent to be in
+the race on all topics of popular interest: and the newspapers are
+occasionally naked savages; the streets are imperfectly garmented even
+by day; and we have our stumbling social anecdotist, our spot-mouthed
+young man, our eminently silly woman; our slippery one; our slimy one,
+the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary the maid and the footman
+William. A vigilant mother has to contend with these and the like in an
+increasing degree. How best?
+
+There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated. The girl’s
+intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it. Since, as he argued,
+we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
+strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
+baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
+have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
+collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
+youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
+time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
+the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.
+
+Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
+hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences. Besides he was a
+bachelor; therefore but a theorist. And his illustrations of his
+theory were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to
+consume, in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The
+satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly
+had excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
+
+One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
+that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
+what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
+the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with
+them then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it
+seemed painfully possible to be sowing in the girl’s mind something
+like the reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a
+rebelliousness partly or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly’s chief
+and her appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
+exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
+of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
+and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
+good promise in the moral department. She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
+view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
+discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
+forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they
+see, to, promise a future stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley
+Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
+more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
+naughtiness on earth.
+
+Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of
+the young of the sex. Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome
+for girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
+prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is
+a fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic
+innocence is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current
+human life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in
+the newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless
+we cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when
+their adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom,
+is harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
+English girls! He was one of the many men to whose minds women come
+in pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves. Like his
+numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
+at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
+dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
+exclaimed. He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father’s
+running counter to love. Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
+for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants. But
+love was unknown to the girl.
+
+Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor’s
+traditional hospitality. Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
+intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: ‘Lady
+Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
+myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
+old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
+of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital! Just
+three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes. It’s the drive
+we want. Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour
+at night and we’re sure of sleep.’ It had a sweet simple air, befitting
+him; as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children. For
+travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of
+the child’s inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
+ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt. That is
+the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
+and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily
+chase. Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival.
+She enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased
+to show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands. Her only regret was
+on account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because
+of happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that
+his bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
+Continent. Fenellan reported Colney to be ‘busy in the act of distilling
+one of his Prussic acid essays.’ Fenellan would have jumped to go. He
+informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
+at periods ‘fearfully necrological! Inexplicably, he was not invited.
+Did it mean, that he was growing dull? He looked inside instead of out,
+and lost the clue.
+
+His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
+have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well
+as Colney been excluded. Two carriages and a cab conveyed the
+excursionists, as they merrily called themselves, to the terminus.
+They were Victor’s guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of
+the nipper reckonings which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss.
+Fenellan’s enviousness drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter
+jumped to the seat beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles
+and Mr. Sowerby facing them. Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind,
+heard Nesta’s laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming
+little girls, that laugh at nothings. She questioned Fenellan.
+
+‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
+musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.’
+
+She smiled: ‘And who are in the cab?’
+
+‘Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin. Those two
+would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the
+way to the station. Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through
+the body. They’re a fabulous couple.’
+
+Victor cut him short. ‘I deny that those two are absurd.’
+
+‘And Catkin’s toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.’
+
+Nataly strongly denied it. Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
+picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
+withering breath they dreaded.
+
+Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
+fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with
+a pitchfork’s exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
+meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles
+in the principles of each. The pair were offending the amatory corner in
+the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
+protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities,
+except by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of
+Miss Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
+Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge. She wondered
+at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
+repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
+those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
+now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
+Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
+are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
+tribulation-bell. Fenellan’s graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
+seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
+emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the
+one most wretched light is Inebriation’s nose; and of the vegetarian
+violoncello’s horror at his vision of the long procession of the
+flocks and herds into his lady’s melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and
+delighted her antipathy. She was amused to transports at the station, on
+hearing Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: ‘No, I carry no
+instrument.’ The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
+forgotten when it sounded.
+
+Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
+under Victor’s ear: ‘Where are those two?’
+
+‘Bid me select the couple,’ said he.
+
+She rejoined: ‘Silly man’; and sleepily gave him her hand for good
+night, and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued
+junction by saying more than he intended: ‘If they come to an
+understanding!’
+
+‘Plain enough on one side.’
+
+‘You think it suitable?’
+
+‘Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.’ ‘This is really
+my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.’
+
+‘Go on.’
+
+‘How?’
+
+‘Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic.’
+
+‘I can hate.’
+
+‘Not me?’
+
+Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
+and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
+or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
+phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a
+never so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots
+within us both straight and far and round the corners. There you have
+Nature, if you want her naked in her elements, for a text. He loved his
+Nataly truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked
+about at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the
+chance warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so
+remarkably surcharging him. But it was without kindling. The lady, the
+much cooler person, did nurse a bit of flame. She had a whimsical liking
+for the man who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and
+it became a fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his
+adventurous enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.
+Women who dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk
+his ball-room trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to
+intoxicate them.
+
+For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies. Nataly lay
+in the cabin. She used to be where Lady Grace was lying. A sort of
+pleadable, transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old
+service induced him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer’s
+pillow, and fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his
+head to the soft mouth murmuring thanks. The women who can dare the nuit
+blanche, and under stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their
+thirtieth, are rare; they are precious. Nataly nevertheless was approved
+for guarding her throat from the nightwind. And a softer southerly
+breath never crossed Channel! The very breeze he had wished for! Luck
+was with him.
+
+Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise. Mr. Sowerby in
+passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
+beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
+not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary. Once
+he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
+French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass
+at the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
+espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native
+land, it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was
+very beautiful.
+
+‘He speaks grammatical French,’ Nesta commented on his achievement. ‘He
+contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,’ mademoiselle rejoined.
+
+Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
+inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be near these ladies, and
+he passed them but once. His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
+notorious. Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
+demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the
+man who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
+them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
+can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales. And say, that she
+is uprooted;--he does but roll a log. Mr. Peridon’s efforts to perfect
+himself in the French tongue touched her.
+
+A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
+the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
+addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
+greying. Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
+the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.
+The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
+interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
+grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
+refuge on any far fisher-sail.
+
+Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed. The
+girl’s cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
+They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was
+a languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
+Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
+were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
+securest of slumbers.
+
+Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
+the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
+to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes. He was near; and
+quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him. Her look was grave,
+straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis
+for penetration. He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
+bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if
+that young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof. Man could not be
+more guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
+vexation, he execrated tobacco. And ask not why, where reason never was.
+
+Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
+Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
+silvery French chimes.
+
+Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
+they had been observing every variation in it. He spoke happily of
+the pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of
+the excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night;
+the prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of
+speculation--apparently a sourness that did not exist. Nesta had a
+singular notion, coming of a girl’s mingled observation and intuition,
+that the impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike
+him till late. Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she
+remembered to have noticed the same in many small things. And it was a
+pointed perception.
+
+Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
+sunlight over the waters. Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
+the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
+her eyes like a string of bubbles in ascent. ‘Victor, Victor, it seems
+only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
+and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
+Dear French people! I share your love for France.’
+
+‘Home of our holidays!--the “drives”; and they may be the happiest.
+And fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
+stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.’
+
+Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: ‘Sir
+Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands! She understood that Lady
+Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of
+brine to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
+evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
+encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands. He told Sir
+Rodwell the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the
+hotel the impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand
+the doctor’s certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to
+appear, and waved it, within a step of suicide. ‘Well, to be brief, my
+wife--“noble dame Anglaise,” as the man announced her on the Concert
+platform, undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure
+contralto voice, as you will say; with the result that there was
+a perfect tumult of enthusiasm. Next day, the waiters of the hotel
+presented her with a bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central
+violets. It was in the Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d’outre
+Manche--I think that was it?’ he asked Nataly.
+
+‘I forget,’ said she.
+
+He glanced at her: a cloud had risen. He rallied her, spoke of the old
+Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
+imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude. She nodded
+an excellent artificial brightness.
+
+And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
+Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
+entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
+is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into
+rock-caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and
+will be left to emptiness again. Nataly had the intimation visiting
+us when, in a decline of physical power, the mind’s ready vivacity to
+conjure illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force
+impelling her against it, and no hope of deviation. And this is the
+featureless thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to
+throw them into it to look at us.
+
+Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
+from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and
+hardly less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters,
+the skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from
+under the globe of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. A PATRIOT ABROAD
+
+Nine days after his master’s departure, Daniel Skepsey, a man of some
+renown of late, as a subject of reports and comments in the newspapers,
+obtained a passport, for the identification, if need were, of his
+missing or misapprehended person in a foreign country, of the language
+of which three unpronounceable words were knocking about his head to
+render the thought of the passport a staff of safety; and on the morning
+that followed he was at speed through Normandy, to meet his master
+rounding homeward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is
+written, by reason of the custom of the good people of the country, with
+whom we would fain live on neighbourly terms:--yes, and they had proof
+of it, not so very many years back, when they were enduring the worst
+which can befall us--though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the
+writing of the place of his destination large on a card, and the wording
+of the French sound beside it, besides the jotting down of trains and
+the station for the change of railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the
+active form of our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon
+them when they were prostrate and unable to resist!
+
+A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had recent cause to
+know, but often exceedingly dark; not so patriotic as desireable, it
+was to be feared; and yet, strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent
+things on the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped--he
+was emphatic in saying he hoped--we should be regenerated. He must have
+meant, that boxing--on a grand scale would contribute to it. He said,
+that a blow now and then was wholesome for us all. He recommended a
+monthly private whipping for old gentlemen who decline the use of the
+gloves, to disperse their humours; not excluding Judges and Magistrates:
+he could hardly be in earnest. He spoke in a clergyman’s voice, and said
+it would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to their souls:
+he seemed to mean it. He said, that old gentlemen were bottled vapours,
+and it was good for them to uncork them periodically. He said, they
+should be excused half the strokes if they danced nightly--they resented
+motion. He seemed sadly wanting in veneration.
+
+But he might not positively intend what he said. Skepsey could overlook
+everything he said, except the girding at England. For where is a braver
+people, notwithstanding appearances! Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
+bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt; worthy, with a little
+public encouragement, to rank beside their grandfathers of the Ring,
+in the brilliant times when royalty and nobility countenanced the manly
+art, our nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy
+division of classes. He still trusted to convince Mr. Durance, by means
+of argument and happy instances, historical and immediate, that the
+English may justly consider themselves the elect of nations, for
+reasons better than their accumulation of the piles of gold-better than
+‘usurers’ reasons,’ as Mr. Durance called them. Much that Mr. Durance
+had said at intervals was, although remembered almost to the letter of
+the phrase, beyond his comprehension, and he put it aside, with penitent
+blinking at his deficiency.
+
+All the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues around him,
+and a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks
+in a torrent. Generally the men slouched when they were not running. At
+Dieppe he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler
+on the legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a
+patriotic vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he
+had read chapters of Military History. He sat eyeing the front row of
+figures in his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we
+might, heaven designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until
+he gazed on Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had
+informed him of the city on the river, that it must be the very city
+of Rouen, not so many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a
+foreign foe. Strong pity laid hold of Skepsey. He fortified the heights
+for defence, but saw at a glance that it was the city for modern
+artillery to command, crush and enter. He lost idea of these afflicted
+people as foes, merely complaining of their attacks on England, and
+their menaces in their Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain
+views of the country to be marched over on the road by this route to
+Paris, for the dictation of terms of peace at the gates of the French
+capital, sparing them the shameful entry; and this after the rout of
+their attempt at an invasion of the Island!
+
+A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes. Skepsey
+handed a card from his pocket. The man perused it, and crying: ‘Dreux?’
+waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen
+as not the place, not at all, totally other. Thus we are taught, that
+a foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
+defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
+commonest man he meets. Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew
+from his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
+necessities on a line of march. The roads to Great Britain’s metropolis,
+and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on
+London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that,
+with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a
+belligerent return for it. Only we pray to be let live peacefully.
+
+Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us,
+conducts an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the
+streets of Rouen, after a short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in
+the identification of coins; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.
+
+And why be dealing wounds and death? It is a more blessed thing to keep
+the Commandments. But how is it possible to keep the Commandments if you
+have a vexatious wife?
+
+Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the hereditary energy in his
+crying and coughing; and it was owing, he could plead, to her habits
+and her tongue, that he sometimes, that he might avoid the doing of
+worse--for she wanted correction and was improved by it--courted the
+excitement of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on publicans’
+first floors. He could have told the magistrates so, in part apology for
+the circumstances dragging him the other day, so recently, before his
+Worship; and he might have told it, if he had not remembered Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan’s words about treating women chivalrously which was
+interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them, when called upon to do
+it, but never exposing them only, if allowed to account for the
+circumstances pushing us into the newspapers, we should not present so
+guilty a look before the public.
+
+Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to serve his master,
+there is likewise question: whether is he, while receiving reproof
+and punishment for excess of zeal in the service of his master, not to
+mention the welfare of the country, morally--without establishing it as
+a principle--exonerated? Miss Graves might be asked save that one would
+not voluntarily trouble a lady on such subjects. But supposing, says the
+opposing counsel, now at work in Skepsey’s conscience, supposing this
+act, for which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved and
+punished, to be agreeable to you, how then? We answer, supposing it--and
+we take uncomplainingly the magistrate’s reproof and punishment--morally
+justified can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, although
+we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the public?
+
+His master and the dear ladies would hear of it; perhaps they knew of it
+now; with them would rest the settlement of the distressing inquiry. The
+ladies would be shocked ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness,
+not even with the gloves:--and knowing, as they must, that our practise
+of the manly art is for their protection.
+
+Skepsey’s grievous prospect of the hour to come under judgement of a sex
+that was ever a riddle unread, clouded him on the approach to Dreux. He
+studied the country and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great
+military operations. Mr. Durance had spoken of big battles round about
+the town of Dreux; also of a wonderful Mausoleum there, not equally
+interesting. The little man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on
+crimson dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the sound
+of the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.
+
+He handed his card to the station-master. A glance, and the latter
+signalled to a porter, saying: ‘Paradis’; and the porter laid hold of
+Skepsey’s bag. Skepsey’s grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled.
+Skepsey heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench. He wrenched back
+with vigour, and in his own tongue exclaimed, that he held to the bag
+because his master’s letters were in the bag, all the way from England.
+For a minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will: the porter
+appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look of cooled steel. Then the
+Frenchman, requiring to shrug, gave way to the Englishman’s eccentric
+obstinacy, and signified that he was his guide. Quite so, and Skepsey
+showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried his bag. But
+with the remembrance of the kindly serviceable man at Rouen, he sought
+to convey to the porter, that the terms of their association were
+cordial. A waving of the right hand to the heavens ratified the
+treaty on the French side. Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with
+across-Channel vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and
+back, pleasantly beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under
+the Mausoleum heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin
+current; but the Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped
+him on the shoulder, and sang him a quatrain. Skepsey had in politeness
+to stand listening, and blinking, plunged in the contrition of
+ignorance, eclipsed. He took it to signify something to the effect,
+that money should not pass between friends. It was the amatory farewell
+address of Henri IV. to his Charmante Gabrielle; and with
+
+            ‘Perce de mille lords,
+             L’honneur m’appelle
+             Au champ de Mars,’
+
+the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized for his
+enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had captured his heart.
+
+Skepsey’s card was taken in the passage of the hotel. A clean-capped
+maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen of these people, preceded
+him at quick march to an upper chamber. When he descended, bag in hand,
+she flung open the salon-door of a table d’hote, where a goodly number
+were dining and chattering; waiters drew him along to the section
+occupied by his master’s party. A chair had been kept vacant for him;
+his master waved a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck
+the bag in front of a guardian foot, growing happy. He could fancy they
+had not seen the English newspapers. And his next observation of the
+table showed him wrecked and lost: Miss Nesta’s face was the oval of
+a woeful O at his wild behaviour in England during their absence. She
+smiled. Skepsey had nevertheless to consume his food--excellent,
+very tasty soup-with the sour sauce of the thought that he must be
+tongue-tied in his defence for the time of the dinner.
+
+‘No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,’ said Nesta.
+
+He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he was doing so, and
+he choked.
+
+His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes earlier. Skepsey
+spoke through a cough of long delays at stations. The Rev. Septimus
+Barmby, officially peacemaker, sounded the consequent excuse for a
+belated comer. It was final; such is the power of sound. Looks were
+cast from the French section of the table at the owner of the prodigious
+organ. Some of the younger men, intent on the charms of Albion’s
+daughters, expressed in a sign and a word or two alarm at what might be
+beneath the flooring: and ‘Pas encore Lui!’ and ‘Son avant-courrier!’
+and other flies of speech passed on a whiff, under politest of cover,
+not to give offence. But prodigies, claim attention.
+
+Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say it was good,
+without specifying a dish, because a selection of this or that would
+have seemed to italicize, and commit, them, in the presence of ladies,
+to a notice of the matter of-course, beneath us, or the confession of
+a low sensual enjoyment; until Lady Grace Halley named the particular
+dressing of a tete de veau approvingly to Victor; and he stating, that
+he had offered a suggestion for the menu of the day, Nataly exclaimed,
+that she had suspected it: upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu,
+Mr. Barmby, Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right
+after-dinner ring in Victor’s ears, thanks to the woman of the world
+who had travelled round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver
+themselves heartily. One tap, and they are free. That is, in the moments
+after dinner, when nature is at the gates with them. Only, it must be a
+lady and a prevailing lady to give the tap. They need (our English) and
+will for the ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.
+
+Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master’s head and
+followed him.
+
+He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master’s
+perusal of letters. Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled;
+so Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
+adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell. The journey,
+pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely
+blank at the termination. French people had been very kind; he could not
+say more. But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only
+he could subordinate it to narrative. The little man did not know, that
+time was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a
+true story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on
+the way for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage
+of incidents at the call for them. Things had happened, numbers of
+interesting minor things, but they all slipped as water through the
+fingers; and he being of the band of honest creatures who will
+not accept a lift from fiction, drearily he sat before the ladies,
+confessing to an emptiness he was far from feeling.
+
+Nesta professed excessive disappointment. ‘Now, if it had been in
+England, Skips!’ she said, under her mother’s gentle gloom of brows.
+
+He made show of melancholy submission.
+
+‘There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,’ Nataly said.
+
+And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
+that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
+for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means! He
+declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them,
+but for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their
+kind aid in obtaining his master’s forgiveness. Mr. Durance had very
+considerately promised to intercede. Skepsey dropped a hint or two of
+his naughty proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to
+the manly art would not permit of warmth.
+
+Nesta said: ‘Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
+Paris.’
+
+He sighed. ‘Ladies can look on at fencing! foils and masks! Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French are our masters at
+it.’ He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.
+
+‘You box, M. Skepsey!’ she said.
+
+His melancholy increased: ‘Much discouragement from Government, Society!
+If ladies... but I do not venture. They are not against Games. But
+these are not a protection... to them, when needed; to the country.
+The country seems asleep to its position. Mr. Durance has remarked on
+it:--though I would not always quote Mr. Durance... indeed, he says,
+that England has invested an Old Maid’s All in the Millennium, and is
+ruined if it delays to come. “Old Maid,” I do not see. I do not--if
+I may presume to speak of myself in the same breath with so clever
+a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance in everything. But the
+chest-measurement of recruits, the stature of the men enlisted, prove
+that we are losing the nursery of our soldiers.’
+
+‘We are taking them out of the nursery, Skips, if you ‘re for quoting
+Captain Dartrey,’ said Nesta. ‘We’ll never haul down our flag, though,
+while we have him!’
+
+‘Ah! Captain Dartrey!’ Skepsey was refreshed by the invocation of the
+name.
+
+A summons to his master’s presence cut short something he was beginning
+to say about Captain Dartrey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY’S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+NATALY
+
+His master opened on the bristling business.
+
+‘What’s this, of your name in the papers, your appearing before a
+magistrate, and a fine? Tell the tale shortly.’
+
+Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence the modest form
+of the two hands at rolling play and the head deferentially sidecast.
+But knowing that he had gratified his personal tastes in the act of
+serving his master’s interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged
+him into self-consciousness; an unwonted state with him, clogging to a
+simple story.
+
+‘First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of your name beside
+mine...’
+
+‘Tush: on with you.’
+
+‘Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the case. I read,
+that there was laughter in the court at my exculpation of my conduct--as
+I have to call it; and there may have been. I may have expressed myself
+.... I have a strong feeling for the welfare of the country.’
+
+‘So, it seems, you said to the magistrate. Do you tell me, that the
+cause of your gross breach of the law, was a consideration for the
+welfare of the country? Run on the facts.’
+
+‘The facts--I must have begun badly, sir.’ Skepsey rattled the dry facts
+in his head to right them. From his not having begun well, they had
+become dry as things underfoot. It was an error to have led off with the
+sentiments. ‘Two very, two very respectable persons--respectable--were
+desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of my
+science, they call it.’
+
+‘Don’t be nervous. To the point; you went into a field five miles out
+of London, in broad day, and stood in a ring, the usual Tiff-raff about
+you!’
+
+‘With the gloves: and not for money, Sir: for the trial of skill; not
+very many people. I cannot quite see the breach of the law.’
+
+‘So you told the magistrate. You were fined for your inability to quite
+see. And you had to give security.’
+
+‘Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an acquaintance of the
+magistrate.’
+
+‘This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey. You must try to get
+the better of it--must! And my name too! I’m to be proclaimed, as
+having in my service an inveterate pugilist--who breaks the law from
+patriotism! Male or female, these very respectable persons--the people
+your show was meant for?’
+
+‘Male, sir. Females!... that is, not the respectable ones.’
+
+‘Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your standard of behaviour
+in future.’
+
+‘It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the spectators,
+that I could be as good as my word. I wished I may say, to conciliate
+him, partly. He would not--he judged by size--credit me with... he
+backed my adversary Jerry Scroom--a sturdy boxer, without the knowledge
+of the first principles.’
+
+‘You beat him?’
+
+‘I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir; he was
+complimentary before we parted. He thought I could not have lasted.
+After the second round, the police appeared.’
+
+‘And you ran!’
+
+‘No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.’
+
+‘Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican’s room in town,
+where you could have hammer-nailed and ding-donged to your heart’s
+content for as long as you liked!’
+
+‘That would have been preferable, from the point of view of safety from
+intrusion, I can admit-speaking humbly. But one of the parties--I had a
+wish to gratify him--is a lover of old English times and habits and our
+country scenes. He wanted it to take place on green grass. We drove over
+Hampstead in three carts and a gig, as a company of pleasure--as it
+was. A very beautiful morning. There was a rest at a public-house. Mr.
+Shaplow traces the misfortune to that. Mr. Jarniman, I hear, thinks it
+what he calls a traitor in the camp. I saw no sign; we were all merry
+and friendly.’
+
+‘Jarniman?’ said Victor sharply. ‘Who is the Jarniman?’
+
+‘Mr. Jarniman is, I am to understand from the acquaintance introducing
+us--a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train from Lakelands one day, and again
+at the corner of a street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by
+a Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief carving in the
+shop, and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman: he is in a confidential place,
+highly trusted.’ Skepsey looked up from the hands he soaped: ‘He is
+a curious mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes in
+ghosts. He mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting, he thinks that
+spectres are on the increase. He has a very large appetite, depressed
+spirits. Mr. Shaplow informs me he is a man of substance, in the service
+of a wealthy lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her appearance
+to him. He has the look--Mr. Shaplow assures me he does not drink to
+excess: he is a slow drinker.’
+
+Victor straightened: ‘Bad way of health, you said?’
+
+‘Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being immediate: he put it,
+that he expected her spirit to be out for him to meet it any day--or
+night. He desires it. He says, she has promised it--on oath, he says,
+and must feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if she
+is to appear to him with any countenance after. But he is anxious for
+her in any case to show herself, and says, he should not have the heart
+to reproach her. He has principles, a tear for suffering; he likes to be
+made to cry. Mrs. Jarniman, his mother, he is not married, is much the
+same so far, except ghosts; she will not have them; except after strong
+tea, they come, she says, come to her bed. She is foolish enough to
+sleep in a close-curtained bed. But the poor lady is so exceedingly
+stout that a puff of cold would carry her off, she fears.’
+
+Victor stamped his foot. ‘This man Jarniman serves a lady now in
+a--serious, does he say? Was he precise?’
+
+‘Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of diseases; very
+complicated, he says. He has no opinion of doctors. He says, that the
+lady’s doctor and the chemist--she sits in a chemist’s shop and
+swallows other people’s prescriptions that take her fancy. He says, her
+continuing to live is wonderful. He has no reason to hurry her, only for
+the satisfaction of a natural curiosity.’
+
+‘He mentioned her name?’
+
+‘No name, sir.’
+
+Skepsey’s limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to Victor, who was
+assured that the little man stood clean of any falsity.
+
+‘You are not on equal terms. You and the magistrate have helped him to
+know who it is you serve, Skepsey.’
+
+‘Would you please to direct me, sir.’
+
+‘Another time. Now go and ease your feet with a run over the town.
+We have music in half an hour. That you like, I know. See chiefly to
+amusing yourself.’
+
+Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had enjoyed his trip.
+
+Victor checked him: it was to ask whether this Jarniman had specified
+one, any one of the numerous diseases afflicting his aged mistress.
+
+Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of
+the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady’s decayed constitution:
+not to be mentioned, Skepsey’s thought, in relation to ladies; whose
+organs and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting
+them to the sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very
+oldest date, respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are chivalrous
+to them, deploring their need at times for the doctors and drugs. He
+stood looking most unhappy. ‘She was to appear, sir, in a few--perhaps a
+week, a month.’
+
+A nod dismissed him.
+
+The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had wound himself up to
+relish it) was at night in the towns, when the sound of instrumental and
+vocal music attracted crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and
+they heard zon, zon, violon, fete et basse; not bad fluting, excellent
+fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own Opera, would
+have approved. So Victor said of his darlings’ voices. Nesta’s and
+her mother’s were a perfect combination; Mr. Barmby’s trompe in union,
+sufficiently confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
+They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages, with expressions
+of gratitude, at the departure from Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors
+had entreated them to stay another night, to give an entertainment.
+Victor took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a quiet
+English family, simply keeping-up the habits they practiced in Old
+England: all were welcome to hear them while they were doing it; but
+they did not give entertainments.
+
+The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
+dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold
+of Dudley Sowerby at Dreux. He was at the window from time to time,
+counting heads below. For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to
+supplant the flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena
+section of the Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile. She
+consulted her mother, and they sang it. The crowds below, swollen to
+a block of the street, were dead still, showing the instinctive
+good manners of the people. Then mademoiselle astonished them with a
+Provencal or Cevennes air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but
+it suited her mezzo-soprano tones; and it rang massively of the
+martial-religious. To what heights of spiritual grandeur might not
+a Huguenot France have marched! Dudley Sowerby, heedlessly, under an
+emotion that could be stirred in him with force, by the soul of religion
+issuing through music, addressed his ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley.
+She did nor shrug or snub him, but rejoined: ‘I could go to battle with
+that song in the ears.’ She liked seeing him so happily transformed; and
+liked the effect of it on Nesta when his face shone in talking. He was
+at home with the girl’s eyes, as he had never been. A song expressing in
+one of the combative and devotional, went to the springs of his blood;
+for he was of an old warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed
+peaceful maxims and commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness.
+As much as wine, will music bring out the native bent of the civilized
+man: endow him with language too. He was as if unlocked; he met
+Nesta’s eyes and ran in a voluble interchange, that gave him flattering
+after-thoughts; and at the moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some
+extent assured, station beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady
+would be helped to perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.
+
+Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor’s mastering subtlety. She had
+hoped (having clearly seen the sheep’s eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
+Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
+she had stipulated for his presence on the journey. She remembered
+Victor’s rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
+Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man. Mr. Barmby had
+tried all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted;
+notably once at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and
+mademoiselle found themselves in the cell of the prisoner’s Nail-wrought
+work while Nesta had to take Sowerby’s hand for help at a passage here
+and there along the narrow outer castle-walls. And Mr. Barmby, upon
+occasions, had set that dimple in Nesta’s cheek quivering, though Simeon
+Fenellan was not at hand, and there was no telling how it was done,
+beyond the evidence that Victor willed it so.
+
+From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought
+more into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
+previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
+everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
+struggle with him. But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was
+almost as if he had descended to earth from the skies. She now saw his
+mortality in the miraculous things he did. The reason of it was,
+that through the perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an
+opposing spirit had plainer view of his aim, to judge it. She thought it
+a mean one.
+
+The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
+she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
+consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
+her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
+hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly.
+She could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she
+could trust him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a
+treachery. Still she was compelled to judge.
+
+When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: ‘This is the
+news of the day, my love! It’s death at last. We shall soon be thanking
+heaven for freedom’; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a
+torture of remorse on his behalf. A shattering throb of her heart gave
+her sight of herself as well. For so it is with the woman who loves in
+subjection, she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.’
+
+‘You have a letter, Victor?’
+
+‘Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.’
+
+He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
+interested animated conduit necessarily will. Neither of them smiled.
+
+The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.
+
+It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
+pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!
+
+She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness. The murderous hope stood
+up, stood out in forms and pictures. There was one of a woman at her
+ease at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic
+haunting figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger
+of scorn for a bold-faced impostor. Nataly’s lips twitched at the
+remembrance of quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing
+that a large instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the
+social offender fearing exposure. Majesty in the criminal’s dock, is a
+confounding spectacle. To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her
+glorious attributes have become the executioner’s implements. She must
+for her soul’s health believe that a day of release and exoneration
+approaches.
+
+‘Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,’ Victor said, in
+tenderest undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face;
+and pierced her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that
+she would have objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.
+
+She nodded. Down rolled the first big tear.
+
+We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
+once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.
+
+‘Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,’ Nataly said, weeping, near on
+laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of
+her tears. ‘Don’t mind me. I am rather like Fenellan’s laundress, the
+tearful woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake
+of soap. Skepsey has made his peace with you?’
+
+Victor answered: ‘Yes, yes; I see what he has been about. We’re a mixed
+lot, all of us-the best! You’ve noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
+absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!’
+
+‘But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them. Captain Dartrey
+thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.’
+
+‘So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he’s a worthy little
+velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes Colney had been with us.
+Only Colney!--pity one can’t cut his talons for the space before they
+grow again.’
+
+Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been
+so encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby! It was the
+very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
+to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
+feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
+when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
+delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
+with us to inspire. In Nataly’s bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
+for offering counsel where Victor for his soul’s sake needed it, was
+beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
+mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.
+
+It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
+A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her
+at her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the
+contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
+the guilty was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push
+be eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence
+rose up to clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no
+devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
+to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed
+of the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a
+fact spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one
+hard word. But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred
+to Nesta. It seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the
+Merciful Disposer! .... Nataly’s intellect and her reverence clashed.
+They clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of
+Life as a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about
+this or that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath,
+if we will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal,
+mount to the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.
+She was in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate
+of individuals. Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid
+the fevered tangle of her sensations.
+
+A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
+her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
+existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
+footing with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself for
+taking pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard,
+ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as
+not to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to
+welcome the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a
+greater than common need of the protection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID’S IMAGININGS
+
+That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us. History, pleads for the
+pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there.
+The pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
+becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility
+in the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a
+visible conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in
+coloured glass and marbles.
+
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
+advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit ‘the spot of so
+impressive a monument’: as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
+whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures
+of incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
+likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
+pathos of his exhaustless ‘whacking of the platitudes’; which still
+retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
+Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.
+
+Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
+poetic fire. It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
+Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
+estimation among his countrymen of all classes. They are shown by
+example how to look, think, speak; what to do. Poets are disturbing;
+they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the
+metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and
+decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind
+us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome! Established plain prose
+officials do better for our English. The audience moved round with heads
+of undertakers.
+
+Victor called to recollection Fenellan’s ‘Rev. Glendoveer’ while Mr.
+Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags. And those
+who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
+laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
+wits are absent. Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
+Barmby’s remarks: The Fate of Princes! The Paths of Glory! St. Louis
+was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
+Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader. St. Louis was
+for Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to
+homeliness by tears. She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint’s
+halo, that swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers. She
+listened to Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all
+she felt: he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the
+devotional service she was holding mutely. Mademoiselle upon St. Louis:
+‘Worthy to be named King of Kings!’ swept her to a fount of thoughts,
+where the thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the
+mother emotions. Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and
+deeply moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open
+to be musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales. This crypt of
+the recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
+passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
+altar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
+leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death. With such
+a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation
+to political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of
+things with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable,
+obliterate the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and
+garden were, would be appeased, transfigured. She hoped, she prayed for
+that glorious leader’s advent.
+
+On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
+communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
+her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young
+creature saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams
+of a body rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her
+hopes and prayers were dumb in her bosom. It signified shame. She knew
+not the how, for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment
+of earth and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.
+But if the new crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born
+prince nobly man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet
+from the face of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet
+upon the ground. Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the
+inmost forest-well of mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of
+good aspiration through their obscurities find much akin to them.
+
+She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
+had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and
+the old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be
+friendly! What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the
+slow parade, and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification
+of a holiday on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby’s attention to him, in
+elucidating the scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The
+Rev. Septimus of course occupied her chiefly.
+
+Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
+gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections
+to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be
+aiming too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the
+voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman’s closed lips; not a smile at all, and
+certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
+in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
+sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
+of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in
+England: an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the
+mouth, upon mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at
+his reading of a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony
+involving his favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow
+like Hymen rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying
+slipper. He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the
+slumbering features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower,
+entering into nuptials in his fifty-fourth year. Why not? But we ask it
+of Heaven and Man, why not? Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or
+youngish; her own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue
+the matter with a young or youngish person of her sex. Could it be a
+reasonable woman--a woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the
+pastors of the flocks? But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of
+an argument thereon with a lady.
+
+Luther... but we are not in Luther’s time:--Nature... no, nor can there
+possibly be allusions to Nature. Mr. Barmby wondered at Protestant
+parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower of English
+womanhood. However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially also; there
+they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman, a handsome
+face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in the looks
+which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously adverse.
+
+The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
+father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
+keep guard over the deeper among her own. At the Chateau de Gisors,
+leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
+with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle’s,
+a reverence for the prisoner’s patient holy work, and picturings of his
+watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on
+the circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres. But the
+Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
+re-edified it. The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a
+word of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a
+day rather increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the
+possessor of it, more the worshipper.
+
+Mademoiselle had to say to herself: ‘Impossible!’ after seeing the drift
+of her dear Nesta’s eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
+She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding
+it. Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the
+Bethesda and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were,
+the towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of
+its multitudinous outroar. The ‘Which?’ of the Rev. Septimus, addressed
+to Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her ‘Either’; and his
+gentle hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could
+not be unnoticed by women.
+
+Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
+indulgent skipper of parental pages?
+
+Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators’ daggers out at any
+instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly’s peace of mind. But
+she trusted her girl’s laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
+overbalancing. She left the ground where maternal meditations are
+serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta’s heart as a lover.
+Was it worth inquiry?
+
+A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with
+mention of Mr. Barmby’s name.
+
+Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders. ‘We are at present much enamoured of
+Bethesda.’
+
+That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
+smothered it.
+
+Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
+Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
+And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
+waves on deep sea. The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
+She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington’s third son to the
+coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor. These
+are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the
+man who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
+offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
+Service. ‘To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor’s protection, is
+a step!’ Lady Blachington said. Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints
+and revealings. There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
+residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor’s
+London table. He was already winning his way, apparently without effort,
+to be the popular man of that neighbourhood. A subterranean tide or
+a slipping of earth itself seemed bearing her on. She had his promise
+indeed, that he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of
+his freedom had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the
+heart of the word went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady
+Blachington (who could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation
+for not returning her call, that she called in a friendly way a second
+time, warmly to thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at
+Lakelands in August, to an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for
+the purpose of erecting an East of London Clubhouse, where the children
+of the poor by day could play, and their parents pass a disengaged
+evening. Doubtless a worthy Charity. Nataly was alive to the duties of
+wealth. Had it been simply a demand for a donation, she would not have
+shown that momentary pucker of the brows, which Lady Blachington read as
+a contrast with the generous vivacity of the husband.
+
+Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement. Nay, she beheld
+herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
+doing of things against the better mind. An outer world is thoughtless
+of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
+benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party
+of the readily heroical. She scourged her weakness: and the intimation
+of the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the
+deficiency affecting her character lay in her want of language. A tongue
+to speak and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way. But
+then again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and
+strike at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
+electrical vitality of a man like Victor. It was an exultation of their
+life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
+breathed a reproach upon one another.
+
+She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
+of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
+been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
+or acts. The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
+prostrate. She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
+matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.
+
+Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree
+for stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta. The girl not having
+inclinations, and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they
+were easily kept from the dangerous count of two.
+
+Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever
+a minute quite alone with her lamb. Incredulously she perceived signs of
+a shock. The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return
+for a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids. Out it came,
+on a nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident,
+to bring it nearer to comprehension. Mr. Barmby--and decide who will
+whether it is that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by
+his fires are subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by
+stealing minutes enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself. And
+no wonder the girl looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval
+forest-palace of illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a
+mountain hind, that sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her
+first quick leap from hounds; her instincts alarmed, instead of rich
+imagination colouring and fostering.
+
+She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
+meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
+love in her ears from the mouth of a man.
+
+There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would
+be, the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden
+clothing of her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as
+the bend of grasses to the breath of a still twilight. She lived
+too spiritedly to hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled
+dread-shadow-sister to the virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful
+power that might drag her down, disorder, discolour. But now she had
+heard it: the word, the very word itself! in her own ears! addressed to
+her! in a man’s voice! The first utterance had been heard, and it was
+over; the chapter of the book of bulky promise of the splendours and
+mysteries;--the shimmering woods and bushy glades, and the descent of
+the shape celestial, and the recognition--the mutual cry of affinity;
+and overhead the crimson outrolling of the flag of beneficent
+enterprises hand in hand, all was at an end. These, then, are the
+deceptions our elders tell of! That masculine voice should herald a new
+world to the maiden. The voice she had heard did but rock to ruin the
+world she had been living in.
+
+Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or
+on his conduct. Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.
+
+‘Can I have been guilty of leading him to think...?’ she said, in a tone
+that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.
+
+‘They choose to think,’ mademoiselle replied. ‘It is he or another. My
+dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick,
+as they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
+one’s, if you are hit.’
+
+Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of ‘Louise.’
+
+Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty. ‘Has it happened
+to me? I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
+my dear, I have gone through it. To spare you the questions tormenting
+you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
+nigh on a kind of resemblance. The first gentleman who did me the honour
+to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.’
+
+Nesta cried ‘Oh!’ in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
+her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby’s boom of the terrific word attacking
+Louise from that deformed one.
+
+Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision. A girl of
+quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
+comic of young women’s hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.
+
+‘My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
+for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first...!’
+
+‘But, my dear, it did me no harm.’
+
+‘But if it had been known!’
+
+‘But it was known!’
+
+Nesta controlled a shuddering: ‘It is the knowledge of it in
+ourselves--that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who deserve so
+much better! And one asks--Oh, why are we not left in peace! And do look
+at the objects it makes of us!’ Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl’s
+desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy. ‘It is really
+worse to have it unknown--when you are compelled to be his partner in
+sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal
+for fear that everybody will laugh at its face.’
+
+She resumed her seriousness: ‘I find it so hard to be vexed with him and
+really really like him. For he is a good man; but he will not let one
+shake him off. He distresses: because we can’t quite meet as we did.
+Last Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am annoyed that I
+was glad.’
+
+‘Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their pretty patterns from
+damage as best they can,’ said mademoiselle.
+
+Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy on the spot.
+‘Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-dust! One feels them. I
+suppose they pass. They must. But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your
+poor dear good little afflicted suitor--was he kindly pitied?’
+
+‘Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young damsels who are in
+request to surrender the custody of their hands. It is easy to commit
+a dangerous excess in the dispensing of that article they call pity of
+them.’
+
+‘And he--did he?--vowed to you he could not take No for an answer?’
+
+At this ingenuous question, woefully uttered, mademoiselle was pricked,
+to smile pointedly. Nesta had a tooth on her under-lip. Then, shaking
+vapours to the winds, she said: ‘It is an honour, to be asked; and we
+cannot be expected to consent. So I shall wear through it.--Only I
+do wish that Mr. Fenellan would not call him The Inchcape Bell!’ She
+murmured this to herself.
+
+Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks. ‘Can anything have offended him?’
+Victor inquired, in some consternation, appreciating the man’s worth,
+and the grand basso he was; together with the need for him at the
+Lakelands Concert in August.
+
+Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation. She had no reply. Her
+speculations were cut short by Victor, who handed her a brief note
+addressed to him and signed by the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a
+private interview.
+
+The formality of the request incensed Victor. ‘Now, dear love, you see
+Colney’s meaning, when he says, there are people who have no intimacy in
+them. Here’s a man who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
+familiar for years--four, at least; and he wants to speak to me, and
+must obtain the “privilege” by special appointment! What can be the
+meaning of it?’
+
+‘You will hear to-morrow afternoon,’ Nataly said, seeing one paved way
+to the meaning--a too likely meaning... ‘He hasn’t been... nothing about
+Fredi, surely!’
+
+‘I have had no information.’
+
+‘Impossible! Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can’t intend to come
+scraping on that string. But we won’t lose him; he’s one of us. Barmby
+counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and
+particularly in the country. But he’s an excellent fellow--eh?’
+
+‘That he is,’ Nataly agreed.
+
+Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on
+the late afternoon of the day to follow.
+
+Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview,
+ignorant of Mr. Barmby’s purpose though she was, had her fires
+extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage, out
+of the library.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that
+downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely
+feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast,
+and with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the
+stroke raised voice. This much you know. It may be communicated to you,
+that there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited
+on the dizzy line of division between the living and the dead. For those
+unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air
+were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful
+Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads
+against a beggar of a mortal. The terrible sugariness which poured into
+him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery
+of jaws expressed it. They gaped. At the same time, his eyeballs gave
+up. All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an
+hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn. Tears,
+issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour (a
+ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.
+
+Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be
+composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch
+the fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across
+the scene of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor
+Radnor, that he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for
+the hand of Nesta Victoria. It is the excelling merit of similes and
+metaphors to spring us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary
+places. But, as with the visits of Immortals, we must be ready to
+receive them. Beware, moreover, of examining them too scrupulously:
+they have a trick of wearing to vapour if closely scanned. Let it be
+gratefully for their aid.
+
+So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at
+liberty to pursue his quest.
+
+Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it. He was at
+pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make
+Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to
+lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said;
+and why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the
+race!--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry
+the negative like a crack of thunder in the City. But such matters as
+these! and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and
+pleading in a tone... ‘I assure you, my love, he touched chords.’
+
+‘Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?’ Nataly asked
+smoothly.
+
+‘His passion--nothing else. Candid enough. And he had a tone--he has
+a tone, you know. It ‘s not what he said. Some allusion to belief in a
+favourable opinion of him... encouragement... on the part of the mama.
+She would have him travelling with us! I foresaw it.’
+
+‘You were astonished when it came.’
+
+‘We always are.’
+
+Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.
+
+She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of
+despondency--that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled
+prospect: and a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd
+to detect Victor’s cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him
+previously in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly
+printed on her mind. It did not draw her to read him with a novel
+familiarity; it drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of
+the man he was--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive. Nor
+did he seem in this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle’s
+estimate of the mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby’s
+position would be both a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly
+final idea that the poor man might now serve permanently to check the
+more dreaded applicant: a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was
+blunted.
+
+Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
+weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
+natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
+his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear
+soul’s hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
+of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
+struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed him.
+She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
+moment marble to sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of
+martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.
+
+He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip
+of fingers from the outside of life.
+
+The seizure was over before it could be called ominous. When it was once
+over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety,
+his apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally
+in wrath at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her
+ailments instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.
+
+Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance
+for it. In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence,
+haunted him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they
+united to head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the
+army of charges against Mrs. Burman.
+
+And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
+reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall
+on London Bridge. He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and
+could cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below,
+half an inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by
+Nataly in old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious
+and enviable cerebrum. He knew well it was a fancy. But it was a fact
+also, that since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses,
+before that day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had
+been knocked in the back of his head.
+
+Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
+accounted a gloomy day? He would not have it so.
+
+She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with
+her singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,
+reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act. Recently only
+had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
+forward to the hours of the City office. This was odd, but so it was;
+and looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment
+when it was not Concert evening. The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla
+Graves, and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and
+Peridon and Catkin, were the lineing of his nest. Well, and so they
+had been before Lakelands rose. What had induced!... he suddenly felt
+foreign to himself. The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London
+Bridge went by.
+
+A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth,
+that if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not
+native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of
+our tastes?
+
+He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured
+phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational
+answer. Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money.
+Epigrams of Colney’s; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist
+orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.
+
+They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his
+office to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband’s
+family-seat, where the dear man lay in evil case. She signified her
+resignation to the decrees from above, saying generously:
+
+‘You look troubled, my friend. Any bad City news?’
+
+‘I look troubled?’ Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the
+trouble might be. ‘City news would not cause the look. Ah, yes;--I was
+talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day,
+and he kept noticing his horse’s queer starts. We spied half a dozen
+children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking
+at a hair. “Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse’s tail?”
+ said the mite. We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to
+pluck at. Men come to the fathers about their girls. It’s my belief that
+mothers more easily say no. If they learn the word as maids, you’ll say!
+However, there’s no fear about my girl. Fredi’s hard to snare. And what
+brings you Cityward?’
+
+‘I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler
+mine.’
+
+‘You have multiplied your investment by ten.’
+
+‘If it had been thousands!’
+
+‘Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you’re at
+the bottom of it.’
+
+‘There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have
+been on my way to Whinfold at this moment. The shares are lower.’
+
+‘The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that
+you may quit it for them to ascend. Tiddler has enemies, like the best
+of mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like. And mines that have
+gone up, go down for a while before they rise again; it’s an affair of
+undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy. The stories are false, for
+the time. I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday. He’s here
+next month; some time in August.’
+
+‘He is married, is he not?’
+
+‘Was.’
+
+Victor’s brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.
+
+‘Is he not a soldier?’ she said.
+
+‘Soldiers and parsons!’ Victor interjected.
+
+Now she saw. She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby’s hovering offer
+of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling
+Bethesda.
+
+But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when
+there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have
+to lower her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler,
+exclaiming: ‘It’s only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a
+dream of the past!’
+
+‘The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,’ said
+Victor.
+
+She put out her hand to be taken. ‘Not if you back me here. It really
+is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow. And if I’m to be
+a widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you. I love
+adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain
+in a storm. And if the worst happens, we go down together. It ‘s the
+detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of
+fighting.’
+
+‘Say, brandy.’
+
+‘Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?’
+
+‘Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction, let it be
+fiction; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet, my troop of short
+skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can’t read dull
+analytical stuff or “stylists” when I want action--if I’m to give my
+mind to a story. I can supply the reflections. I’m English--if Colney
+‘s right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of
+supernaturalism.
+
+I don’t ask for bloodshed: that’s what his “brandy” means.’
+
+‘But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect
+it where there’s love; it’s part of the balance, and justifies one’s
+excitement. How otherwise do you get any real crisis? I must read and
+live something unlike this flat life around us.’
+
+‘There’s the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says. Pass it in
+books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our
+thoughts. No brandy there! And no fine name for personal predilections
+or things done in domino!’ Victor said, with his very pleasant face,
+pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and
+bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
+other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage
+despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain. But the
+thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons. ‘This is one that I could
+trust, as captain or mate,’ he pressed the hand again before dropping
+it.
+
+‘You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person
+at the trial,’ said Lady Grace.
+
+Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded
+of trains and husbands.
+
+She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the
+physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with
+grandeur of shape. She belonged rather to the description physically
+distasteful to him.
+
+It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the
+jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this
+effect. If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is
+excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing
+spark. He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the
+Court of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions. Supposing,
+however, that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions
+of her, and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman’s voluble tongue
+to sisterly occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as
+in the domestic circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless
+directed upon us with intent.
+
+That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in
+Morality: Is she moral? Does she mean to be harmless? Is she not
+untamable Old Nature? And when once on an equal footing with her lordly
+half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
+transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton
+old thing--the empress of disorderliness? You have to recollect, as the
+Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging
+her to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence. The
+party views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember,
+on an intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she
+is almost unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the
+sentences of classical authors and Eastern sages. Conservatives know
+what they are about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an
+ancient harem open to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery,
+which would despoil an ankle of its flying wink.
+
+Victor’s opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to
+the occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating
+to maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked
+female world lest the step should be to wickeder. His opinions were in
+the background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward;
+and he fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the
+intrusion of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual. No
+sting of the sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the
+Channel boat-nothing to speak of. ‘Why does she come here! Why didn’t
+she go to her husband! She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and
+catches at the nearest hand to help her out! Nice woman enough.’ Yes,
+but he was annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether
+heartless to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the
+dear woman their natural divinity. And between him and that dear woman,
+since the communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly
+the dividing spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse. They both felt
+her there. They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.
+
+Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
+surprised Victor’s eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review
+the visit of Lady Grace.
+
+Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility
+from the ‘sick falcon’ distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.
+Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor
+during the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far
+from being one, in Colney’s words, to enliven the condition of domestic
+fowl with an hereditary turn for ‘preying’; eminently the reverse; he
+was of good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen. But there was
+the obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only
+as a formality--of his ‘love’: hard to do even in view and near to the
+damsel’s reddening cheeks: it perplexed him. He dropped a veil on the
+bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
+points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts
+and Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom.
+He considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose
+preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance
+between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance
+to lords. When a person is not read by character, the position or
+profession is called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to
+spell.
+
+Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor’s thought behind the smile he bent
+on this bald Cupid. She deserved a more poetical lover! His paternal
+sympathies for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as
+a wooer; nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby’s toned
+eloquence upon the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby’s
+addresses, checked his contempt for the latter. He could not despise the
+suitor he sided with against another and seemingly now a more dangerous.
+Unable quite to repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to
+put it to his uses. For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and
+precise in the exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the
+stars if such a girl condescends to give him a hearing. He had this idea
+through the conception of his girl’s generosity. And furthermore, the
+cognizant eye of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in
+Victor, demanded as a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces
+on the part of the acceptable applicant to the post of husband of
+that peerless. These being absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed
+sufficient for the present, after the fashion of the young gentleman, to
+capitulate the few material matters briefly.
+
+They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the
+sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish
+all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open
+it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and
+all the things utterable. Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light:
+and though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the
+light, he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by
+the touch at his heart. Dudley Sowerby’s deficiencies, however, were
+outweighed by the palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and
+his good repute for conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners. Victor
+sighed again over his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the
+choice must be left to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of
+his persuasive arts and how they would be used, to think that he was
+actually making the choice.
+
+Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no
+longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of
+rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across
+waysides to right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a
+self-devouring hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at
+the embrace of it. This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the
+forfeit of pleasure. She bids us count the passage of a sober day for
+the service of the morrow; that is her system; and she would have
+us adopt it, to keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the
+guarantee of enjoyment: doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or
+other of the furious matrix instincts; we are blunt to all else.
+
+Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor;
+he alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments. He was waxing to
+fervidness. He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start,
+that he was to say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to
+present Miss Radnor at Court....
+
+Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
+of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
+sneer at its functions: ‘Court! my girl? But the arduous duties are over
+for the season. We are a democratic people retaining the seductions of
+monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count
+among the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court
+presentations; no harm. Only there’s plenty of time... very young girls
+have their heads turned--though I don’t say, don’t imagine, my girl
+would. By and by perhaps.’
+
+Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling’s room and introduced to the
+figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a
+respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a
+glimpse of the downright contrast to his partner. He had heard casual
+remarks on the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance.
+A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers
+of the man who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster,
+descendant of a line of City merchants, having features for a wife to
+identify; as drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their
+round-bellied beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after
+dreary fits of restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor’s
+obedient cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the
+Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for
+shoals of good things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in
+quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and
+wanting only metre to make it our national Poem.
+
+Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
+somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor,
+and deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that
+lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory
+of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
+against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
+pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man
+who speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried
+onward and onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction,
+in perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at
+a turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had
+never forgiven the youth’s venture in India of an enormous purchase
+of Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his
+share of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify
+the bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion
+from that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor’s
+genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and
+consequently his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his
+quondam comfortable feeling of security. And if you will imagine the
+sprite of the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the
+malignant who has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once
+had from his God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state
+of Mr. Inchling’s mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very
+disturbing partner.
+
+He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with
+North American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa
+and, gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her
+inward comparisons. Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example
+of the island energy. Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be
+much the guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting
+there with Colney Durance; Colney’s humour for satire being instantly in
+bristle at sight of his representative of English City merchants:
+‘over whom,’ as he wrote of the venerable body, ‘the disciplined and
+instructed Germans not deviously march; whom acute and adventurous
+Americans, with half a cock of the eye in passing, compassionately
+outstrip.’ He and Dr. Schlesien agreed upon Mr. Inchling. Meantime
+the latter gentleman did his part at the tables of the wealthier City
+Companies, and retained his appearance of health; he was beginning to
+think, upon a calculation of the increased treasures of those Companies
+and the country, that we, the Taxpayer, ought not to leave it altogether
+to Providence to defend them; notwithstanding the watchful care of us
+hitherto shown by our briny Providence, to save us from anxiety and
+expense. But there are, he said, ‘difficulties’; and the very word
+could stop him, as commonly when our difficulty lies in the exercise of
+thinking.
+
+Victor’s African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
+was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
+Continents. Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.
+
+He and Victor walked in company Westward. The shop of Boyle and
+Luckwort, chemists, was not passed on this occasion. Dudley grieved that
+he had to be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his
+engagement to his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge
+Wells. Victor mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies,
+residing near the Wells. They measured the distance between Cronidge and
+Moorsedge, the two houses, as for half an hour on horseback.
+
+Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
+confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.
+
+‘Who, do you think, was the topic?’ Victor asked.
+
+She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION
+BETWEEN THEM AND OF A SATIRIST’S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
+COUNTRY
+
+There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild
+moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,
+Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be
+joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
+querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original
+motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to such a pass! And what is
+the gain? If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will
+strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
+with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby
+wrote himself donkey, for his present reading. Soldiers, heroes, even
+the braided, even the wearers of the gay cock’s feathers, who get
+the honours and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical
+eloquence. They have no answer for her, save an index at the machine
+pushing them on yet farther under the enemy’s line of fire, where they
+pluck the golden wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more.
+They glorify her topping wisdom while on the march to confound it.
+She is wise in her way. But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had
+followed her exclusively, how far should we have travelled from our
+starting-point? We of the world and its prizes and duties must do her
+an injury to make her tongue musical to us, and her argument worthy of
+attention. So it seems. How to keep the proper balance between those two
+testy old wranglers, that rarely pull the right way together, is as much
+the task for men in the grip of the world, as for the wanton youthful
+fry under dominion of their instincts; and probably, when it is done,
+man will have attained the golden age of his retirement from service.
+
+Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant soldiery, his question
+was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the
+quality of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first
+coveted; it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick
+he held, as a reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his
+natural tastes. Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the
+conception of Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together
+in one; and the young gentleman had moral character, good citizen
+substance, and station, rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him
+was firm. Yet so far was it from hearty, that when hearing a professed
+satirist like Colney Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley’s
+transparent courtship of the girl, under his look of an awakened
+approval of himself, that he appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you
+not think I bid fair for an excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had
+a nip of spite at the thought of Dudley’s dragging him bodily to be the
+grandfather. Poor Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by
+her hard fate to feel proud of Philistine babies! Though women soon get
+reconciled to it! Or do they? They did once. What if his Fredi turned
+out one of the modern young women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught
+himself speculating on that, as on a danger. The alliance with Dudley
+really seemed to set him facing backward.
+
+Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided
+Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her
+compression of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to
+exclude the young patriarch of Philistines’ ridiculous image.
+
+He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a
+path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest
+of gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a
+division--and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life. Why
+had he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the world’s nurse-like,
+old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites;
+its long-suffering tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast
+laws, while the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only
+ankle-high; together with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the
+choice of ways he liked best, told of things, which were better things,
+incomprehensibly forfeited. So that the plain sense of value insisted on
+more than one weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.
+
+He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a
+goal of his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not
+command him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it. The speaking
+to this dry young Dudley was not imperative at present. A word would do
+in the day to come.
+
+Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for
+the great August Concert. He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the
+verge of Dr. Themison’s latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from
+which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear
+soul’s dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her
+cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;
+and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning
+by Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in
+the fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said
+his friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance
+to him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the
+calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: ‘Sitting-room, not
+bedroom; she was always quite the lady,’ Skepsey reported his Jarniman.
+Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
+character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was
+a woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the
+approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.
+
+Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity. His happy
+vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day. Nataly heard him at night,
+on a moan: ‘Poor soul!’ and loudly once while performing an abrupt
+demi-vault from back to side: ‘Perhaps now!’ in a voice through doors.
+She schooled herself to breathe equably.
+
+Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was
+charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.
+And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the
+Radnor family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have
+cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations. At
+night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily
+craped figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black
+pad, accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind
+was dragged to go through the whole case by morning light; and the
+compassionate man appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his
+delectable sophistries; as, that it was his intense humaneness, which
+exposed him to an accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly
+best to happen, which anticipated Mrs. Burman’s expiry. They were simple
+sophistries, fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing
+the imprimatur of common sense. They refreshed him, as a chemical scent
+a crowded room.
+
+All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her
+feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley! A
+dry stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no
+doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi would
+have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and
+Creckholt!
+
+Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent
+student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal
+Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome
+appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born
+to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and
+Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England
+prone along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the
+possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful
+England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully
+hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the
+howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in
+Brewery, too! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were ahead of
+them, and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well;
+while we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire
+their young Professors, and then to import their beer.
+
+Have the Germans more brains than we English? Victor’s blood up to the
+dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative. But, as old Colney
+says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably
+successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more
+than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know
+we are racing. Victor scored a mark for one of his projects. A
+well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a
+sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what
+degree their sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to
+ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of
+criticism applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it
+for a weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the
+cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would the people he loved? He
+agreed with Colney, forgetting the satirist’s venom: to-wit; that the
+journalists should be close under their editor’s rod to put it in sound
+bold English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality:
+but honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the
+disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,
+which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness
+to reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and
+called conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP? Why not, if it exactly hits the
+signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do
+to itself, to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no vulgarity
+in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor wrote it at night,
+naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the
+publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in
+his desk.
+
+Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing
+to Fredi’s reproduction or imitation of her mother’s romantic sentiment
+for Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry
+fellow had his feelings. Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey’s
+history and character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably
+younger, and totally different. ‘Dartrey’s mother was Lady Charlotte
+Kiltorne, one of the Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and
+no reproach on her, not a shadow; only she made the General’s Bank-notes
+fly black paper. And--if you ‘re for heredity--the queer point is,
+that Simeon, whose mother was a sober-minded woman, has always been the
+spendthrift. Dartrey married one of the Hennen women, all an odd lot,
+all handsome. I met her once. Colney said, she came up here with a
+special commission from the Prince of Darkness. There are women who stir
+the unholy in men--whether they mean it or not, you know.’
+
+Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know. And good for
+Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge! But
+he was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead
+of trusting to the spin of the blood.
+
+‘She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to
+her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper. I ‘ve seen
+the blood in his veins, mount to cracking. But there’s the man: because
+she was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And, by heaven,
+he had cause. She couldn’t be left. She tricked him, and she loved
+him-passionately, I believe. You don’t understand women loving the
+husband they drag through the mire?’
+
+Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.
+
+‘Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?’
+
+‘I’ve no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,’
+Victor replied hurriedly. ‘He got a drenching of all the damns in the
+British service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a
+trooper’s negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes
+Dartrey to his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation.
+Good soldier lost. And I can’t complain; he has been a right-hand man to
+me over in Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his temper,
+especially a soldier.’
+
+Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.
+
+‘Worse than that temper of Dartrey’s, he can’t forgive an injury. He
+bears a grudge against his country. You’ve heard Colney Durance abuse
+old England. It’s three parts factitious-literary exercise. It ‘s milk
+beside the contempt of Dartrey’s shrug. He thinks we’re a dead people,
+if a people; “subsisting on our fat,” as Colney says.’
+
+‘I am not of opinion that we show it,’ observed Dudley.
+
+‘We don’t,’ Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion’s mincing tone
+of a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to
+be at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens,
+who little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
+gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted
+to read behind words and looks.
+
+They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
+this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: ‘It’s a pity we seem to
+have no means of keeping our parks select.’
+
+Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of
+Fenellan’s, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
+discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
+in their hymning.
+
+‘Have you seen anything offensive to you?’ he asked.
+
+‘One sees notorious persons.’
+
+Dudley spoke aloof from them--‘out of his cold attics,’ Fenellan would
+have said.
+
+Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in
+sad earnest we consent to take life as it is.
+
+He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
+fatherly embrace of goodness.
+
+Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
+Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
+morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his
+armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He
+was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
+of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for
+him at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him
+at a corner of the Strand.
+
+Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed
+with Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
+self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
+Dudley’s. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
+presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
+conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove
+him to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
+bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley
+to critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
+foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another
+thing, she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
+tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
+seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having
+to share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman’s way, always
+reassured by his endurance of Colney’s company:--she read it to mean,
+that he could bear Colney’s perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
+had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
+his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
+Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan’s easy humour to
+Colney’s acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter’s antidote to
+Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.
+
+For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
+their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
+period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants
+to be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not
+performance, of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their
+temperaments. Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of
+the Nineteenth Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and
+negatives divorced from harmony and awakened by the slight increase
+of incubating motion to vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion
+duellists for the rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully
+slaved for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the latter
+entered on an inheritance counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew
+a briefless barrister disposed for scholarship from the forlornest
+of seats in the Courts. They had foretold of one another each the
+unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as the child of his prediction.
+Victor was to have been ruined long back; Colney the prey of independent
+bachelors. Colney had escaped his harpy, and Victor could be called a
+millionaire and more. Prophesy was crowned by Colney’s dyspepsia, by
+Victor’s ticklish domestic position. Their pity for one another, their
+warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of different temperaments;
+and we have to distinguish, that in many estimable and some gifted human
+creatures, it is the quality of the blood which directs the current of
+opinion.
+
+Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and
+to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he
+was doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,
+impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
+does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the
+delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has
+his instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy’s countenance at the
+confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it
+were a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack
+with the wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no
+compensation: Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a
+common ‘tu-quoque’ at one who hugs the worst.
+
+The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
+and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the
+days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London’s early August
+when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as
+cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
+and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who
+resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
+blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
+water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London’s
+professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
+Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They
+ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been
+turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after
+a run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she
+and Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath
+had filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it
+as victim on St. Helena’s rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua’s
+fortress-walls blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes
+for his pathetic sublime.
+
+Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of
+his darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious
+pictures of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth
+from the London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks
+and snow lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood
+undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a
+dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it
+shooting aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and
+wide-armed in its pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in
+immobility, to the heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to
+crowned victory. And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows
+and maize, and lower vineyards and central tall green spires! Walking
+beside young Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the
+trips and twists of a rill, that was lured a little further down through
+scoops, ducts, and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.
+
+He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on
+the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver
+foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an
+air of ‘Whither you will, so it be on’; happy for service as in freedom.
+Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded
+through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:
+dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest
+on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.
+Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and
+that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
+military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly’s
+tender pleading, ‘Could you not help to give him another chance, dear
+Victor?’--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or
+more or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office;
+which he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an
+untutored rill of the mountains, if ever was one.
+
+Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures: Lakelands had hold of him!
+
+Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the
+slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must
+be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the
+disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on
+the centre.--You’re dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry
+the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!
+
+Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court. He
+entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to
+independence. It could not be argued publicly, and the more the
+pity:--for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his
+outlook over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly
+constrained) spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to
+the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent. And it helped the plea in
+his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he
+had to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the
+most unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself
+it was to cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was
+remiss in not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass. He
+could see his Nataly’s pained endurance beneath her habitual submission.
+Her effort was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the
+gathering at Lakelands.
+
+On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the
+amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear ‘trial of the acoustics’ of the
+Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the
+railway-carriage over Colney’s description of Fashionable London’s vast
+octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of
+its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while. He
+had the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as
+when the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down
+upon tablets in the head behind. Victor observed his look at Nataly. The
+look was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing. She was not or did
+not appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
+professional gentleman’s holiday reckoning of the hours before the
+return train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it. She
+was, as she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self
+again--defying suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world
+honoured in uplifting her.
+
+Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison’s very warm
+applause. He named the greatest of contraltos. Colney did better service
+than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured
+Dr. Themison’s ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of
+European Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at
+the Court of Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the
+follies of the countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think,
+those of Old England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was about
+to begin, she made her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, ‘Oh!
+Delphica!’ For she was naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby’s distaste for
+the story and disgust with the damsel Delphica.
+
+Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of
+the expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter
+for an Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not
+encourage a Cis-Atlantic bard. To America the honours from beginning to
+end belong.
+
+So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption
+of the language it may choose among the foremost famous European
+tongues. Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a
+whole people at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as
+the most precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the principal
+Seats of Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity to match that of his
+unexampled and all but stupefying mission. A fluent linguist, yet an
+Englishman, the slight American accent contracted during a lengthened
+residence in the United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him
+to pay his visit of exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court
+to the distinguished Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr.
+Bouthoin among the learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to
+him; a scholar endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to
+cite and instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan
+and civilization in the filial embrace of mother English. ‘For to this
+it must come predestinated,’ says the astonishing applicant. ‘We seem
+to see a fitness in it,’ says the cogitative Rev. Doctor. ‘And an Island
+England in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,’ adds the former.
+‘We think of things more pregnant,’ concludes the latter, with a dry
+gleam of ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the Review
+upon his recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let
+the newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!
+
+Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at
+Dr. Bouthoin’s disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the
+expedition be secret. ‘Better so,’ says pure Saxon’s champion. On a
+day patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
+through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.
+Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,
+stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and
+other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in
+the ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest
+adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic
+pair speaking pure Saxon or other.
+
+Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period
+(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a
+belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience. He passed
+under veil the Rev. Doctor’s acknowledgement of Neptune’s power, and the
+temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments
+of these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness
+of certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them
+the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,
+pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking
+of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him
+is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for
+the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible
+incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then,
+of the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages
+the young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them
+to say a word? What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble,
+uncontrolled M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued
+like the pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive
+boyhood, which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another,
+hitherto unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name
+transpires as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some
+lines of Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language.
+Greek, is it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of
+the poetic chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps
+himself with the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a
+whole mouth. There must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another
+in privacy. Delphica draws Mr. Semhians aside.
+
+Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the
+transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells
+of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent
+as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths
+of the races of mankind. Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman,
+the Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the
+Court of Japan. Concurrents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on
+a contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius. He is
+astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!
+
+‘Have you ever imagined anything?’ Dr. Gannius asks him. Entomologist,
+botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready
+regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of
+bath-slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who,
+in awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of
+discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he
+has no alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong
+one; a relative too; he is the Saxon’s cousin, to say the least.
+This German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his
+argumentative war into the enemy’s country: and he presents on all sides
+a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the
+doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really
+like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless
+flesh to his beak. So we are cousinly.
+
+Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from
+‘our simpleton of the pastures,’ as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his
+daughter, that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth
+upon this most mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their
+Government! Babes in the Wood that they are! ‘a la grace de dieu’
+at every turn that cries for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of
+English arms behind them, to support--and with the grandest of national
+prizes in view!--the pleading oration before the Court of the elect,
+erudites, we will call them, of an intelligent, yet half barbarous,
+people; hesitating, these, between eloquence and rival eloquence,
+cunning and rival cunning. Why, in such a case, the shadow-nimbus of
+Force is needed to decide the sinking of the scale. But have these
+English never read their Shakespeare, that they show so barren an
+acquaintance with human, to say nothing of semi-barbaric, nature? But
+it is here that we Germans prove our claim to being the sons of his
+mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the mask: he also is a
+concurrent. And not only is he the chosen by election of the chief
+Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene dilating
+Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and lightning of
+his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before them all.
+M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine double-dimples
+his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his beak; Dr.
+Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the masterful
+effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his hand, the
+others find the reverse of concealment in hiding their own.
+
+Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be
+encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.
+The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the
+blessed old English manner. ‘It has even been thus with us: unhelped we
+do it!’ exclaims the Rev. Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing
+Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed
+Delphica’s phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.
+Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the
+person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship
+of our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her
+guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,
+charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience
+of the Japanese erudites. Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn,
+is very pretty Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most
+redoubtable adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats
+(containing newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the
+Polypheme puffing past Sandy Hook.
+
+There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the serial.
+
+Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for his pained frown at
+the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would
+keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;
+and mischievously she said: ‘Do you take to Delphica?’
+
+He replied, with an evident sincerity, ‘I cannot say I do.’
+
+Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?
+
+‘One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,’ Victor said to
+Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.
+
+‘In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals. I
+want to know what comes of it,’ said the doctor.
+
+‘There’s a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me, it will all end in
+satire upon poor Old England. According to Colney, we excel in nothing.’
+
+‘I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment
+for which I am indebted to you to-day.’
+
+‘Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The contralto?’
+
+‘Exquisite.’
+
+Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.
+
+‘Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?’ said Victor;
+and hearing ‘the privilege’ mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to
+limpid. ‘You have seen how it stands with us here!’ At once he related
+what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the
+case.
+
+Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her
+desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to
+the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted
+man; setting her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of the
+husband soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor’s comrade’s manner
+of it, was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling
+for the elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung
+away the world for him and borne him their one dear child. Victor took
+the blame wholly upon himself. ‘It is right that you should know,’ he
+said to the doctor’s thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame;
+and a flame shot across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the
+hurricane of a man he was in the passion: indicating the subjection
+of such a temperament as this Victor Radnor’s to trials of the moral
+restraints beyond his human power.
+
+Dr. Themison said: ‘Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but
+supposing the poor lady...?’
+
+Victor broke in: ‘I see her wish: I will.’
+
+The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison’s faltering query.
+
+We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to
+stammer. If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor’s hand warmly.
+
+‘I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind
+will be granted?’ he said.
+
+‘She has but to call me to her,’ said Victor, stiffening his back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS
+
+Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that the day of the
+great gathering there had been authoritatively foretold as fine, by
+Mr. Victor Radnor; and he delivered his prophecy in the teeth of
+the South-western gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really
+inspired belief or a kind of trust; some supposing him to draw from
+reserves of observation, some choosing to confide in the singularly
+winged sparkle of his eyes. Lady Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs.
+Blathenoy; and Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it. And when women
+stand for Hope, and any worshipped man for Promise, nothing less than
+redoubled confusion of him dissolves the union. Even then they cling to
+it, under an ejaculation, that it might and should have been otherwise;
+fancy partly has it otherwise, in her caerulean home above the weeping.
+So it is good at all points to prophecy with the aspect of the radiant
+day foretold.
+
+A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to pieces. Nataly’s
+faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered beneath the crashes. She had
+not much power of heart to desire anything save that which her bosom
+disavowed. Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated. She wished
+her beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all
+successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness
+of blood and being. Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack
+of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feeling, under
+privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused
+her reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of
+him; known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both
+sexes in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are
+proved quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of
+nature. A constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired,
+and was bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed
+her; a perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject
+to the thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its
+reviled brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions.
+She coldly felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been
+the temporary rapture. Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate
+withholding of it helped her spirit to escape a stain. Less coldly, she
+thanked at heart her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke. It
+plighted them over flesh.
+
+He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike
+himself, a word of City affairs: ‘That fellow Blathenoy, with his
+increasing multitude of bills at the Bank: must watch him there, sit
+there regularly. One rather likes his wife. By the way, if you see him
+near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don’t forget. He heads
+the subscription list of Lady Blachington’s Charity.’
+
+Victor chuckled at Colney’s humping of shoulders and mouth, while
+the tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist. ‘If old Colney had
+listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa
+began heaving, he’d have been a fairly wealthy man by now... ha! it
+would have genialized him. A man may be a curmudgeon with money: the
+rule is for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at
+his countrymen all round and getting hated. Well, Colney popular, can’t
+be imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid. He
+has the six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his
+miserable pay for Essays. Literature! Of course, he sours. But don’t
+let me hear of bachelors moralists. There he sits at his Temple Chambers
+hatching epigrams... pretends to have the office of critic! Honest old
+fellow, as far as his condition permits. I tell him it will be fine
+to-morrow.’
+
+‘You are generally right, dear,’ Nataly said.
+
+Her dropping breath was audible.
+
+Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven’s blessing on her
+and a dose of soft nursery prattle.
+
+He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day. She heard him sigh
+settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of
+the world’s good children. She could have turned to him, to show him she
+was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear
+founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the
+semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror
+kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was
+the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.
+
+Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor’s popularity was already up over the
+extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
+augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
+roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine tomorrow, to
+a certainty! he had been heard to say. The doubt weighed for something;
+the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for
+he had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was
+a real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
+hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten. The reasoning
+went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
+if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one
+of the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
+gifts. ‘You can’t foretell weather!’ cried a pothouse sceptic. But the
+workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics among
+the common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a
+whiff from the delirium attending any mention of his name.
+
+How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
+Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to
+have the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the
+bearing of his politics? Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days
+when wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful
+to their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
+irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis,
+if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
+trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
+on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
+merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among
+electoral shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he
+subscribed, patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular;
+he was unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining
+from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of
+cloud, more agreeable to earth’s populations than his pinched appearance
+of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January
+day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his
+popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.
+He did this:--and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing
+wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
+assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their
+thinking well of themselves. It came first from the workmen at his
+house. ‘The right sort, and no humbug: likes you to be men.’ Such a
+report made tropical soil for any new seed.
+
+Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even
+in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think
+it of ourselves. Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and
+you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are
+equal. Humanity’s historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration
+bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently
+has to be administered. Certes the cocks among men do not require the
+process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
+submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen,
+cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands,
+a Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel
+themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.
+Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on
+legs. Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy
+of wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat
+in their persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative
+exaltation. They send up their rough glory round the name of the
+gentleman--a stranger, but their friend: and never is friend to be
+thought of as a stranger--who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham
+and thereabout, that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of
+a doddered humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he
+has unwound.
+
+Says he: Is it a Charity Concert? Charity begins at home, says he: and
+if I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows
+you grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts
+down here. He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse
+him. Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors
+all sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues ‘em and
+rubs ‘em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to
+his business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor
+men don’t ask for more. A working man, all the world over, asks but
+justice and a little relaxation--just a collar of fat to his lean.
+
+Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and
+repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
+instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
+he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day. The remarks
+of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic
+to extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
+substantially, they are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations
+of Mr. Radnor’s riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A merchant, a
+holder of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails,
+a princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim
+of the man? It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure
+of our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets! The
+Romans have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the
+populace; we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in
+this vaunted age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the
+hands of the populace! Panem et circenses! Mr. Caddis repeated it, after
+his fathers; his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original
+voracity. There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their
+appetites. And it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.
+
+Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
+in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
+bit of fun. Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor
+had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about. Cartloads of
+provisions had been seen to come. An immediate reward of a deed of
+benevolence, is a thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets
+were paid for as if for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr.
+Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric
+juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were
+chilled, on their steps along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the
+house, by seeing three tables of prodigious length, where very evidently
+a feast had raged: one to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted
+by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children. These
+had been at it for two merry hours. They had risen. They were beef and
+pudding on legs; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the
+flourishes of a military band. Boys, who had shaken room through their
+magical young corporations for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing
+circle to the crumbled cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes
+back, and buried another tart. Plenty still reigned: it was the will of
+the Master that it should.
+
+We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the
+Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates: we have no
+right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.
+Signora Bianca Luciani: of whom we have read almost to the hearing her;
+enough to make the mistake at times. The grand violinist Durandarte:
+forcibly detained on his way to America. Mr. Radnor sent him a blank
+cheque:--no!--so Mr. Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible;
+a great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style. We have
+now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife--the drum, some say! We
+may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.
+
+England’s nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing
+population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained
+its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting
+them to downright uses. Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be
+satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at
+fife and drum.
+
+But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings for a ticket to
+hear the music they love, and not having full assurance of refreshment,
+are often, latterly, satirical upon their superiors; and, over this
+country at least, require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts
+in them may be reconciled with aristocracy. Do not listen to them
+further on the subject. They vote safely enough when the day comes, if
+there is no praetematurally strong pull the other way.
+
+They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, fourth down the
+Concert-bill; marked for a flute-duet with Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta
+Victoria Radnor accompanying at the piano. It may mean?... do you want
+a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean? The father’s wealth is
+enormous; the mother is a beautiful majestic woman in her prime. And
+see, she sings: a wonderful voice. And lower down, a duet with her
+daughter: violins and clarionet; how funny; something Hungarian. And
+in the Second Part, Schubert’s Ave Maria--Oh! when we hear that, we
+dissolve. She was a singer before he married her, they say: a lady by
+birth one of the first County families. But it was a gift, and she could
+not be kept from it, and was going, when they met--and it was love! the
+most perfect duet. For him she abandoned the Stage. You must remember,
+that in their young days the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem
+entertained for it now. Domestic Concerts are got up to gratify her: a
+Miss Fredericks: good old English name. Mr. Radnor calls his daughter,
+Freddy; so Mr. Taplow, the architect, says. They are for modern music
+and ancient. Tannhauser, Wagner, you see. Pergolese.
+
+Flute-duet, Mercadante. Here we have him! O--Durandarte: Air Basque,
+variations--his own. Again, Senor Durandarte, Mendelssohn. Encore
+him, and he plays you a national piece. A dark little creature a
+Life-guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the fifteen
+minutes of the performance; but he fills the hall and thrills the heart,
+wafts you to heaven; and does it as though he were conversing with his
+Andalusian lady-love in easy whispers about their mutual passion
+for Spanish chocolate all the while: so the musical critic of the
+Tirra-Lirra says. Express trains every half hour from London; all the
+big people of the city. Mr. Radnor commands them, like Royalty. Totally
+different from that old figure of the wealthy City merchant; young,
+vigorous, elegant, a man of taste, highest culture, speaks the languages
+of Europe, patron of the Arts, a perfect gentleman. His mother was one
+of the Montgomerys, Mr. Taplow says.
+
+And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer, dying knighted.
+But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take less than a Barony--and then only
+with descent of title to his daughter, in her own right.
+
+Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose that he should say.
+
+Carriages were in flow for an hour: pedestrians formed a wavy coil.
+Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall
+contain them? Marvels were told of the hall. Every ticket entered and
+was enfolded; almost all had a seat. Chivalry stood. It is a breeched
+abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a
+restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good
+things be rather in the fair ones’ favour, as they are to think: with
+the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality
+puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be
+mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively
+show their good sense. They send up an incense of perfumery, all the
+bouquets of the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of
+woman in the nose of man. They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and
+muslins, magic interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it. See,
+hear, smell, they are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry
+with them; otherwise they are better in the kitchen. Is there--but there
+is not; there is not present one of the chivalrous breeched who could
+prefer the shocking emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety
+on our sensations and inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of
+them.
+
+Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of
+Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been
+to the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady’s man, a
+rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that
+thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
+necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
+him, to conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would look
+outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other,
+Lady Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England’s
+conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go
+down to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and
+are to be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while
+they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently
+does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies,
+Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though
+one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral
+spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere);
+holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric’s blue mud of the
+glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the
+neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among
+them, chatting right and left.
+
+Lady Carmine asked him: ‘Is Durandarte counted on?’
+
+He answered: ‘I made sure of the Luciani.’
+
+She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
+instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as
+paste will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by
+bold supernumeraries.
+
+He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
+flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.
+
+Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
+Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
+lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--Mr.
+Peridon was generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of
+amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a movement of
+Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. ‘They have come,’ he said; he jumped on the
+orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in
+the retiring-room.
+
+His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton. An
+opinion was unuttered. His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
+Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole,
+a pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened
+was not flustered by it. But the act of leading, appeared as an official
+thing to do. Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under
+a breath, without a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell
+Blachington would have preferred Radnor’s not leading or playing either.
+Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
+in a man of station... notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
+least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
+old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes. It is
+true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!
+
+The colonel fished for Lady Carmine’s view. And Lady Swanage too? Both
+of the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor’s leading--for a
+leading off. Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
+prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
+unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these ladies had none of
+the colonel’s remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
+adolescent’s intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
+supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
+to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a baton without looking
+affected. And at one of the Colonel’s Clubs in town, only five years
+back, an English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now
+by the mystery of events knighted!--had been (he makes now fifteen
+thousand a year) black-balled. ‘Fiddler? no; can’t admit a Fiddler to
+associate on equal terms with gentlemen.’ Only five years back: and at
+present we are having the Fiddler everywhere.
+
+A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor
+had kept himself somewhat more exclusive. Dr. Schlesien heard remarks,
+upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly. Do these English
+care one bit for music?--for anything finer than material stuffs?--what
+that man Durance calls, ‘their beef, their beer, and their pew in
+eternity’? His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they
+did.
+
+But they do. Art has a hold of them. They pay for it; and the thing
+purchased grapples. It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in
+time: entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little
+objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians. A
+people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting
+in the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state,
+like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.
+Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
+much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
+Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
+elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is
+there among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
+bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
+for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
+were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
+great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
+his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
+as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone
+or mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
+beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert’s pasture.
+
+Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
+truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
+breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
+a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
+will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
+And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists
+jump on his back. Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
+England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
+scourge. The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
+the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
+power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
+the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
+excites to satire. Colney Durance had his excuses. He could point to the
+chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning their
+survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating unreason
+and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around them. Viola
+under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich
+national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies, the
+idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing to one,
+that they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their poorer
+fawning fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in tricking the
+world and their Maker: and so forth, a tiresome tirade: and as it was
+not on his lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let him
+grind that hurdy-gurdy for himself. His friend Victor set it stirring:
+Victor had here what he aimed at!
+
+How Success derides Ambition! And for this he imperilled the happiness
+of the worthy woman he loved! Exposed her to our fen-fogs and foul
+snakes--of whom one or more might be in the assembly now: all because
+of his insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the minute!
+Colney’s rapid interjections condensed upon the habitual shrug at human
+folly, just when Victor, fronting the glassy stare of Colonel Corfe,
+tapped to start his orchestra through the lively first bars of the
+overture to Zampa.
+
+We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thoroughly fills,
+whatever it may be. Zampa takes horse from the opening. We have no
+amateur conductor riding ahead: violins, ‘cellos, piano, wind-stops:
+Peridon, Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn, Dudley
+Sowerby: they are spirited on, patted, subdued, muted, raised, rushed
+anew, away, held in hand, in both hands. Not earnestness worn as a
+cloak, but issuing, we see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader
+of men. The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a development
+in the character of England’s merchant princes. The homage we pay him
+flatters us. A delightful overture, masterfully executed; ended too
+soon; except that the programme forbids the ordinary interpretation
+of prolonged applause. Mr. Radnor is one of those who do everything
+consummately. And we have a monition within, that a course of spiritual
+enjoyment will rouse the call for bodily refreshment. His genial nod and
+laugh and word of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we know
+not how, of provision to come. At the door of the retiring-room, see, he
+is congratulated by Luciani and Durandarte. Miss Priscilla Graves is
+now to sing a Schumann. Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus
+Barmby. We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian
+Operatic singer! Ices after the first part is over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. DARTREY FENELLAN
+
+Had Nataly and Nesta known who was outside helping Skepsey to play ball
+with the boys, they would not have worked through their share of the
+performance with so graceful a composure. Even Simeon Fenellan was
+unaware that his half-brother Dartrey had landed in England. Dartrey
+went first to Victor’s office, where he found Skepsey packing the
+day’s letters and circulars into the bag for the delivery of them
+at Lakelands. They sprang a chatter, and they missed the last of the
+express trains which did, not greatly signify, Skepsey said, ‘as it was
+a Concert.’ To hear his hero talk, was the music for him; and he richly
+enjoyed the pacing along the railway-platform.
+
+Arrived on the grounds, they took opposite sides in a game of rounders,
+at that moment tossing heads or tails for innings. These boys were
+slovenly players, and were made unhappy by Skepsey’s fussy instructions
+to them in smartness. They had a stupid way of feeding the stick, and
+they ran sprawling; it concerned Great Britain for them to learn how to
+use their legs. It was pitiful for the country to see how lumpish her
+younger children were. Dartrey knew his little man and laughed, after
+warning him that his English would want many lessons before they
+stomached the mixture of discipline and pleasure. So it appeared: the
+pride of the boys in themselves, their confidence, enjoyment of the
+game, were all gone; and all were speedily out but Skepsey; who ran for
+the rounder, with his coat off, sharp as a porpoise, and would have got
+it, he had it in his grasp, when, at the jump, just over the line of the
+goal, a clever fling, if ever was, caught him a crack on that part of
+the human frame where sound is best achieved. Then were these young
+lumps transformed to limber, lither, merry fellows. They rejoiced
+Skepsey’s heart; they did everything better, ran and dodged and threw in
+a style to win the nod from the future official inspector of Games and
+Amusements of the common people; a deputy of the Government, proposed by
+Skepsey to his hero with a deferential eagerness. Dartrey clapped him on
+the shoulder, softly laughing.
+
+‘System--Mr. Durance is right--they must have system, if they are to
+appreciate a holiday,’ Skepsey said; and he sent a wretched gaze around,
+at the justification of some of the lurid views of Mr. Durance, in signs
+of the holiday wasted;--impoverishing the country’s manhood in a small
+degree, it may be argued, but we ask, can the country afford it, while
+foreign nations are drilling their youth, teaching them to be ready to
+move in squads or masses, like the fist of a pugilist. Skepsey left
+it to his look to speak his thought. He saw an enemy in tobacco. The
+drowsiness of beer had stretched various hulks under trees. Ponderous
+cricket lumbered half-alive. Flabby fun knocked-up a yell. And it was
+rather vexatious to see girls dancing in good time to the band-music.
+One had a male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the thing he
+could not do.
+
+Apparently, too certainly, none but the girls had a notion of orderly
+muscular exercise. Of what use are girls! Girls have their one mission
+on earth; and let them be healthy by all means, for the sake of
+it; only, they should not seem to prove that old England is better
+represented on the female side. Skepsey heard, with a nip of spite at
+his bosom, a small body of them singing in chorus as they walked in
+step, arm in arm, actually marched: and to the rearward, none of these
+girls heeding; there were the louts at their burlesque of jigs and
+fisticuffs! ‘Cherry Ripe,’ was the song.
+
+‘It’s delightful to hear them!’ said Dartrey.
+
+Skepsey muttered jealously of their having been trained.
+
+The song, which drew Dartrey Fenellan to the quick of an English home,
+planted him at the same time in Africa to hear it. Dewy on a parched
+forehead it fell, England the shedding heaven.
+
+He fetched a deep breath, as of gratitude for vital refreshment. He had
+his thoughts upon the training of our English to be something besides
+the machinery of capitalists, and upon the country as a blessed mother
+instead of the most capricious of maudlin step-dames.
+
+He flicked his leg with the stick he carried, said: ‘Your master’s the
+man to make a change among them, old friend!’ and strolled along to
+a group surrounding two fellows who shammed a bout at single-stick.
+Vacuity in the attack on either side, contributed to the joint success
+of the defense. They paused under inspection; and Dartrey said: ‘You’re
+burning to give them a lesson, Skepsey.’
+
+Skepsey had no objection to his hero’s doing so, though at his personal
+cost.
+
+The sticks were handed to them; the crowd increased; their rounders boys
+had spied them, and came trooping to the scene. Skepsey was directed to
+hit in earnest. His defensive attitude flashed, and he was at head and
+right and left leg, and giving point, recovering, thrusting madly, and
+again at shoulder and thigh, with bravos for reward of a man meaning
+business; until a topper on his hat, a cut over the right thigh, and the
+stick in his middlerib, told the spectators of a scientific adversary;
+and loudly now the gentleman was cheered. An undercurrent of warm
+feeling ran for the plucky little one at it hot again in spite of the
+strokes, and when he fetched his master a handsome thud across the
+shoulder, and the gentleman gave up and complimented him, Skepsey had
+applause.
+
+He then begged his hero to put the previous couple in position, through
+a few of the opening movements. They were horribly sheepish at first.
+Meantime two boys had got hold of sticks, and both had gone to work in
+Skepsey’s gallant style; and soon one was howling. He excused himself,
+because of the funny-bone, situated, in his case, higher than usual up
+the arm. And now the pair of men were giving and taking cuts to make a
+rhinoceros caper.
+
+‘Very well; begin that way; try what you can bear,’ said Dartrey.
+
+Skepsey watched them, in felicity for love of the fray, pained by the
+disregard of science.
+
+Comments on the pretty play, indicating a reminiscent acquaintance with
+it, and the capacity for critical observations, were started. Assaults,
+wonderful tricks of a slashing Life-Guardsman, one spectator had
+witnessed at an exhibition in a London hall. Boxing too. You may see
+displays of boxing still in places. How about a prizefight?--With money
+on it?--Eh, but you don’t expect men to stand up to be knocked into
+rumpsteaks for nothing?--No, but it’s they there bets!--Right, and
+that’s a game gone to ruin along of outsiders.--But it always was and it
+always will be popular with Englishmen!
+
+Great English names of young days, before the wintry shadow of the Law
+had blighted them, received their withered laurels. Emulous boys were in
+the heroic posture. Good! sparring does no hurt: Skepsey seized a likely
+lad, Dartrey another. Nature created the Ring for them. Now then, arms
+and head well up, chest hearty, shoulders down, out with the right fist,
+just below the level of the chin; out with the left fist farther, right
+out, except for that bit of curve; so, and draw it slightly back for
+wary-pussy at the spring. Firm you stand, feeling the muscles of both
+legs, left half a pace ahead, right planted, both stringy. None of your
+milk-pail looks; show us jaw, you bulldogs. Now then, left from the
+shoulder, straight at right of head.--Good, and alacrity called on
+vigour in Skepsey’s pupil; Dartrey’s had the fist on his mouth before he
+could parry right arm up. ‘Foul blow!’ Dartrey cried. Skepsey vowed to
+the contrary. Dartrey reiterated his charge. Skepsey was a figure of
+negation, gesticulating and protesting. Dartrey appealed tempestuously
+to the Ring; Skepsey likewise, in a tone of injury. He addressed a
+remonstrance to Captain Dartrey.
+
+‘Hang your captain, sir! I call you a coward; come on,’ said the
+resolute gentleman, already in ripe form for the attack. His blue eyes
+were like the springing sunrise over ridges of the seas; and Skepsey
+jumped to his meaning.
+
+Boys and men were spectators of a real scientific set-to, a lovely show.
+They were half puzzled, it seemed so deadly. And the little one got in
+his blows at the gentleman, who had to be hopping. Only, the worse the
+gentleman caught it, the friendlier his countenance became. That was the
+wonder, and that gave them the key. But it was deliciously near to the
+real thing.
+
+Dartrey and Skepsey shook hands.
+
+‘And now, you fellows, you’re to know, that this is one of the
+champions; and you take your lesson from him and thank him,’ Dartrey
+said, as he turned on his heel to strike and greet the flow from the
+house.
+
+‘Dartrey come!’ Victor, Fenellan, Colney, had him by the hand in turn.
+Pure sweetness of suddenly awakened joy sat in Nataly’s eyes as she swam
+to welcome him, Nesta moved a step, seemed hesitating, and she tripped
+forward. ‘Dear Captain Dartrey!’
+
+He did not say: ‘But what a change in you!’
+
+‘It is blue-butterfly, all the same,’ Nataly spoke to his look.
+
+Victor hurriedly pronounced the formal introduction between the Hon.
+Dudley Sowerby and Captain Dartrey Fenellan. The bronze face and the
+milky bowed to one another ceremoniously; the latter faintly flushing.
+
+‘So here you are at last,’ Victor said. ‘You stay with us.’
+
+‘To-morrow or later, if you’ll have me. I go down to my people
+to-night.’
+
+‘But you stay in England now?’ Nataly’s voice wavered on the question.
+
+‘There’s a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah before the week’s
+ended.’
+
+‘Ah, dear, dear!’ sighed Fenellan; ‘and out of good comes evil!--as
+grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his
+dripping wife from the mud of the Deluge waters. Do you mean to be
+running and Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?’
+
+‘Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!’
+Dartrey said.
+
+His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his
+brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the
+sight of the women who knew him.
+
+The bill-broker’s fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity
+concerning him to Nataly. He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a
+soldier: and was he married? Yes, he was married.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor’s tone. She could
+account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the
+feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets. She
+was young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly
+awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man,
+fretful for a dash of imprudence. This Mrs. Radnor should be the one to
+second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed
+of any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath--she required
+it, for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip: proved such,
+without a day’s variation during the whole of the ten wedded months.
+Nataly gratified her spoken wish. Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady,
+and she withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies
+had the wish ungratified. Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and
+their complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced
+officer so well.
+
+Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the
+multitude. It circulated, one knows not how. Eloquent as the whiffs to
+the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are
+sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the
+field. Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he
+was among the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a
+lawyer should do. The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte
+divine!--did not everybody think so? Everybody did, in default of a term
+for overtopping it. Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices
+are stronger. Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the
+ineffable. Where was Durandarte now? Gone; already gone; off with the
+Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear
+friend Mr. Radnor. Cheque fifty guineas: hardly more on both sides than
+an exchange of smiles. Ah, these merchant-princes! What of Mr. Radnor’s
+amateur instrumentalists? Amateurs, they are not to be named: perfect
+musicians. Mr. Radnor is the perfection of a host. Yes, yes; Mrs.
+Radnor; Miss Radnor too: delicious voices; but what is it about Mr.
+Radnor so captivating! He is not quite English, yet he is not at all
+foreign. Is he very adventurous in business, as they say?
+
+‘Soundest head in the City of London,’ Mr. Blathenoy remarked.
+
+Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.
+
+The crowd interjected, half-sighing. We ought to be proud of such a man!
+Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerating, says its heart. But that we are
+wholly grateful to him, is a distinct conclusion. And he may be one of
+the great men of his time: he has a quite individual style of dress.
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance:
+
+‘Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English people.’
+
+‘If he can prove himself to be sufficiently the dupe of the English
+people,’ said Colney.
+
+‘Idol--dupe?’ interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eyebrows fixed at the
+perch of Colney’s famous ‘national interrogation’ over vacancy of
+understanding, as if from the pull of a string. He had his audience with
+him; and the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight
+of a planted barb.
+
+Colney was asked to explain. He never explained. He performed a series
+of astonishing leaps, like the branchy baboon above the traveller’s head
+in the tropical forest, and led them into the trap they assisted him to
+prepare for them. ‘No humour, do you say? The English have no humour?’ a
+nephew of Lady Blachington’s inquired of him, with polite pugnacity, and
+was cordially assured, that ‘he vindicated them.’
+
+‘And Altruistic! another specimen of the modern coinage,’ a classical
+Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust, remarked to a lady, as they
+passed.
+
+Colney pricked-up his ears. It struck him that he might fish for
+suggestions in aid of the Grand Argument before the Elders of the Court
+of Japan. Dr. Wardan, whose recognition he could claim, stated to him,
+that the lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legitimate
+quality now being inflicted upon the language.
+
+‘The slang from below is perhaps preferable?’ said Colney.
+
+‘As little-less.’
+
+‘But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must continue to practise
+piracy, surely, or else take reinforcements in slang, otherwise it is
+inexpressive of new ideas.’
+
+‘Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.’
+
+‘If insular. They will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners.
+You would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious
+currency? Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be
+clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the
+English language to become the universal. If we refuse additions from
+above, they force themselves on us from below.’
+
+Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked the substance.
+
+‘One is to understand that the English language has these pretensions?’
+he said:--he minced in his manner, after the well-known mortar-board
+and tassel type; the mouthing of a petrifaction: clearly useless to the
+pleadings of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.
+
+He gave no grip to Colney, who groaned at cheap Donnish sarcasm, and let
+him go, after dealing him a hard pellet or two in a cracker-covering.
+
+There was Victor all over the field netting his ephemerae! And he who
+feeds on them, to pay a price for their congratulations and flatteries,
+he is one of them himself!
+
+Nesta came tripping from the Rev. Septimus Barmby. ‘Dear Mr. Durance,
+where is Captain Dartrey?’
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy had just conducted her husband through a crowd, for an
+introduction of him to Captain Dartrey. That was perceptible.
+
+Dudley Sowerby followed Nesta closely: he struck across the path of the
+Rev. Septimus: again he had the hollow of her ear at his disposal.
+
+‘Mr. Radnor was excellent. He does everything consummately: really, we
+are all sensible of it. I am. He must lead us in a symphony. These light
+“champagne overtures” of French composers, as Mr. Fenellan calls
+them, do not bring out his whole ability:--Zampa, Le Pre aux clercs,
+Masaniello, and the like.’
+
+‘Your duet together went well.’
+
+‘Thanks to you--to you. You kept us together.’
+
+‘Papa was the runaway or strain-the-leash, if there was one.’
+
+‘He is impetuous, he is so fervent. But, Miss Radnor, I could not be the
+runaway-with you... with you at the piano. Indeed, I... shall we stroll
+down? I love the lake.’
+
+‘You will hear the bell for your cold dinner very soon.’
+
+‘I am not hungry. I would so much rather talk--hear you. But you are
+hungry? You have been singing twice: three times! Opera singers, they
+say, eat hot suppers; they drink stout. And I never heard your voice
+more effective. Yours is a voice that... something of the feeling one
+has in hearing cathedral voices: carry one up. I remember, in Dresden,
+once, a Fraulein Kuhnstreich, a prodigy, very young, considering her
+accomplishments. But it was not the same.’
+
+Nesta wondered at Dartrey Fenellan for staying so long with Mr. and Mrs.
+Blathenoy.
+
+‘Ah, Mr. Sowerby, if I am to have flattery, I cannot take it as a
+milliner’s dumb figure wears the beautiful dress; I must point out my
+view of some of my merits.’
+
+‘Oh! do, I beg, Miss... You have a Christian name and I too: and once
+... not Mr. Sowerby: yes, it was Dudley!
+
+‘Quite accidentally, and a world of pardons entreated.’
+
+‘And Dudley begged Dudley might be Dudley always!’
+
+He was deepening to the Barmby intonation--apparently Cupid’s; but a
+shade more airily Pagan, not so fearfully clerical.
+
+Her father had withdrawn Dartrey Fenellan from Mr. and Mrs. Blathenoy.
+Dr. Schlesien was bowing with Dartrey.
+
+‘And if Durandarte would only--but you are one with Miss Graves to
+depreciate my Durandarte, in favour of the more classical Jachimo; whom
+we all admire; but you shall be just,’ said she, and she pouted. She had
+seen her father plant Dartrey Fenellan in the midst of a group of City
+gentlemen.
+
+Simeon touched among them to pluck at his brother. He had not a chance;
+he retired, and swam into the salmon-net of seductive Mrs. Blathenoy’s
+broad bright smile.
+
+‘It’s a matter of mines, and they’re hovering in the attitude of
+the query, like corkscrews over a bottle, profoundly indifferent to
+blood-relationships,’ he said to her.
+
+‘Pray, stay and be consoled by me,’ said the fair young woman. ‘You
+are to point me out all the distinguished people. Is it true, that your
+brother has left the army?’
+
+‘Dartrey no longer wears the red. Here comes Colonel Corfe, who does.
+England has her army still!’
+
+‘His wife persuaded him?’
+
+‘You see he is wearing the black.’
+
+‘For her? How very very sad! Tell me--what a funnily dressed woman
+meeting that gentleman!’
+
+‘Hush--a friend of the warrior. Splendid weather, Colonel Corfe.’
+
+‘Superb toilettes!’ The colonel eyed Mrs. Blathenoy dilatingly,
+advanced, bowed, and opened the siege.
+
+She decided a calculation upon his age, made a wall of it, smilingly
+agreed with his encomium of the Concert, and toned her voice to
+Fenellan’s comprehension: ‘Did it occur recently?’
+
+‘Months; in Africa; I haven’t the date.’
+
+‘Such numbers of people one would wish to know! Who are those ladies
+holding a Court, where Mr. Radnor is?’
+
+‘Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage--if it is your wish?’ interposed the
+colonel.
+
+She dealt him a forgiving smile. ‘And that pleasant-looking old
+gentleman?’
+
+Colonel Corfe drew-up. Fenellan said: ‘Are we veterans at forty or so?’
+
+‘Well, it ‘s the romance, perhaps!’ She raised her shoulders.
+
+The colonel’s intelligence ran a dog’s nose for a lady’s interjections.
+‘The romance?... at forty, fifty? gone? Miss Julinks, the great heiress
+and a beauty; has chosen him over the heads of all the young men of his
+time. Cranmer Lotsdale. Most romantic history!’
+
+‘She’s in love with that, I suppose.’
+
+‘Now you direct my attention to him,’ said Fenellan, ‘the writing of the
+romantic history has made the texture look a trifle thready. You have a
+terrible eye.’
+
+It was thrown to where the person stood who had first within a few
+minutes helped her to form critical estimates of men, more consciously
+to read them.
+
+‘Your brother stays in England?’
+
+‘The fear is, that he’s off again.’
+
+‘Annoying for you. If I had a brother, I would not let him go.’
+
+‘How would you detain him?’
+
+‘Locks and bolts, clock wrong, hands and arms, kneeling--the fourth act
+of the Huguenots!’
+
+‘He went by way of the window, I think. But that was a lover.’
+
+‘Oh! well!’ she flushed. She did not hear the ‘neglected and astonished
+colonel speak, and she sought diversion in saying to Fenellan: ‘So many
+people of distinction are assembled here to-day! Tell me, who is that
+pompous gentleman, who holds his arms up doubled, as he walks?’
+
+‘Like flappers of a penguin: and advances in jerks: he is head of the
+great Firm of Quatley Brothers: Sir Abraham: finances or farms one of
+the South American Republics: we call him, Pride of Port. He consumes it
+and he presents it.’
+
+‘And who is that little man, who stops everybody?’
+
+‘People of distinction indeed! That little man--is your upper lip
+underrateing him?... When a lady’s lip is erratically disdainful,
+it suggests a misuse of a copious treasury, deserving to be mulcted,
+punished--how?--who can say?--that little man, now that little man, with
+a lift of his little finger, could convulse the Bacon Market!’
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy shook. Hearing Colonel Corfe exclaim:
+
+‘Bacon Market!’ she let fly a peal. Then she turned to a fresh
+satellite, a round and a ruddy, ‘at her service ever,’ Mr. Beaves
+Urmsing, and repeated Fenellan’s words. He, in unfeigned wonderment at
+such unsuspected powers, cried: ‘Dear me!’ and stared at the little man,
+making the pretty lady’s face a twinkling dew.
+
+He had missed the Concert. Was it first-rate? Ecstasy answered in the
+female voice.
+
+‘Hem’d fool I am to keep appointments!’ he muttered.
+
+She reproved him: ‘Fie, Mr. Urmsing; it’s the making of them, not the
+keeping!’
+
+‘Ah, my dear ma’am, if I’d had Blathenoy’s luck when he made a certain
+appointment. And he was not so much older than me? The old ones get the
+prizes!’
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing prompted Colonel Corfe to laugh in triumph. The
+colonel’s eyebrows were up in fixity over sleepy lids. He brightened to
+propose the conducting of the pretty woman to the banquet.
+
+‘We shall see them going in,’ said she. ‘Mr. Radnor has a French cook,
+who does wonders. But I heard him asking for Mr. Beaves Urmsing. I’m
+sure he expected The Marigolds at his Concert.’
+
+‘Anything to oblige the company,’ said the rustic ready chorister,
+clearing his throat.
+
+The lady’s feet were bent in the direction of a grassy knoll, where
+sunflowers, tulips, dahlias, peonies, of the sex eclipsed at a distance
+its roses and lilies. Fenellan saw Dartrey, still a centre of the
+merchantmen, strolling thither.
+
+‘And do you know, your brother is good enough to dine with us next week,
+Thursday, down here,’ she murmured. ‘I could venture to command?--if you
+are not induced.’
+
+‘Whichever word applies to a faithful subject.’
+
+‘I do so wish your brother had not left the army!’
+
+‘You have one son of Mars.’
+
+Her eyes took the colonel up to cast him down: he was not the antidote.
+She said to him: ‘Luciani’s voice wears better than her figure.’
+
+The colonel replied: ‘I remember,’ and corrected himself, ‘at Eton, in
+jackets: she was not so particularly slim; never knew how to dress. You
+beat Italians there! She moved one as a youngster.’
+
+‘Eton boys are so susceptible!’
+
+‘Why, hulloa, don’t I remember her coming out!--and do you mean to tell
+me,’ Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally addressed the colonel, ‘that you were
+at Eton when... why, what age do you give the poor woman, then!’ He
+bellowed, ‘Eh?’ as it were a bull crowing.
+
+The colonel retreated to one of his defensive corners. ‘I am not aware
+that I meant to tell you anything.’
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on Fenellan: ‘Fellow’s a born
+donkey!’
+
+‘And the mother lived?’ said Fenellan.
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.
+
+Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surrounding and
+felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan conversing with fair ones,
+and it struck a light in him; he went three steps backward, with shouts.
+‘Dam funny fellow! eh? who is he? I must have that man at my table.
+Worth fifty Colonel Jackasses! And I ‘ve got a son in the Guards: and as
+much laugh in him, he ‘s got, as a bladder. But we’ll make a party, eh,
+Radnor? with that friend o’ yours. Dam funny fellow! and precious little
+of it going on now among the young lot. They’re for seeing ghosts and
+gaping their jaws; all for the quavers instead of the capers.’
+
+He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the capers. A second
+glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anecdote, as he called it, seizing
+Victor’s arm, to have him out of earshot of the ladies. Delivery,
+not without its throes, was accomplished, but imperfectly, owing to
+sympathetic convulsions, under which Mr. Beaves Urmsing’s countenance
+was crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring rhubarb-leaf. Unable
+to repeat the brevity of Fenellan’s rejoinder, he expatiated on it to
+convey it, swearing that it was the kind of thing done in the old days,
+when men were witty dogs:--‘pat! and pat back! as in the pantomime.’
+
+‘Repartee!’ said Victor. ‘He has it. You shall know him. You’re the man
+for him.’
+
+‘He for me, that he is!--“Hope the mother’s doing well? My card”:--eh?
+Grave as an owl! Look, there goes the donkey, lady to right and left,
+all ears for him--ha! ha! I must have another turn with your friend.
+“Mother lived, did she?” Dam funny fellow, all of the olden time! And
+a dinner, bachelor dinner, six of us, at my place, next week, say
+Wednesday, half-past six, for a long evening--flowing bowl--eh, shall it
+be?’
+
+Nesta came looking to find her Captain Dartrey.
+
+Mr. Beaves Urmsing grew courtly of the olden time. He spied Colonel
+Corfe anew, and ‘Donkey!’ rose to split the roar at his mouth, and full
+of his anecdote, he pursued some congenial acquaintances, crying to his
+host: ‘Wednesday, mind! eh? by George, your friend’s gizzarded me for
+the day!’
+
+Plumped with the rich red stream of life, this last of the squires of
+old England thumped along among the guests, a very tuning-fork to keep
+them at their pitch of enthusiasm. He encountered Mr. Caddis, and it was
+an encounter. Mr. Caddis represented his political opinions; but here
+was this cur of a Caddis whineing his niminy note from his piminy nob,
+when he was asked for his hearty echo of the praises of this jolly good
+fellow come to waken the neighbourhood, to be a blessing, a blazing
+hearth, a fall of manna:--and thank the Lord for him, you desertdog! ‘He
+‘s a merchant prince, and he’s a prince of a man, if you’re for titles.
+Eh? you “assent to my encomiums.” You’ll be calling me Mr. Speaker next.
+Hang me, Caddis, if those Parliamentary benches of yours aren’t freezing
+you from your seat up, and have got to your jaw--my belief!’
+
+Mr. Caddis was left reflecting, that we have, in the dispensations
+of Providence, when we have a seat, to submit to castigations from
+butcherly men unaccountably commissioned to solidify the seat. He could
+have preached a discourse upon Success, to quiet the discontentment of
+the unseated. And our world of seats oddly gained, quaintly occupied,
+maliciously beset, insensately envied, needs the discourse. But it was
+not delivered, else would it have been here written down without mercy,
+as a medical prescript, one of the grand specifics. He met Victor,
+and, between his dread of him and the counsels of a position subject
+to stripes, he was a genial thaw. Victor beamed; for Mr. Caddis had
+previously stood eminent as an iceberg of the Lakelands’ party. Mr.
+Inchling and Mr. Caddis were introduced. The former in Commerce, the
+latter in Politics, their sustaining boast was, the being our stable
+Englishmen; and at once, with cousinly minds, they fell to chatting upon
+the nothings agreeably and seriously. Colney Durance forsook a set of
+ladies for fatter prey, and listened to them. What he said, Victor did
+not hear. The effect was always to be seen, with Inchling under Colney.
+Fenellan did better service, really good service.
+
+Nataly played the heroine she was at heart. Why think of her as having
+to act a character! Twice had Carling that afternoon, indirectly and
+directly, stated Mrs. Burman to be near the end we crape a natural, a
+defensible, satisfaction to hear of:--not wishing it--poor woman!--but
+pardonably, before man and all the angels, wishing, praying for the
+beloved one to enter into her earthly peace by the agency of the other’s
+exit into her heavenly.
+
+Fenellan and Colney came together, and said a word apiece of their
+friend.
+
+‘In his element! The dear old boy has the look of a goldfish, king of
+his globe.’
+
+‘The dear old boy has to me the look of a pot on the fire, with a loose
+lid.’
+
+I may have the summons from Themison to-morrow, Victor thought. The
+success of the day, was a wine that rocked the soberest of thoughts.
+For, strange to confess, ever since the fall on London Bridge, his
+heart, influenced in some degree by Nataly’s depression perhaps, had
+been shadowed by doubts of his infallible instinct for success. Here, at
+a stroke, and before entering the house, he had the whole neighbourhood
+about him: he could feel that he and Nataly stood in the minds of the
+worthy people variously with the brightness if not with the warmth
+distinguishable in the bosom of Beaves Urmsing--the idea of whom gave
+Lakelands an immediate hearth-glow.
+
+Armandine was thirteen minutes, by his watch, behind the time she had
+named. Small blame to her. He excused her to Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage,
+Lady Blachington, Mrs. Fanning, Sir Abraham Quatley, Mr. Danny (of Bacon
+fame) and the rest of the group surrounding Nataly on the mound leftward
+of the white terraces descending to the lake; where she stood beating
+her foot fretfully at the word brought by Nesta, that Dartrey Fenellan
+had departed. It was her sunshine departed. But she went through her
+task of conversing amiably. Colney, for a wonder, consented to be useful
+in assisting Fenellan to relate stories of French Cooks; which were,
+like the Royal Hanoverian oyster, of an age for offering acceptable
+flavour to English hearers. Nesta drew her mother’s attention to
+Priscilla Graves and Skepsey; the latter bending head and assenting.
+Nataly spoke of the charm of Priscilla’s voice that day, in her duet
+with the Rev. Septimus. Mr. Pempton looked; he saw that Priscilla was
+proselytizing. She was perfection to him but for one blotting thing.
+With grief on his eyelids, he said to Nataly or to himself: ‘Meat!’
+
+‘Dear friend, don’t ride your hobby over us,’ she replied.
+
+‘But it’s with that object they mount it,’ said Victor.
+
+The greater ladies of the assembly were quite ready to accuse the
+sections, down to the individuals, of the social English (reserving our
+elect) of an itch to be tyrants.
+
+Colney was apologizing for them, with his lash: ‘It’s merely the
+sensible effect of a want of polish of the surface when they rub
+together.’
+
+And he heard Carling exclaim to Victor: ‘How comes the fellow here!’
+
+Skepsey had rushed across an open space to intercept a leisurely
+progressive man, whose hat was of the shape Victor knew; and the man
+wore the known black gaiters. In appearance, he had the likeness of a
+fallen parson.
+
+Carling and Victor crossed looks that were questions carrying their
+answers.
+
+Nataly’s eyes followed Victor’s. ‘Who is the man?’ she said; and she got
+no reply beyond a perky sparkle in his gaze.
+
+Others were noticing the man, who was trying to pass by Skepsey, now on
+his right side, now on his left.
+
+‘There’ll be no stopping him,’ Carling said, and he slipped to the
+rear.’
+
+At this juncture, Armandine’s mellow bell proclaimed her readiness.
+
+Victor rubbed the back of his head. Nataly asked him: ‘Dear, is it that
+man?’
+
+He nodded scantly: ‘Expected, expected. I think we have our summons from
+Armandine. One moment--poor soul! poor soul! Lady Carmine--Sir Abraham
+Quatley. Will you lead? Lady Blachington, I secure you. One moment.’
+
+He directed Nataly to pair a few of the guests; he hurried down the
+slope of sward.
+
+Nataly applied to Colney Durance. ‘Do you know the man?--is it that
+man?’
+
+Colney rejoined: ‘The man’s name is Jarniman.’
+
+Armandine’s bell swung melodiously. The guests had grouped, thickening
+for the stream to procession. Mrs. Blathenoy claimed Fenellan; she
+requested him to tell her whether he had known Mrs. Victor Radnor many
+years. She mused. ‘You like her?’
+
+‘One likes one’s dearest of friends among women, does one not?’
+
+The lady nodded to his response. ‘And your brother?’
+
+‘Dartrey is devoted to her.’
+
+‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘your brother is a chivalrous gentleman. I
+like her too.’ She came to her sentiment through the sentiment of the
+chivalrous gentleman. Sinking from it, she remarked that Mr. Radnor
+was handsome still. Fenellan commended the subject to her, as one to
+discourse of when she met Dartrey. A smell of a trap-hatch, half-open,
+afflicted and sharpened him. It was Blathenoy’s breath: husbands of
+young wives do these villanies, for the sake of showing their knowledge.
+Fenellan forbore to praise Mrs. Victor: he laid his colours on Dartrey.
+The lady gave ear till she reddened. He meant no harm, meant nothing but
+good; and he was lighting the most destructive of our lower fires.
+
+Visibly, that man Jarniman was disposed of with ease. As in the
+street-theatres of crowing Punch, distance enlisted pantomime to do the
+effective part of the speeches. Jarniman’s hat was off, he stood bent,
+he delivered his message. He was handed over to Skepsey’s care for the
+receiving of meat and drink. Victor returned; he had Lady Blachington’s
+hand on his arm; he was all hers, and in the heart of his company of
+guests at the same time. Eyes that had read him closely for years,
+were unable to spell a definite signification on his face, below the
+overflowing happiness of the hospitable man among contented guests. He
+had in fact something within to enliven him; and that was the more than
+suspicion, amounting to an odour of certainty, that Armandine intended
+one of her grand surprises for her master, and for the hundred and fifty
+or so to be seated at her tables in the unwarmed house of Lakelands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
+
+Armandine did her wonders. There is not in the wide range of the Muses
+a more responsive instrument than man to his marvellous cook; and if
+his notes were but as flowing as his pedals are zealous, we should be
+carried on the tale of the enthusiasm she awakened, away from the rutted
+highroad, where History now thinks of tightening her girdle for an
+accelerated pace.
+
+The wonders were done: one hundred and seventy guests plenteously fed
+at tables across the great Concert Hall, down a length of the
+conservatory-glass, on soups, fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under
+play of creative sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness;
+every dish, one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to be your
+partner, instead of passively submitting to the eye of appetite,
+consenting to the teeth, as that rather melancholy procession of the
+cold, resembling established spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will
+appear to do. Whether Armandine had the thought or that she simply acted
+in conformity with a Frenchwoman’s direct good sense, we do require to
+smell a sort of animation in the meats we consume. We are still perhaps
+traceably related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs,
+who betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished
+a palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we
+young-oldsters cherish the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of
+the vanquished in it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.
+The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out
+a breath to meet us. Victor’s crowded saloon-carriage was one voice
+of eulogy, to raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting
+over Wrensham Station at the start Londonward. How had she managed? We
+foolishly question the arts of magicians.
+
+Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is
+half a century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the
+display of slaughtered herds and their devourers. He had picked out
+his vegetable and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them
+uncontaminated; enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was,
+that he did not complain. When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in
+wrath at him for systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on
+the maceration of his animal part, he put on his martyr’s pride, which
+assumed a perfect contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing
+systems: he was drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered
+our animal part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that
+much of the immorality of the world was due to the present excessive
+indulgence in meats. ‘Not in drink?’ Miss Graves inquired. ‘No,’ he said
+boldly; ‘not equally; meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking
+life--of fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad
+blood made: cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be
+looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that
+pass. I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly,
+or at least on the morrow.’
+
+‘Paid by the drunkard’s wife, you should say.’
+
+‘Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
+spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the
+least-generous of the vices.’
+
+Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare,
+that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
+breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
+hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
+champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
+sex. They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
+wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another’s practises;
+they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of
+his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were
+baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.
+He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
+panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of
+bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves
+Vikings.
+
+Nataly interposed. She was vexed with him. He let his eyelids drop: but
+the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English,
+could not be resisted. Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small
+annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr.
+John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken
+if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a
+destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses
+he prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at
+patients treated as horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the
+smoke of tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly
+denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his
+friend caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to protect the admirer of
+her beloved Louise. Her subsiding young excitement of the day set her
+Boating on that moony melancholy in Mr. Peridon.
+
+No one could understand the grounds for Colney’s more than usual
+waspishness. He trotted out the fulgent and tonal Church of the Rev.
+Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that
+of Dudley Sowerby’s family; maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar
+with Fenellan, ending in a snarl and a shout. Victor said to him: ‘Yes,
+here, as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you’ve staggered
+that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too; and I
+don’t know how many besides. What the pleasure of it can be, I can’t
+guess.’
+
+‘Nor I,’ said Fenellan, ‘but I’ll own I feel envious; like the girl
+among a family of boys I knew, who were all of them starved in their
+infancy by a miserly father, that gave them barely a bit of Graves to
+eat and not a drop of Pempton to drink; and on the afternoon of his
+funeral, I found them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up,
+walking on their hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me,
+that her brothers were able so to send the little blood they had in
+their bodies to their brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it,
+happy, and empowered to deal with the problems of the universe; as they
+couldn’t on their legs; but she, poor thing, was forbidden to do the
+same! And I’m like her. I care for decorum too much to get the brain
+to act on Colney’s behaviour; but I see it enraptures him and may be
+comprehensible to the topsy-turvy.’
+
+Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney’s bag of satiric spite.
+In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society,
+by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor
+was wearing a false face over the signification--of Jarniman’s visit
+and meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed
+bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature. He had a resolve to
+pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain
+words before the night had ended. But Fenellan took it out of him.
+Victor’s show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton’s, incited
+Colney to some of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary;
+and the heat which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool
+epigrams, will not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing him over to
+the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting
+spices will render an earnest simplicity distasteful. He was invited
+by Nataly to come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides
+personal, was moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially
+benefit them. He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.
+
+‘Work!’ Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right comprehension
+of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of
+literature. Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly
+noticed, without a sign of the reluctance he showed when the others,
+including Fenellan, excused themselves.
+
+‘So! we’re alone?’ he said, when the door of the hall had closed
+on them. He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she,
+observing her mother’s look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied
+yawn. She was kissed, and she tripped to her bed.
+
+‘Now we are alone,’ Nataly said.
+
+‘Well, dear, and the day was, you must own... ‘ he sought to trifle with
+her heavy voice; but she recalled him: ‘Victor!’ and the naked anguish
+in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the one he
+filled.
+
+‘Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman. You saw him, I remember. You
+recollected him?--stouter than he was. In her service ever since. Well,
+a little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.’
+
+‘Victor, is she very ill?’
+
+‘My love, don’t feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme
+case: not yet: old and ill. I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment:
+he had to do his errand.’
+
+‘What? why did he come?’
+
+‘Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears to have
+outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it. But if that woman thinks
+of intimidating me now--!’ His eyes brightened; he had sprung from
+evasions. ‘Living in flagrant sin, she says: you and I! She will not
+have it; warns me. Heard this day at noon of company at Lakelands.
+Jarniman off at once. Are to live in obscurity;--you and I! if together!
+Dictates from her death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.’
+
+‘Dearest,’ Nataly pressed hand on her left breast, ‘may we not think
+that she may be right?’
+
+‘An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming herself wife when she
+is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast
+the healthy and vigorous! I remember old Colney’s once, in old days,
+calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus. It was to me. There I
+lay--see myself lying! wasting! Think what you can good of her, by all
+means! From her bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside,
+with the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow--what imposition
+was it I practised?... flagrant sin?--it would have been an infinitely
+viler.... She is the cause of suffering enough: I bear no more from her;
+I’ve come to the limit. She has heard of Lakelands: she has taken one of
+her hatreds to the place. She might have written, might have sent me a
+gentleman, privately. No: it must be done in dramatic style-for effect:
+her confidential--lawyer?--doctor?--butler! Perhaps to frighten me:--the
+boy she knew, and--poor soul! I don’t mean to abuse her: but such
+conduct as this is downright brutal. I laugh at it, I snap my fingers.
+I can afford to despise it. Only I do say it deserves to be called
+abominable.’
+
+‘Victor, has she used a threat?’
+
+‘Am I brought to listen to any of her threats!--Funny thing, I ‘m
+certain that woman never can think of me except as the boy she knew. I
+saw her first when she was first a widow. She would keep talking to me
+of the seductions of the metropolis--kept informing me I was a young
+man... shaking her head. I ‘ve told you. She--well, I know we are
+mixtures, women as well as men. I can, I hope, grant the same--I believe
+I can--allowances to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of
+using one sense: though I won’t give Colney his footing; there’s a
+better way of reading us. I hold fast to Nature. No violation of Nature,
+my good Colney! We can live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that
+happiness was meant for us:--just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
+you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise all’s
+wrong. There’s the right answer to Colney! But when a woman like
+that .... and marries a boy: well, twenty-one--not quite that: and an
+innocent, a positive innocent--it may seem incredible, after a term of
+school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly understand it myself when I
+look back. Marries him! And then sets to work to persecute him, because
+he has blood in his veins, because he worships beauty; because he seeks
+a real marriage, a real mate. And, I say it! let the world take its own
+view, the world is wrong! because he preferred a virtuous life to the
+kind of life she would, she must--why, necessarily!--have driven him to,
+with a mummy’s grain of nature in his body. And I am made of flesh, I
+admit it.’
+
+‘Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living at Lakelands.’
+
+‘Pray, don’t speak excitedly, my love,’ he replied to the woman whose
+tones had been subdued to scarce more than waver. ‘You see how I meet
+it: water off a duck’s back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a
+Hindoo! I despise it hardly worth contempt;--But, come: our day was
+a good one. Fenellan worked well. Old Colney was Colney Durance, of
+course. He did no real mischief.’
+
+‘And you will not determine to enter Lakelands--not yet, dear?’ said
+Nataly.
+
+‘My own girl, leave it all to me.’
+
+‘But, Victor, I must, must know.’
+
+‘See the case. You have lots of courage. We can’t withdraw. Her
+intention is mischief. I believe the woman keeps herself alive for it:
+we’ve given her another lease!--though it can only be for a very short
+time; Themison is precise; Carling too. If we hold back--I have great
+faith in Themison--the woman’s breath on us is confirmed. We go down,
+then; complete the furnishing, quite leisurely; accept--listen--accept
+one or two invitations: impossible to refuse!--but they are
+accepted!--and we defy her: a crazy old creature: imagines herself the
+wife of the ex-Premier, widow of Prince Le Boo, engaged to the Chinese
+Ambassador, et caetera. Leave the tussle with that woman to me. No, we
+don’t repeat the error of Crayc Farm and Creckholt. And here we
+have stout friends. Not to speak of Beaver Urmsing: a picture of Old
+Christmas England! You took to him?--must have taken to Beaver Urmsing!
+The Marigolds! And Sir Rodwell and Lady Blachington are altogether
+above the mark of Sir Humphrey and Lady Pottil, and those half and half
+Mountneys. There’s a warm centre of home in Lakelands. But I know my
+Nataly: she is thinking of our girl. Here is the plan: we stand our
+ground: my dear soul won’t forsake me only there’s the thought of Fredi,
+in the event... improbable enough. I lift Fredi out of the atmosphere
+awhile; she goes to my cousins the Duvidney ladies.’
+
+Nataly was hit by a shot. ‘Can you imagine it, Victor?’
+
+‘Regard it as done.’
+
+‘They will surely decline!’
+
+‘Their feeling for General Radnor is a worship.’
+
+‘All the more...?’
+
+‘The son inherits it. He goes to them personally. Have you ever known me
+personally fail? Fredi stays at Moorsedge for a month or two. Dorothea
+and Virginia Duvidney will give her a taste of a new society; good for
+the girl. All these little shiftings can be turned to good. Meantime, I
+say, we stand our ground: but you are not to be worried; for though we
+have gone too far to recede, we need not and we will not make the entry
+into Lakelands until--you know: that is, auspiciously, to suit you in
+every way. Thus I provide to meet contingencies. What one may really
+fancy is, that the woman did but threaten. There’s her point of view to
+be considered: silly, crazy; but one sees it. We are not sure that she
+struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt. I wonder she never wrote. She was
+frightened, when she came to manage her property, of signing her name to
+anything. Absurd, that sending of Jarniman! However, it’s her move; we
+make a corresponding disposition of our chessmen.’
+
+‘And I am to lose my Nesta for a month?’ Nataly said, after catching
+here and there at the fitful gleams of truce or comfort dropped from his
+words. And simultaneously, the reproach of her mind to her nature for
+again and so constantly yielding to the domination of his initiative:
+unable to find the words, even the ideas, to withstand him,--brought
+big tears. Angry at herself both for the internal feebleness and the
+exhibition of it, she blinked and begged excuse. There might be nothing
+that should call her to resist him. She could not do much worse than
+she had done to-day. The reflection, that to-day she had been actually
+sustained by the expectation of a death to come, diminished her estimate
+of to-morrow’s burden on her endurance, in making her seem a less
+criminal woman, who would have no such expectation: which was virtually
+a stab at a fellow creature’s future. Her head was acute to work in the
+direction of the casuistries and the sensational webs and films. Facing
+Victor, it was a block.
+
+But the thought came: how could she meet those people about Lakelands,
+without support of the recent guilty whispers! She said coldly, her
+heart shaking her: ‘You think there has been a recovery?’
+
+‘Invalids are up and down. They are--well, no; I should think she dreads
+the...’ he kept ‘surgeon’ out of hearing. ‘Or else she means this for
+the final stroke: “though I’m lying here, I can still make him feel.”
+ That, or--poor woman--she has her notions of right and wrong.’
+
+‘Could we not now travel for a few weeks, Victor?’
+
+‘Certainly, dear; we will, after we have kept our engagements to dine--I
+accepted--with the Blathenoys, the Blachingtons, Beaver Urmsing.’
+
+Nataly’s vision of the peaceful lost little dairy cottage swelled to
+brilliance, like the large tear at the fall; darkening under her present
+effort to comprehend the necessity it was for him to mix and be foremost
+with the world. Unable to grasp it perfectly in mind, her compassionate
+love embraced it: she blamed herself, for being the obstruction to him.
+
+‘Very well,’ she said on a sigh. ‘Then we shall not have to let our girl
+go from us?’
+
+‘Just a few weeks. In the middle of dinner, I scribbled a telegram to
+the Duvidneys, for Skepsey to take.’
+
+‘Speaking of Nesta?’
+
+‘Of my coming to-morrow. They won’t stop me. I dine with them, sleep at
+the Wells; hotel for a night. We are to be separated for a night.’
+
+She laid her hand in his and gave him a passing view of her face: ‘For
+two, dear. I am... that man’s visit--rather shaken: I shall have a
+better chance of sleeping if I know I am not disturbing you.’
+
+She was firm; and they kissed and parted. Each had an unphrased
+speculation upon the power of Mrs. Burman to put division between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. TREATS OF THE LADIES’ LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF
+MOMENTOUS EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
+
+The maiden ladies Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney were thin--sweet
+old-fashioned grey gentlewomen, demurely conscious of their excellence
+and awake to the temptation in the consciousness, who imposed a certain
+reflex primness on the lips of the world when addressing them or when
+alluding to them. For their appearance was picturesque of the ancestral
+time, and their ideas and scrupulousness of delivery suggested the
+belated in ripeness; orchard apples under a snow-storm; or any image
+that will ceremoniously convey the mind’s profound appreciation together
+with the tooth’s panic dread of tartness. They were by no means tart;
+only, as you know, the tooth is apprehensively nervous; an uninviting
+sign will set it on edge. Even the pen which would sketch them has a
+spell on it and must don its coat of office, walk the liveried footman
+behind them.
+
+Their wealth, their deeds of charity, their modesty, their built grey
+locks, their high repute; a ‘Chippendale elegance’ in a quaintly formal
+correctness, that they had, as Colney Durance called it; gave them some
+queenliness, and allowed them to claim the ear as an oracle and banish
+rebellious argument. Intuitive knowledge, assisted by the Rev. Stuart
+Rem and the Rev. Abram Posterley, enabled them to pronounce upon men and
+things; not without effect; their country owned it; the foreigner beheld
+it. Nor were they corrupted by the servility of the surrounding ear.
+They were good women, striving to be humbly good. They might, for all
+the little errors they nightly unrolled to then perceptions, have stood
+before the world for a study in the white of our humanity. And this may
+be but a washed wall, it is true: revolutionary sceptics are measuring
+the depths of it. But the hue refreshes, the world admires; and we
+know it an object of aim to the bettermost of the wealthy. If, happily,
+complacent circumstances have lifted us to the clean paved platform out
+of grip of puddled clay and bespattering wheeltracks, we get our chance
+of coming to it.
+
+Possessing, for example, nine thousand pounds per annum in Consols, and
+not expending the whole of it upon our luxuries, we are, without further
+privation, near to kindling the world’s enthusiasm for whiteness. Yet
+there, too, we find, that character has its problems to solve; there are
+shades in salt. We must be charitable, but we should be just; we give to
+the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants;
+duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and
+with a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing.
+We hate dirt. Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the
+mouth of Mr. Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in
+relation to a dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a
+pleased sense of entry into the world’s ideal.
+
+At the same time, we protest our unworthiness. Acknowledgeing that they
+were not purely spotless, these ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot
+for a spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise
+in relief their goodness. They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and
+veiled it: warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.
+
+To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping. Uneasy
+consciences could not have slept. The sleeping served for proof of an
+accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day’s debits. They differed
+in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown
+by a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were
+their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not
+feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it. The
+English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of
+virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel,
+often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long;
+and the English Funds are always constant and a tower. Would they be
+suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?
+
+Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies. Hearing of the
+journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:
+‘Then Victor has met his match!’ Nataly had sent for him to dine with
+her in Victor’s absence: she was far from grieved, as to the result, by
+his assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance. Colney thought so.
+‘Just like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the
+greatest power in England.’ They were England herself; the squat
+old woman she has become by reason of her overlapping numbers of
+the comfortable fund-holder annuitants: a vast body of passives and
+negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent,
+and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their
+continuing undisturbed. Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists,
+and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora of them:--mixed with
+an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically
+appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He
+was near a truth; and he had the heat of it on him.
+
+Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could
+be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of
+strong plain speech over the crack of their whips. Colney could not or
+would not praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic, tramping
+active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives and negatives; he had
+occasions for flicking the fellow sharply: and to speak of the Lord as
+our friend present with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural
+piety solely through the reason, which justifies punishment; that would
+have stopped his mouth upon the theme of God-forsaken creatures. Our
+satirist is an executioner by profession, a moralist in excuse, or
+at the tail of it; though he thinks the position reversed, when he
+moralizes angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned.
+Nevertheless, he fills a serviceable place; and certainly he is not
+happy in his business. Colney suffered as heavily as he struck. If he
+had been no more than a mime in the motley of satire, he would have
+sucked compensation from the acid of his phrases, for the failure to
+prick and goad, and work amendment.
+
+He dramatized to Nataly some of the scene going on at the Wells:
+Victor’s petition; his fugue in urgency of it; the brief reply of Miss
+Dorothea and her muted echo Miss Virginia. He was rather their apologist
+for refusing. But, as when, after himself listening to their ‘views,’ he
+had deferentially withdrawn from the ladies of Moorsedge, and had then
+beheld their strangely-hatted lieutenants and the regiments of the
+toneless respectable on the pantiles and the mounts, the curse upon
+the satirist impelled him to generalize. The quiet good ladies were
+multiplied: they were ‘the thousands of their sisters, petticoated
+or long-coated or buck-skinned; comfortable annuitants under clerical
+shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyze at home
+and stultify abroad.’ Colney thumped away. The country’s annuitants had
+for type ‘the figure with the helmet of the Owl-Goddess and the trident
+of the Earth-shaker, seated on a wheel, at the back of penny-pieces; in
+whom you see neither the beauty of nakedness nor the charm of drapery;
+not the helmet’s dignity or the trident’s power; but she has patently
+that which stops the wheel; and poseing for representative of an
+imperial nation, she helps to pass a penny.’ So he passed his
+epigram, heedless of the understanding or attention of his hearer; who
+temporarily misjudged him for a man impelled by the vanity of literary
+point and finish, when indeed it was hot satiric spite, justified of its
+aim, which crushed a class to extract a drop of scathing acid, in the
+interests of the country, mankind as well. Nataly wanted a picture
+painted, colours and details, that she might get a vision of the scene
+at Moorsedge. She did her best to feel an omen and sound it, in his
+question ‘whether the yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants
+and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a
+sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of sap.’
+
+Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire; and doubtless she was the weakest
+of women; she could follow no thought; her heart was beating blindly
+beside Victor, hopeing for the refusal painful to her through his
+disappointment.
+
+‘You think me foolish,’ she made answer to one of Colney’s shrugs; ‘and
+it has come to that pitch with me, that I cannot be sensible of a merit
+except in being one with him--obeying, is the word. And I have never yet
+known him fail. That terrible Lakelands wears a different look to me,
+when I think of what he can do; though I would give half my days to
+escape it.’
+
+She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to
+Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness
+to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her
+for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation
+rendered her pitiable. ‘You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,’
+he said, and thought how the simple words carried the bitterness.
+
+That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when the ladies of
+Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance to their dearest
+relative, were at the hall-door of the house with Victor, saying the
+good-night, to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a
+baffled man. They clasped hands. Miss Dorothea said:
+
+‘You, Victor, always.’ Miss Virginia said: ‘You will be sure of
+welcome.’ He walked out upon the moonless night; and for lack of any
+rounded object in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere
+take moorings to gather himself together and define the man who had
+undergone so portentous a defeat. He was glad of quarters at an hotel, a
+solitary bed, absence from his Nataly.
+
+For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They had no triumph
+in their victory: the weight of it bore them down. They closed, locked,
+shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door. They had to be
+reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso’s curly silky coat,
+that he had not taken his evening’s trot to notify malefactors of his
+watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.
+Without consultation, they unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to
+‘compose his vesper hymn,’ as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.
+
+Though not pretending to the Muse’s crown so far, the little dog had
+qualities to entrance the spinster sex. His mistresses talked of him;
+of his readiness to go forth; of the audible first line of his hymn
+or sonnet; of his instinct telling him that something was wrong in the
+establishment. For most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by
+a fashionable epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but Montague,
+the butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his wife; Perrin, the
+footman, was confined to his chamber; Manton, the favourite maid, had
+appeared in the morning with a face that caused her banishment to bed;
+and the cook, Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat
+for the ladies’ dinner. Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their
+cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right to claim his
+place at their table, was ‘of the blood,’ they said. He was recognized
+as the living prince of it. His every gesture, every word, recalled the
+General. The trying scene with him had withered them, they did not speak
+of it; each had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of
+a gale. Would they sleep? They scarcely dared ask it of themselves. They
+had done rightly; silence upon that reflection seemed best. It was
+the silence of an inward agitation; still they knew the power of good
+consciences to summon sleep.
+
+Tasso was usually timed for five minutes. They were astonished to
+discover by the clock, that they had given him ten. He was very quiet:
+if so, and for whatever he did, he had his reason, they said: he was a
+dog endowed with reason: endowed--and how they wished that Mr. Stuart
+Rem would admit it!--with, their love of the little dog believed (and
+Mr. Posterley acquiesced), a soul. Do but think it of dear animals, and
+any form of cruelty to them becomes an impossibility, Mr. Stuart
+Rem! But he would not be convinced: ungenerously indeed he named Mr.
+Posterley a courtier. The ladies could have retorted, that Mr. Posterley
+had not a brother who was the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.
+
+Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was opened to him. Not
+a sound of him could be heard. The ladies blew his familiar whistle.
+He trotted back to a third appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not
+caressed; he received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight
+at his reason. He saw it and felt it. The hug of him was deferred to the
+tender good-night to him in his basket at the foot of the ladies’ beds.
+
+On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so fatigued that
+sleep appeared to their minds the compensating logical deduction. Miss
+Dorothea suppressed a yawn, and inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who
+returned it, with an apology, and immediately had her sister’s hand on
+her shoulder, for, an attempted control of one of the irresistibles; a
+spectacle imparting bitter shudders and shots to the sympathetic jawbones
+of an observer. Hand at mouth, for not in privacy would they have been
+guilty of exposing a grimace, they signified, under an interim smile,
+their maidenly submission to the ridiculous force of nature: after
+which, Miss Virginia retired to the dressing-room, absorbed in woeful
+recollection of the resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate,
+in response to the most eloquent and, saving for a single instance,
+admirable man, their cousin, the representative of ‘the blood,’
+supplicating them. A recreant thankfulness coiled within her bosom at
+the thought, that Dorothea, true to her office of speaker, had tasked
+herself with the cruel utterance and repetition of the word. Victor’s
+wonderful eyes, his voice, yet more than his urgent pleas; and also, in
+the midst of his fiery flood of speech, his gentleness, his patience,
+pathos, and a man’s tone through it all; were present to her.
+
+Disrobed, she knocked at the door.
+
+‘I have called to you twice,’ Dorothea said; and she looked a motive for
+the call.
+
+‘What is it?’ said Virginia, with faltering sweetness, with a terrible
+divination.
+
+The movement of a sigh was made. ‘Are you aware of anything, dear?’
+
+Virginia was taken with the contrary movement of a sniff. But the fear
+informing it prevented it from being venturesome. Doubt of the pure
+atmosphere of their bed-chamber, appeared to her as too heretic even for
+the positive essay. In affirming, that she was not aware of anything,
+her sight fell on Tasso. His eyeballs were those of a little dog that
+has been awfully questioned.
+
+‘It is more than a suspicion,’ said Dorothea; and plainly now, while
+open to the seductions of any pleasing infidel testimony, her nose in
+repugnance convicted him absolutely.
+
+Virginia’s nose was lowered a few inches; it inhaled and stopped midway.
+‘You must be mistaken, dear. He never... ‘
+
+‘But are you insensible to the...’ Dorothea’s eyelids fainted.
+
+Virginia dismissed the forlornest of efforts at incredulity. A whiff of
+Tasso had smitten her. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed and fell away. ‘Is it Tasso!
+How was it you noticed nothing before undressing, dear?’
+
+‘Thinking of what we have gone through to-night! I forgot him. At last
+the very strange... The like of it I have not ever!... And upon that
+thick coat! And, dear, it is late. We are in the morning hours.’
+
+‘But, my dear-Oh, dear, what is to be done with him?’
+
+That was the crucial point for discussion. They had no servant to
+give them aid; Manton, they could not dream of disturbing. And Tasso’s
+character was in the estimate; he hated washing; it balefully depraved
+his temper; and not only, creature of habit that he was, would he
+decline to lie down anywhere save in their bedroom, he would lament,
+plead, insist unremittingly, if excluded; terrifying every poor
+invalid of the house. Then again, were they at this late hour to dress
+themselves, and take him downstairs, and light a fire in the kitchen,
+and boil sufficient water to give him a bath and scrubbing? Cold water
+would be death to him. Besides, he would ring out his alarum for the
+house to hear, pour out all his poetry, poor dear, as Mr. Posterley
+called it, at a touch of cold water. The catastrophe was one to weep
+over, the dilemma a trial of the strongest intelligences.
+
+In addition to reviews of their solitary alternative-the having of a
+befouled degraded little dog in their chamber through the night, they
+were subjected to a conflict of emotions when eyeing him: and there
+came to them the painful, perhaps irreverent, perhaps uncharitable,
+thought:--that the sinner who has rolled in the abominable, must cleanse
+him and do things to polish him and perfume before again embraced even
+by the mind: if indeed we can ever have our old sentiment for him again!
+Mr. Stuart Rem might decide it for them. Nay, before even the heart
+embraces him, he must completely purify himself. That is to say, the
+ordinary human sinner--save when a relative. Contemplating Tasso, the
+hearts of the ladies gushed out in pity of an innocent little
+dog, knowing not evil, dependent on his friends for help to be
+purified;--necessarily kept at a distance: the very look of him
+prescribed extreme separation, as far as practicable. But they had proof
+of a love almost greater than it was previous to the offence, in the
+tender precautions they took to elude repulsion.
+
+He was rolling on the rug, communicating contagion. Flasks of
+treble-distilled lavender water, and their favourite, traditional in the
+family, eau d’Arquebusade, were on the toilet-table. They sprinkled
+his basket, liberally sprinkled the rug and the little dog.
+Perfume-pastilles were in one of the sitting-rooms below; and Virginia
+would have gone down softly to fetch a box, but Dorothea restrained her,
+in pity for the servants, with the remark: ‘It would give us a nightmare
+of a Roman Catholic Cathedral!’ A bit of the window was lifted by
+Dorothea, cautiously, that prowling outsiders might not be attracted.
+Tasso was wooed to his basket. He seemed inquisitive; the antidote of
+his naughtiness excited him; his tail circled after his muzzle several
+times; then he lay. A silken scarf steeped in eau d’Arquebusade was
+flung across him.
+
+Their customary devout observances concluded, lights were extinguished,
+and the ladies kissed, and entered their beds.
+
+Their beds were not homely to them. Dorothea thought that Virginia was
+long in settling herself. Virginia did not like the sound of Dorothea’s
+double sigh. Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso. He rested.
+
+He was uneasy; he was rounding his basket once more; unaware of the
+exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct, poor innocent, he shook that
+dreadful coat of his! He had displaced the prophylactic cover of the
+scarf.
+
+He drove them in a despair to speculate on the contention between the
+perfume and the stench in junction, with such a doubt of the victory
+of which of the two, as drags us to fear our worst. It steals into our
+nostrils, possesses them. As the History of Mankind has informed us, we
+were led up to our civilization by the nose. But Philosophy warns us on
+that eminence; to beware of trusting exclusively to our conductor, lest
+the mind of us at least be plunged back into barbarism. The ladies
+hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the
+object, of the above contention. But call it not a contention: there is
+nobility in that. This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very
+sickening results. Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling,
+could not well be guessed. The drenching at least was righteously
+intended.
+
+Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the oppression of a
+darkness not laden with slumber. They saw it insolidity; themselves
+as restless billows, driven dashing to the despondent sigh. Sleep was
+denied them.
+
+Tasso slept. He had sinned unknowingly, and that is not a spiritual sin;
+the chastisement confers the pardon.
+
+But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them? Was it that they
+might have a survey of all the day’s deeds and examine them under the
+cruel black beams of Insomnia?
+
+Virginia said: ‘You are wakeful.’
+
+‘Thoughtful,’ was the answer.
+
+A century of the midnight rolled on.
+
+Dorothea said: ‘He behaved very beautifully.’
+
+‘I looked at the General’s portrait while he besought us,’ Virginia
+replied.
+
+‘One sees him in Victor, at Victor’s age. Try to sleep.’
+
+‘I do. I pray that you may.’
+
+Silence courted slumber. Their interchange of speech from the posture of
+bodies on their backs, had been low and deliberate, in the tone of
+the vaults. Dead silence recalled the strangeness of it. The night
+was breathless; their open window a peril bestowing no boon. They were
+mutually haunted by sound of the gloomy query at the nostrils of each
+when drawing the vital breath. But for that, they thought they might
+have slept.
+
+Bed spake to bed:
+
+‘The words of Mr. Stuart Rem last Sunday!’ ‘He said: “Be just.” Could
+one but see direction!’
+
+‘In obscurity, feeling is a guide.’
+
+‘The heart.’
+
+‘It may sometimes be followed.’
+
+‘When it concerns the family.’
+
+‘He would have the living, who are seeking peace, be just.’
+
+‘Not to assume the seat of justice.’
+
+Again they lay as tombstone effigies, that have committed the passage of
+affairs to another procession of the Ages.
+
+There was a gentle sniff, in hopeless confirmation of the experience of
+its predecessors. A sister to it ensued.
+
+‘Could Victor have spoken so, without assurance in his conscience, that
+his entreaty was righteously addressed to us? that we...’
+
+‘And no others!’
+
+‘I think of his language. He loves the child.’
+
+‘In heart as in mind, he is eminently gifted; acknowledgeing error.’
+
+‘He was very young.’
+
+The huge funereal minutes conducted their sonorous hearse, the hour.
+
+It struck in the bed-room: Three.
+
+No more than three of the clock, it was the voice telling of half the
+precious restorative night-hours wasted.
+
+Now, as we close our eyelids when we would go to sleep, so must we,
+in expectation of the peace of mind granting us the sweet oblivion,
+preliminarily do something which invokes, that we may obtain it.
+
+‘Dear,’ Dorothea said.
+
+‘I know indeed,’ said Virginia.
+
+‘We may have been!’
+
+‘Not designingly.’
+
+‘Indeed not. But harsh it may be named, if the one innocent is to be the
+sufferer.’
+
+‘The child can in no sense be adjudged guilty.’
+
+‘It is Victor’s child.’
+
+‘He adores the child.’
+
+Wheels were in mute motion within them; and presently the remark was
+tossed-up:
+
+‘In his coming to us, it is possible to see paternal solicitude’
+
+Thence came fruit of reflection:
+
+‘To be instrumental as guides to a tender young life!’
+
+Reflection heated with visions:
+
+‘Once our dream!’
+
+They had the happier feeling of composure, though Tasso possessed
+the room. Not Tasso, but a sublimated offensiveness, issue of the
+antagonistically combined, dispersed to be the more penetrating;
+insomuch that it seemed to them they could not ever again make use of
+eau d’Arquebusade without the vitiating reminder. So true were the words
+of Mr. Stuart Rem: ‘Half measures to purification are the most delusive
+of our artifices.’ Fatigue and its reflections helped to be peacefuller.
+Their souls were mounting to a serenity above the nauseating
+degradation, to which the poor little dog had dragged them.
+
+‘Victor gave his promise.’
+
+‘At least, concession would not imply contact with the guilty.’
+
+Both sighed as they took up the burden of the vaporous Tasso to drop
+him; with the greater satisfaction in the expelling of their breath.
+
+‘It might be said, dear, that concession to his entreaty does not in any
+way countenance the sin.’
+
+‘I can see, dear, how it might be read as a reproof.’
+
+Their exchange of sentences followed meditative pauses; Dorothea
+leading.
+
+‘To one so sensitive as Victor!’
+
+‘A month or two of our society for the child!’
+
+‘It is not the length of time.’
+
+‘The limitation assures against maternal claims.’
+
+‘She would not dare.’
+
+‘He used the words: “her serious respect” for us. I should not wish to
+listen to him often.’
+
+‘We listen to a higher.’
+
+‘It may really be, that the child is like him.’
+
+‘Not resembling Mr. Stuart Rem’s Clementina!’
+
+‘A week of that child gave us our totally sleepless night.’ ‘One thinks
+more hopefully of a child of Victor’s.’
+
+‘He would preponderate.’
+
+‘He would.’
+
+They sighed; but it was now with the relief of a lightened oppression.
+
+‘If, dear, in truth the father’s look is in the child, he has the
+greater reason to desire for her a taste of our atmosphere.’
+
+‘Do not pursue it. Sleep.’
+
+‘One prayer!’
+
+‘Your mention of our atmosphere, dear, destroys my power to frame one.
+Do you, for two. But I would cleanse my heart.’
+
+‘There is none purer.’
+
+‘Hush.’
+
+Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her sister, and had not
+the hushing response to it. She heard the soft regular breathing. Her
+own was in downy fellowship with it a moment later.
+
+At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the crumbs of his
+hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note that bore the handwriting
+of Dorothea Duvidney.
+
+   ‘Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a month.
+   In haste, before your train. Our love. D. and V.’
+
+His face flashed out of cloud.
+
+A more precious document had never been handed to him. It chased back to
+midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;--phrased to
+say, that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world. And it
+extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night.
+Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot
+of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling
+that he stood whole and solid.--Because of two mature maiden ladies?
+Yes, because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow. And friend Colney,
+you know the ladies, and what the getting round them for one’s purposes
+really means.
+
+The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight. Victor’s
+internal crow was over Colney now. And when you have the optimist
+and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively
+conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of
+time. For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other’s
+triumph or dismay. The couple are scales of a balance; and not before
+last night had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while
+he dropped low to graze the pebbles.
+
+He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth
+Act of the Favorita: neglected since that mighty German with his
+Rienzi, and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to
+the displacement of his boyhood’s beloved sugary -inis and -antes
+and-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up
+to a new realm, invigorating if severer. But now his youth would have
+its voice. He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked,
+and took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the
+honeyed Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and
+flutter had a revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the
+mouth: honeyed, golden, rich in visions;--having surely much more of
+Nature’s encouragement to her children?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. NESTA’S ENGAGEMENT
+
+A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the
+wheels of Victor’s brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on
+the walk Westward. Who knew?--who did not know! He had a torpid
+consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the
+great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had
+caught its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He
+dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain the power they could stir.
+
+‘The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?’
+
+Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement,
+thought ‘there was the look of it.’
+
+‘Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey!--but Dartrey’s an honest fellow
+with women. But men are men. Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit
+is on her. A little woman-pretty little woman!--wife to Jacob Blathenoy!
+She mustn’t at her age have any close choosing--under her hand. And
+Dartrey’s just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.’
+
+‘With a husband who’d reduce Minerva’s to tinder, after a month of him!’
+
+‘He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.’ Blathenoy
+had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor
+Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess--in the usual honeymoon
+boasting of a windbag with his bride--wheezed the foul gossip, to hide
+his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird.
+Probably so. But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared
+him. Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the
+Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and
+unscratched folio sheets on the subject:--as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had
+dropped venom.
+
+‘One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?’
+
+‘Dartrey won’t be back for a week or so; and they’re off to Switzerland,
+after the dinner they give. I heard from him this morning; one of the
+Clanconans is ill.
+
+‘Lucky. But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same “arid
+bore,” as old Colney says.’
+
+‘A domestic simoom,’ said Fenellan, booming it: and Victor had a
+shudder.
+
+‘Awful thing, marriage, to some women! We chain them to that domestic
+round; most of them haven’t the means of independence or a chance of
+winning it; and all that’s open to them, if they’ve made a bad cast for
+a mate--and good Lord! how are they to know before it’s too late!--they
+haven’t a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and
+“drape in blight,” as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional
+marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!--if he means it. You
+never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony.
+It’s donkey nonsense, eh?’
+
+‘The very hee-haw of nonsense,’ Fenellan acquiesced.
+
+‘Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,’ Victor
+said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal
+yoke. ‘They’re donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell!
+Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.’
+
+Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness
+of his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.
+Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his
+hand warmly, by way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at
+Fenellan’s perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he
+stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney’s views upon
+the great Marriage Question were the ‘very hee-haw of nonsense.’ They
+were not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were
+for discussion; there was no bray about them. He could not feel them to
+be absurd while Mrs. Burman’s tenure of existence barred the ceremony.
+Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan’s talk; calling him, Dear
+old boy, to soften the slight.
+
+Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to
+be uninformed of her hero’s release; and that was in the order of happy
+accidents. She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it
+radiated. But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. ‘The good ladies
+are ready to receive our girl.’
+
+Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the
+idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command
+of her.
+
+The note, signed D. and V., was shown.
+
+There stood the words. And last night she had been partly of the opinion
+of Colney Durance. She sank down among the unreasoning abject;--not this
+time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
+under compression. For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should
+go. This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped
+her mental inquiries.
+
+She begged for a week’s delay; ‘before the parting’; as her dear old
+silly mother’s pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and
+he smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in
+error to expect Dartrey’s return to town before the close of a week; and
+then wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who
+ran risk of disturbing their daughters’ bosoms with regard to particular
+heroes married or not. Dartrey attracted women: he was one of the men
+who do it without effort. Victor’s provident mind blamed the mother for
+the indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them. But Dudley had
+been making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a
+Spring flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi
+was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons. One could
+see, his questions and other little points revealed, that he had a
+certain lover’s dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor
+understood the feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man
+elsewhere in another; though she may know she never can wed the man, and
+has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in
+this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness, stripped against
+all the winds that blow; skinless at times. One gets up a sympathy for
+the poor shy dependent shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was young
+Dudley waking, visibly becoming bolder. As in the flute-duets, he gained
+fire from concert. The distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two
+miles and a quarter.
+
+Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which
+embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn’s on the last of the
+days, when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own
+composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from
+rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it
+pass: eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he doated am the
+surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation. The girl’s little
+French ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they
+were imitative. If Strauscher let this pass... Victor saw Grand Opera
+somewhere to follow; England’s claim to be a creative musical nation
+vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.
+
+He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn’s; and he imagined a hearing of
+his Fredi’s Opera, and her godmother’s delight in it; the once famed
+Sanfredini’s consent to be the diva at a rehearsal, and then her
+compelling her hidalgo duque to consent further: an event not
+inconceivable. For here was downright genius; the flowering aloe of the
+many years in formation; and Colney admitted the song to have a streak
+of genius; though he would pettishly and stupidly say, that our modern
+newspaper Press is able now to force genius for us twenty or so to the
+month, excluding Sundays-our short pauses for the incubation of it. Real
+rare genius was in that song, nothing forced; and exquisite melody; one
+of those melodies which fling gold chains about us and lead us off, lead
+us back into Eden. Victor hummed at bars of it on the drive homeward.
+His darlings had to sing it again in the half-lighted drawing-room.
+The bubble-happiness of the three was vexed only by tidings heard from
+Colney during the evening of a renewed instance of Skepsey’s misconduct.
+Priscilla Graves had hurried away to him at the close of Mr. John
+Cormyn’s Concert, in consequence; in grief and in sympathy. Skepsey was
+to appear before the magistrate next morning, for having administered
+physical chastisement to his wife during one of her fits of drunkenness.
+Colney had seen him. His version of the story was given, however, in the
+objectionable humorous manner: none could gather from it of what might
+be pleaded for Skepsey. His ‘lesson to his wife in the art of pugilism,
+before granting her Captain’s rank among the Defensive Amazons of Old
+England,’ was the customary patent absurdity. But it was odd, that
+Skepsey always preferred his appeal for help to Colney Durance. Nesta
+proposed following Priscilla that night. She had hinted her wish, on the
+way home; she was urgent, beseeching, when her father lifted praises
+of her: she had to start with her father by the train at seven in the
+morning, and she could not hear of poor Skepsey for a number of hours.
+She begged a day’s delay; which would enable her, she said, to join them
+in dining at the Blachingtons’, and seeing dear Lakelands again. ‘I was
+invited, you know.’ She spoke in childish style, and under her eyes she
+beheld her father and mother exchange looks. He had a fear that Nataly
+might support the girl’s petition. Nataly read him to mean, possible
+dangers among the people at Wrensham. She had seemed hesitating. After
+meeting Victor’s look, her refusal was firm. She tried to make it one of
+distress for the use of the hard word to her own dear girl. Nesta spied
+beneath.
+
+But what was it? There was a reason for her going! She had a right to
+stay, and see and talk with Captain Dartrey, and she was to be deported!
+
+So now she set herself to remember little incidents at Creckholt:
+particularly a conversation in a very young girl’s hearing, upon Sir
+Humphrey and Lady Pottil’s behaviour to the speakers, her parents. She
+had then, and she now had, an extraordinary feeling, as from a wind
+striking upon soft summer weather off regions of ice, that she was in
+her parents’ way. How? The feeling was irrational; it could give her
+no reply, or only the multitudinous which are the question violently
+repeated. She slept on it.
+
+She and her father breakfasted by the London birds’ first twitter.
+They talked of Skepsey. She spoke of her going as exile. ‘No,’ said he,
+‘you’re sure to meet friends.’
+
+Her cheeks glowed. It came wholly through the suddenness of the
+recollection, that the family-seat of one among the friends was near the
+Wells.
+
+He was allowed to fancy, as it suited him to fancy, that a vivid secret
+pleasure laid the colour on those ingenuous fair cheeks.
+
+‘A solitary flute for me, for a month! I shall miss my sober comrade:
+got the habit of duetting: and he’s gentle, bears with me.’
+
+Tears lined her eyelids. ‘Who would not be, dearest dada! But there is
+nothing to bear except the honour.’
+
+‘You like him? You and I always have the same tastes, Fredi.’
+
+Now there was a reddening of the sun at the mount; all the sky aflame.
+How could he know that it was not the heart in the face! She reddened
+because she had perused his wishes; had detected a scheme striking off
+from them, and knew a man to be the object of it; and because she had at
+the same time the sense of a flattery in her quick divination; and she
+was responsively emotional, her blood virginal; often it was a tropical
+lightning.
+
+It looked like the heart doing rich painter’s work on maiden features.
+Victor was naturally as deceived as he wished to be.
+
+From his being naturally so, his remarks on Dudley had an air of
+embracing him as one of the family. ‘His manner to me just hits me.’
+
+‘I like to see him with you,’ she said.
+
+Her father let his tongue run: ‘One of the few young men I feel
+perfectly at home with! I do like dealing with a gentleman. I can
+confide in a gentleman: honour, heart, whatever I hold dearest.’
+
+There he stopped, not too soon. The girl was mute, fully agreeing,
+slightly hardening. She had a painful sense of separation from her dear
+Louise. And it was now to be from her mother as well: she felt the pain
+when kissing her mother in bed. But this was moderated by the prospect
+of a holiday away out of reach of Mr. Barmby’s pursuing voice, whom her
+mother favoured: and her mother was concealing something from her;
+so she could not make the confidante of her mother. Nataly had no
+forewarnings. Her simple regrets filled her bosom. All night she had
+been taking her chastisement, and in the morning it seemed good to her,
+that she should be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity of having
+relatives.
+
+For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the succeeding hours, the
+girl had not spoken of any visit her mother was to pay to the Duvidney
+ladies or they to her. Latterly she had not alluded to her mother’s
+family. It might mean, that the beloved and dreaded was laying finger
+on a dark thing in the dark; reading syllables by touch; keeping silence
+over the communications to a mind not yet actively speculative, as it is
+a way with young women. ‘With young women educated for the market, to
+be timorous, consequently secretive, rather snaky,’ Colney Durance had
+said. Her Nesta was not one of the ‘framed and glazed’ description,
+cited by him, for an example of the triumph of the product; ‘exactly
+harmonious with the ninny male’s ideal of female innocence.’ No; but
+what if the mother had opened her heart to her girl? It had been of late
+her wish or a dream, shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go
+through that furnace. Her knowledge of Victor’s objection, restrained
+an impulse that had not won spring enough to act against his counsel or
+vivify an intelligence grown dull in slavery under him, with regard
+to the one seeming right course. The adoption of it would have wounded
+him--therefore her. She had thought of him first; she had also thought
+of herself, and she blamed herself now. She went so far as to think,
+that Victor was guilty of the schemer’s error of counting human
+creatures arithmetically, in the sum, without the estimate of
+distinctive qualities and value here and there. His return to a
+shivering sensitiveness on the subject of his girl’s enlightenment
+‘just yet,’ for which Nataly pitied and loved him, sharing it, with
+humiliation for doing so, became finally her excuse. We must have some
+excuse, if we would keep to life.
+
+Skepsey’s case appeared in the evening papers. He confessed, ‘frankly,’
+he said, to the magistrate, that, ‘acting under temporary exasperation,
+he had lost for a moment a man’s proper self-command.’ He was as frank
+in stating, that he ‘occupied the prisoner’s place before his Worship a
+second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr. Colney
+Durance, who so kindly stood by him.’ There was hilarity in the Court at
+his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which
+he delivered with solemnity: ‘He could only plead, not in absolute
+justification--an appeal to human sentiments--the feelings of a man of
+the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon
+things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian
+of his household beastly drunk, and destructive.’ Colney made the case
+quite intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the
+idiomatic in the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent.
+No serious harm had been done to the woman. Skepsey was admonished and
+released. His wife expressed her willingness to forgive him, now he had
+got his lesson; and she hoped he would understand, that there was no
+need for a woman to learn pugilism. Skepsey would have explained; but
+the case was over, he was hustled out.
+
+However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy; he followed
+the couple; and in a particular evening Journal, laughable matter was
+printed concerning Skepsey’s view of the pugilism to be imparted to
+women for their physical-protection in extremity, and the distinction
+of it from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having
+objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered her; and
+she was never, she said, ready to stand up to him for practice, as he
+called it, except when she had taken more than he thought wholesome
+for her: he had no sense. There was a squabble between them, because
+he chose to scour away to his master’s office instead of conducting her
+home with the honours. Nesta read the young reporter’s version, with
+shrieks. She led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.
+
+At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they were like a
+pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold. She
+saw but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations,
+which steadily determined the warmth. On the night of the third day,
+they kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.
+
+No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in
+receiving her: Victor’s child; but, as their phrase would have run,
+had they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin. How
+foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
+as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until
+the timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
+invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
+not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
+Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
+the married one of those gentlemen, to ‘divert dear Nesta.’ Every night
+she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was ‘of the blood.’ She
+had Victor’s animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think,
+his eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
+resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
+treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
+there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that
+any event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all
+hazards recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means, they
+preserve the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their
+existence; and so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck
+subjects of their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down,
+scatter, dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most
+vital to them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among
+congregations, often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the
+desperate wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr.
+Stuart Rem) to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points
+they must not think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds
+of the pure ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense
+of smell, to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of
+their intelligences.
+
+Victor’s eloquence, Victor’s influence, Victor’s child he carried them
+as a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature
+of the blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned
+abstract, and the child’s presence upon earth seen with the indulgence
+(without the naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the
+numerous offspring of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These things
+pass muster from being ‘Britannically cocooned in the purple,’ says our
+irreverent satirist; and the maiden ladies’ passion of devotion to ‘the
+blood’ helped to blind them; but still more so did the imperious urgency
+to curtain closely the night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences
+upon Victor’s masterful tongue. Whence it ensued (and here is the danger
+for illogical individuals as well as vast communities, who continue to
+batten upon fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of
+pleasure), that they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a cloak to
+their conduct; and doing it, they fell into a habit of yielding to him;
+they disintegrated under him; rules, principles, morality, were shaken
+to some confusion. And still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced
+back, more wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days of early
+innocence, at the night when successfully they withstood him. They
+who had doubted of the rightness of letting Victor’s girl come into
+collision with two clerical gentlemen, one of whom was married,
+permitted him now to bring the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and
+make appointments to meet Mr. Dudley Sowerby under a roof that sheltered
+a young lady, evidently the allurement to the scion of aristocracy;
+of whose family Mr. Stuart Rem had spoken in the very kindling hushed
+tones, proper to the union of a sacerdotal and an English citizen’s
+veneration.
+
+How would it end? And if some day this excellent Mr. Dudley Sowerby
+reproached them! He could not have a sweeter bride, one more truly a
+lady in education and manners; but the birth! the child’s name! Their
+trouble was emitted in a vapour of interjections. Very perplexing was it
+for the good ladies of strict principles to reflect, as dimly they
+did, that the concrete presence of dear Nesta silenced and overcame
+objections to her being upon earth. She seemed, as it were, a draught of
+redoubtable Nature inebriating morality. But would others be similarly
+affected? Victor might get his release, to do justice to the mother: it
+would not cover the child. Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor
+blood (drawn from the most ancient of original Britain’s princes), there
+was also the Cantor blood for consideration; and it was old, noble,
+proud. Would it be satisfied in matching itself with great wealth, a
+radiant health, and the good looks of a young flower? For the sake of
+the dear girl, the ladies hoped that it would; and they enlarged the
+outline of their wedding present, while, in their minds, the noble
+English family which could be satisfied so, was lowered, partaking of
+the taint they had personally ceased to recognize.
+
+Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them: the gentleman loved
+the girl. Her love of him, had it been prominent to view, would have
+stirred a feminine sigh; not more, except a feminine lecture to follow.
+She was quite uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring. His ardour had no
+disguise. They measured him by the favourite fiction’s heroes of their
+youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to the
+prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that is expected
+of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for
+his lady’s faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish. Mr. Dudley
+Sowerby’s eye upon Nesta was really an apprentice. There is in Love’s
+young season a magnanimity in the male kind. Their superior strength
+and knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker and
+shallower: they crown her queen; her look is their mandate. So was it
+when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant
+touched maidenly hearts to throb: so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley
+Sowerby.
+
+Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor. ‘Oh!
+Fredi?’ said he; ‘admires her, no doubt; and so do I, so we all do;
+she’s one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid’s darts, she belongs to the
+cucumber family, and he shoots without fireing. We shall do the mischief
+if we put an interdict. Don’t you remember the green days when obstacles
+were the friction to light that match?’ Their pretty nod of assent
+displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance: they dreamed of having
+once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their nipped natures; and
+dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion. Incidentally,
+he named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was
+calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit. A curious
+effect was produced on them. Though they were not imaginatively
+mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they
+talked of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber. ‘Dukes
+have married for less.’ Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a
+Principality. Victor had supplied them with something of an apology to
+the gentleman proposing to Nesta in their house.
+
+The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the fifteenth
+day of September; and that it was not known to the damsel’s parents
+before the twenty-third; as they were away on an excursion in South
+Tyrol:--away, flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their
+envious, exiled girl; though they did not tell her of new constructions
+at the London house partly causing them to fly. Subject to their
+consent, she wrote, she had given hers. The letter was telegramic on the
+essential point. She wrote of Mr. Barmby’s having visited Mr. Posterley
+at the Wells, and she put it just as flatly. Her principal concern, to
+judge by her writing, was, to know what Mr. Durance had done, during her
+absence, with the group of emissary-advocates of the various tongues of
+Europe on board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of their
+journey to the Court of Japan.
+
+Mr. Simeon Fenellan had written his opinion, that all these delegates of
+the different European nationalities were nothing other than dupes of
+a New-York Syndicate of American Humorists, not without an eye on the
+mainchance; and he was sure they would be set to debate publicly, before
+an audience of high-priced tickets, in the principal North American
+Cities, previous to the embarcation for Japan at San Francisco. Mr.
+Fenellan eulogized the immense astuteness of Dr. Gannius in taking
+his daughter Delphica with him. Dr. Gannius had singled forth poor Dr.
+Bouthoin for the object of his attacks; but Nesta was chiefly anxious
+to hear of Delphica’s proceedings; she was immensely interested in
+Delphica, and envied her; and the girl’s funny speculations over the
+play of Delphica’s divers arts upon the Greek, and upon the Russian,
+and upon the English curate Mr. Semhians, and upon M. Falarique--set
+Gallically pluming and crowing out of an Alsace-Lorraine growl--were
+clever. Only, in such a letter, they were amazing.
+
+Nataly received it at Campiglio, when about to start for an excursion
+down the Sarca Valley to Arco. Her letter of reply was delayed. One to
+Victor from Dudley Sowerby, awaited them, on their return. ‘Confirms
+Fredi,’ he said, showing it, and praising it as commendable, properly
+fervid. She made pretence to read, she saw the words.
+
+Her short beat of wings was over. She had joined herself with Victor’s
+leap for a change, thirsting for the scenery of the white peaks in
+heaven, to enjoy through his enjoyment, if her own capacity was dead:
+and she had found it revive, up to some recovery of her old songful
+readiness for invocations of pleasure. Escape and beauty beckoned ahead;
+behind were the chains. These two letters of the one fact plucked her
+back. The chained body bore the fluttering spirit: or it was the spirit
+in bonds, that dragged the body. Both were abashed before the image of
+her girl. Out of the riddle of her strange Nesta, one thing was clear:
+she did not love the man: and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the
+cup of poisonous regrets at the thought. Her girl’s heart would not
+be broken. But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold to this
+engagement?... It might then be worse. She dropped a plumb-line into the
+young man, sounding him by what she knew of him and judged. She had to
+revert to Nesta’s charm, for the assurance of his anchored attachment.
+
+Her holiday took the burden of her trouble, and amid the beauty of a
+disenchanted scene, she resumed the London incubus.
+
+‘You told him of her being at the Wells? in the neighbourhood, Victor?’
+
+‘Didn’t you know, my dear, the family-seat is Cronidge, two miles out
+from the Wells?--and particularly pretty country.’
+
+‘I had forgotten, if I ever heard. You will not let him be in
+ignorance?’
+
+‘My dear love, you are pale about it. This is a matter between men. I
+write, thanking for the honour and so forth; and I appoint an interview;
+and I show him my tablets. He must be told, necessarily. Incidents of
+this kind come in their turn. If Dudley does not account himself the
+luckiest young fellow in the kingdom, he’s not worthy of his good
+fortune. I wish they were both here now, honeymooning among these peaks,
+seeing the crescent over one, as we did last night!’
+
+‘Have you an idea, in reading Nesta’s letter?’
+
+‘Seems indifferent?--mere trick to hide the blushes. And I, too, I’m
+interested in Delphica. Delphica and Falarique will be fine stage
+business. Of course, Dr. Bouthoin and his curate!--we know what Old
+England has to expect from Colney.’
+
+‘At any rate, Mr. Durance hurts no one. You will, in your letter,
+appoint the day of the interview?’
+
+‘Hurts himself! Yes, dearest; appoint for--ten days homeward--eleventh
+day from to-day. And you to Fredi: a bit of description--as you can, my
+Nataly! Happy to be a dolomite, to be painted by Nataly’s pen.’
+
+The sign is evil, when we have a vexatious ringing in the ear of some
+small piece of familiar domestic chatter, and subject it to scrutiny,
+hang on it, worry and magnify it. What will not creatures under sway
+of the sensational life, catch at to emphasize and strengthen distaste,
+until distaste shall have a semblance of reason, in the period of the
+mind’s awakening to revolt! Nataly shrank from the name of dolomite,
+detested the name, though the scenes regained their beauty or something
+of it beneath her showery vision. Every time Victor spoke of dolomites
+on the journey homeward, she had at heart an accusation of her
+cowardice, her duplicity, frailty, treachery to the highest of her
+worship and sole support of her endurance in the world: not much blaming
+him: but the degrading view of herself sank them both. On a shifty soil,
+down goes the idol. For him she could plead still, for herself she could
+not.
+
+The smell of the Channel brine inspirited her sufficiently to cast off
+the fit and make it seem, in the main, a bodily depression; owing to
+causes, of which she was beginning to have an apprehensive knowledge:
+and they were not so fearful to her as the gloom they displaced.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. NATALY IN ACTION
+
+A ticket of herald newspapers told the world of Victor’s returning to
+his London. Pretty Mrs. Blathenoy was Nataly’s first afternoon visitor,
+and was graciously received; no sign of inquiry for the cause of the
+lady’s alacrity to greet her being shown. Colney Durance came in,
+bringing the rumour of an Australian cantatrice to kindle Europe; Mr.
+Peridon, a seeker of tidings from the city of Bourges; Miss Priscilla
+Graves, reporting of Skepsey, in a holiday Sunday tone, that his
+alcoholic partner might at any moment release him; Mr. Septimus Barmby,
+with a hanged heavy look, suggestive of a wharfside crane swinging the
+ponderous thing he had to say. ‘I have seen Miss Radnor.’
+
+‘She was well?’ the mother asked, and the grand basso pitched forth an
+affirmative.
+
+‘Dear sweet girl she is!’ Mrs. Blathenoy exclaimed to Colney.
+
+He bowed. ‘Very sweet. And can let fly on you, like a haggis, for a
+scratch.’
+
+She laughed, glad of an escape from the conversational formalities
+imposed on her by this Mrs. Victor Radnor’s mighty manner. ‘But what
+girl worth anything!...
+
+We all can do that, I hope, for a scratch!’
+
+Mr. Barmby’s Profession dissented.
+
+Mr. Catkin appeared; ten minutes after his Peridon. He had met Victor
+near the Exchange, and had left him humming the non fu sogno of ERNANI.
+
+‘Ah, when Victor takes to Verdi, it’s a flat City, and wants a burst of
+drum and brass,’ Colney said; and he hummed a few bars of the march in
+Attila, and shrugged. He and Victor had once admired that blatancy.
+
+Mr. Pempton appeared, according to anticipation. He sat himself beside
+Priscilla. Entered Mrs. John Cormyn, voluminous; Mrs. Peter Yatt,
+effervescent; Nataly’s own people were about her and she felt at home.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy pushed a small thorn into it, by speaking of Captain
+Fenellan, and aside, as if sharing him with her. Nataly heard that
+Dartrey had been the guest of these Blathenoys. Even Dartrey was but a
+man!
+
+Rather lower under her voice, the vain little creature asked: ‘You knew
+her?’
+
+‘Her?’
+
+The cool counter-interrogation was disregarded. ‘So sad! In the desert!
+a cup of pure water worth more than barrow-loads of gold! Poor woman!’
+
+‘Who?’
+
+‘His wife.’
+
+‘Wife!’
+
+‘They were married?’
+
+Nataly could have cried: Snake! Her play at brevity had certainly been
+foiled. She nodded gravely. A load of dusky wonders and speculations
+pressed at her bosom. She disdained to question the mouth which had
+bitten her.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy, resolving, that despite the jealousy she excited, she
+would have her friend in Captain Fenellan, whom she liked--liked, she
+was sure, quite as innocently as any other woman of his acquaintance
+did, departed and she hugged her innocence defiantly, with the mournful
+pride which will sometimes act as a solvent.
+
+A remark or two passed among the company upon her pretty face.
+
+Nataly murmured to Colney: ‘Is there anything of Dartrey’s wife?’
+
+‘Dead,’ he answered.
+
+‘When?’
+
+‘Months back. I had it from Simeon. You didn’t hear?’
+
+She shook her head. Her ears buzzed. If he had it from Simeon Fenellan,
+Victor must have known it.
+
+Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.
+
+As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like one who has
+taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult of wild cries at her
+ears blankly ceased. Dartrey, Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of
+the might-have-been for whom a wretched erring woman, washed clean of
+her guilt by death, in a far land, had gone to her end: vainly gone: and
+now another was here, a figure of wood, in man’s shape, conjured up by
+one of the three, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her
+or to them: to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be: and beneath the
+leaden hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the
+core.
+
+She snatched for breath. She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay
+waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of
+the seas of pain, without pain.
+
+Then came sighs. The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his
+labours.
+
+But she had been near it--very near it? A gush of pity for Victor,
+overwhelmed her hardness of mind.
+
+Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to
+the door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking
+strangely upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer
+have thought herself the weak woman. Her aim was to reach the library.
+She sat on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her
+journey: and now her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get
+Railway-guides, and might have had them from the hands of a footman, and
+imagined that she had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of
+those books: proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of
+infant and having to begin our drear ascent again.
+
+A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her. She betrayed no infirmity
+of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive
+to the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps. Arlington brought
+her a note.
+
+Victor had written: ‘My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the
+Walworth. Business. Skepsey for clothes. Eight of us. Formal. A thousand
+embraces. Late.’
+
+Skepsey was ushered in. His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he
+postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady
+would expect it of him. His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died
+in hospital. He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but
+he was advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment
+and trusting to his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional
+sensibility out of it, and felt improved.
+
+Nataly sent a line to Victor: ‘Dearest, I go to bed early, am tired.
+Dine well. Come to me in the morning.’
+
+She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey, when he had gone.
+The prospect of her being alone until the morning had been so absorbing
+a relief.
+
+She found a relief also in work at the book of the trains. A walk to
+the telegraph-station strengthened her. Especially after despatching
+a telegram to Mr. Dudley Sowerby at Cronidge, and one to Nesta at
+Moorsedge, did she become stoutly nerved. The former was requested to
+meet her at Penhurst station at noon. Nesta was to be at the station for
+the Wells at three o’clock.
+
+From the time of the flying of these telegrams, up to the tap of
+Victor’s knuckle on her bed-room door next morning, she was not more
+reflectively conscious than a packet travelling to its destination by
+pneumatic tube. Nor was she acutely impressionable to the features and
+the voice she loved.
+
+‘You know of Skepsey?’ she said.
+
+‘Ah, poor Skepsey!’ Victor frowned and heaved.
+
+‘One of us ought to stand beside him at the funeral.’
+
+‘Colney or Fenellan?’
+
+‘I will ask Mr. Durance.’
+
+‘Do, my darling.’
+
+‘Victor, you did not tell me of Dartrey’s wife.’
+
+‘There again! They all get released! Yes, Dartrey! Dartrey has his luck
+too.’
+
+She closed her eyes, with the desire to be asleep.
+
+‘You should have told me, dear.’
+
+‘Well, my love! Well--poor Dartrey! I fancy I hadn’t a confirmation of
+the news. I remember a horrible fit of envy on hearing the hint: not
+much more than a hint: serious illness, was it?--or expected event.
+Hardly worth while to trouble my dear soul, till certain. Anything about
+wives, forces me to think of myself--my better self!’
+
+‘I had to hear of it first from Mrs. Blathenoy.’
+
+‘You’ve heard of duels in dark rooms:--that was the case between
+Blathenoy and me last night for an hour.’
+
+She feigned somnolent fatigue over her feverish weariness of heart. He
+kissed her on the forehead.
+
+Her spell-bound intention to speak of Dudley Sowerby to him, was broken
+by the sounding of the hall-door, thirty minutes later. She had lain in
+a trance.
+
+Life surged to her with the thought, that she could decide and take
+her step. Many were the years back since she had taken a step; less
+independently then than now; unregretted, if fatal. Her brain was heated
+for the larger view of things and the swifter summing of them. It could
+put the man at a remove from her and say, that she had lived with him
+and suffered intensely. It gathered him to her breast rejoicing in their
+union: the sharper the scourge, the keener the exultation. But she had
+one reproach to deafen and beat down. This did not come on her from the
+world: she and the world were too much foot to foot on the antagonist’s
+line, for her to listen humbly. It came of her quick summary survey of
+him, which was unnoticed by the woman’s present fiery mind as being
+new or strange in any way: simply it was a fact she now read; and
+it directed her to reproach herself for an abasement beneath his
+leadership, a blind subserviency and surrender of her faculties to his
+greater powers, such as no soul of a breathing body should yield to man:
+not to the highest, not to the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men.
+Under cloak, they demand it. They demand their bane.
+
+And Victor!... She had seen into him.
+
+The reproach on her was, that she, in her worship, had been slave, not
+helper. Scarcely was she irreproachable in the character of slave. If it
+had been utter slave! she phrased the words, for a further reproach. She
+remembered having at times murmured, dissented. And it would have been
+a desperate proud thought to comfort a slave, that never once had she
+known even a secret opposition to the will of her lord.
+
+But she had: she recalled instances. Up they rose; up rose everything
+her mind ranged over, subsiding immediately when the service was done.
+She had not conceived her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in
+all earthly-matters. Her intellect had sometimes protested.
+
+What, then, had moved her to swamp it?
+
+Her heart answered. And that heart also was arraigned: and the heart’s
+fleshly habitation acting on it besides: so flagellant of herself was
+she: covertly, however, and as the chaste among women can consent to let
+our animal face them. Not grossly, still perceptibly to her penetrative
+hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of the woman under a charm. She
+saw, and swam whirling with a pang of revolt from her personal being and
+this mortal kind.
+
+Her rational intelligence righted her speedily. She could say in truth,
+by proof, she loved the man: nature’s love, heart’s love, soul’s love.
+She had given him her life.
+
+It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very beginning and
+spring of this wild cast of her life, issued from something he said and
+did (merest of airy gestures) to signify the blessing of life--how good
+and fair it is. A drooping mood in her had been struck; he had a look
+like the winged lyric up in blue heavens: he raised the head of the
+young flower from its contemplation of grave-mould. That was when he
+had much to bear: Mrs. Burman present: and when the stranger in their
+household had begun to pity him and have a dread of her feelings. The
+lucent splendour of his eyes was memorable, a light above the rolling
+oceans of Time.
+
+She had given him her life, little aid. She might have closely
+counselled, wound in and out with his ideas. Sensible of capacity, she
+confessed to the having been morally subdued, physically as well; swept
+onward; and she was arrested now by an accident, like a waif of the
+river-floods by the dip of a branch. Time that it should be! But was not
+Mr. Durance, inveighing against the favoured system for the education of
+women, right when he declared them to be unfitted to speak an opinion
+on any matter external to the household or in a crisis of the household?
+She had not agreed with him: he presented stinging sentences, which
+irritated more than they enlightened. Now it seemed to her, that the
+model women of men make pleasant slaves, not true mates: they lack the
+worldly training to know themselves or take a grasp of circumstances.
+
+There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not the
+strengthening breath of vital common air. If good fortune is with them,
+all may go well: the stake of their fates is upon the perpetual smooth
+flow of good fortune. She had never joined to the cry of the women. Few
+among them were having it in the breast as loudly.
+
+Hard on herself, too, she perceived how the social rebel had reduced
+her mind to propitiate a simulacrum, reflected from out, of an enthroned
+Society within it, by an advocacy of the existing laws and rules
+and habits. Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker: none so
+conservative. Not until we are driven back upon an unviolated Nature, do
+we call to the intellect to think radically: and then we begin to think
+of our fellows.
+
+Or when we have set ourselves in motion direct for the doing of the
+right thing: have quitted the carriage at the station, and secured the
+ticket, and entered the train, counting the passage of time for a simple
+rapid hour before we have eased heart in doing justice to ourself and to
+another; then likewise the mind is lighted for radiation. That doing of
+the right thing, after a term of paralysis, cowardice--any evil name--is
+one of the mighty reliefs, equal to happiness, of longer duration.
+
+Nataly had it. But her mind was actually radiating, and the comfort
+to her heart evoked the image of Dartrey Fenellan. She saw a possible
+reason for her bluntness to the coming scene with Dudley.
+
+At once she said, No! and closed the curtain; knowing what was behind,
+counting it nought. She repeated almost honestly her positive negative.
+How we are mixed of the many elements! she thought, as an observer; and
+self-justifyingly thought on, and with truth, that duty urged her upon
+this journey; and proudly thought, that she had not a shock of the
+painful great organ in her breast at the prospect at the end, or any
+apprehension of its failure to carry her through.
+
+Yet the need of peace or some solace needed to prepare her for her
+interview turned her imagination burningly on Dartrey. She would not
+allow herself to meditate over hopes and schemes:--Nesta free: Dartrey
+free. She vowed to her soul sacredly--and she was one of those in whom
+the Divinity lives, that they may do so--not to speak a word for the
+influencing of Dudley save the one fact. Consequently, for a personal
+indulgence, she mused; she caressed maternally the object of her musing;
+of necessity, she excluded Nesta; but in tenderness she gave Dartrey a
+fair one to love him.
+
+The scene was waved away. That one so loving him, partly worthy of him,
+ready to traverse the world now beside him--who could it be other than
+she who knew and prized his worth? Foolish! It is one of the hatefuller
+scourges upon women whenever, a little shaken themselves, they muse upon
+some man’s image, that they cannot put in motion the least bit of drama
+without letting feminine self play a part; generally to develop into a
+principal part... The apology makes it a melancholy part.
+
+Dartrey’s temper of the caged lion dominated by his tamer, served as
+keynote for any amount of saddest colouring. He controlled the brute:
+but he held the contempt of danger, the love of strife, the passion for
+adventure; he had crossed the desert of human anguish. He of all men
+required a devoted mate, merited her. Of all men living, he was the
+hardest to match with a woman--with a woman deserving him.
+
+The train had quitted London. Now for the country, now for free
+breathing! She who two days back had come from Alps, delighted in the
+look on flat green fields. It was under the hallucination of her saying
+in flight adieu to them, and to England; and, that somewhere hidden, to
+be found in Asia, Africa, America, was the man whose ideal of life was
+higher than enjoyment. His caged brute of a temper offered opportunities
+for delicious petting; the sweetest a woman can bestow: it lifts her
+out of timidity into an adoration still palpitatingly fearful. Ah, but
+familiarity, knowledge, confirmed assurance of his character, lift her
+to another stage, above the pleasures. May she not prove to him how
+really matched with him she is, to disdain the pleasures, cheerfully
+accept the burdens, meet death, if need be; readily face it as the
+quietly grey to-morrow: at least, show herself to her hero for a
+woman--the incredible being to most men--who treads the terrors as well
+as the pleasures of humanity beneath her feet, and may therefore have
+some pride in her stature. Ay, but only to feel the pride of standing
+not so shamefully below his level beside him.
+
+Woods were flying past the carriage-windows. Her solitary companion
+was of the class of the admiring gentlemen. Presently he spoke. She
+answered. He spoke again. Her mouth smiled, and her accompanying look of
+abstract benevolence arrested the tentative allurement to conversation.
+
+New ideas were set revolving in her. Dartrey and Victor grew to
+a likeness; they became hazily one man, and the mingled phantom
+complimented her on her preserving a good share of the beauty of her
+youth. The face perhaps: the figure rather too well suits the years! she
+replied. To reassure her, this Dartrey-Victor drew her close and kissed
+her; and she was confused and passed into the breast of Mrs. Burman
+expecting an operation at the hands of the surgeons. The train had
+stopped. ‘Penhurst?’ she said.
+
+‘Penhurst is the next station,’ said the gentleman. Here was a theme for
+him! The stately mansion, the noble grounds, and Sidney! He discoursed
+of them.
+
+The handsome lady appeared interested. She was interested also by his
+description of a neighbouring village, likely one hundred years hence
+to be a place of pilgrimage for Americans and for Australians. Age, he
+said, improves true beauty; and his eyelids indicated a levelling to
+perform the soft intentness. Mechanically, a ball rose in her throat;
+the remark was illuminated by a saying of Colney’s, with regard to his
+countrymen at the play of courtship. No laughter came. The gentleman
+talked on.
+
+All fancies and internal communications left her. Slowness of motion
+brought her to the plain piece of work she had to do, on a colourless
+earth, that seemed foggy; but one could see one’s way. Resolution is a
+form of light, our native light in this dubious world.
+
+Dudley Sowerby opened her carriage-door. They greeted.
+
+‘You have seen Nesta?’ she said.
+
+‘Not for two days. You have not heard? The Miss Duvidneys have gone to
+Brighton.’
+
+‘They are rather in advance of the Season.’
+
+She thanked him for meeting her. He was grateful for the summons.
+
+Informing the mother of his betrothed, that he had ridden over from
+Cronidge, he speculated on the place to select for her luncheon, and
+he spoke of his horse being led up and down outside the station. Nataly
+inquired for the hour of the next train to London. He called to one of
+the porters, obtained and imparted the time; evidently now, as shown by
+an unevenness of his lifted brows, expecting news of some little weight.
+
+‘Your husband is quite well?’ he said, in affection for the name of
+husband.
+
+‘Mr. Radnor is well; I have to speak to you; I have more than time.’
+
+‘You will lunch at the inn?’
+
+‘I shall not eat. We will walk.’
+
+They crossed the road and passed under trees.
+
+‘My mother was to have called on the Miss Duvidneys. They left
+hurriedly; I think it was unanticipated by Nesta. I venture... you
+pardon the liberty... she allows me to entertain hopes. Mr. Radnor, I am
+hardly too bold in thinking... I trust, in appealing to you... at least
+I can promise!
+
+‘Mr. Sowerby, you have done my daughter the honour to ask her hand in
+marriage.’
+
+He said: ‘I have,’ and had much to say besides, but deferred: a blow was
+visible. The father had been more encouraging to him than the mother.
+
+‘You have not known of any circumstance that might cause hesitation in
+asking?’
+
+‘Miss Radnor?’
+
+‘My daughter:--you have to think of your family.’
+
+‘Indeed, Mrs. Radnor, I was coming to London tomorrow, with the consent
+of my family.’
+
+‘You address me as Mrs. Radnor. I have not the legal right to the name.’
+
+‘Not legal!’ said he, with a catch at the word.
+
+He spun round in her sight, though his demeanour was manfully rigid.
+
+‘Have I understood, madam...?’
+
+‘You would not request me to repeat it. Is that your horse the man is
+leading?’
+
+‘My horse: it must be my horse.’
+
+‘Mount and ride back. Leave me: I shall not eat. Reflect, by yourself.
+You are in a position of one who is not allowed to decide by his
+feelings. Mr. Radnor you know where to find.’
+
+‘But surely, some food? I cannot have misapprehended?’
+
+‘I cannot eat. I think you have understood me clearly.’
+
+‘You wish me to go?’
+
+‘I beg.’
+
+‘It pains me, dear madam.’
+
+‘It relieves me, if you will. Here is your horse.’
+
+She gave her hand. He touched it and bent. He looked at her. A surge
+of impossible questions rolled to his mouth and rolled back, with the
+thought of an incredible thing, that her manner, more than her words,
+held him from doubting.
+
+‘I obey you,’ he said.
+
+‘You are kind.’
+
+He mounted horse, raised hat, paced on, and again bowing, to one of the
+wayside trees, cantered. The man was gone; but not from Nataly’s vision
+that face of wet chalk under one of the shades of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO
+EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
+
+Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke. It filled him, as
+in those halls of political clamour, where explanatory speech is not
+accepted, because of a drowning tide of hot blood on both sides. He
+sought to win attention by submitting a resolution, to the effect, that
+he would the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor,
+bearing his family’s feelings, for a discussion upon them. But the
+brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he could not
+rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were driving shoals; he had
+lost hearing and touch of individual men; had become a house of angrily
+opposing parties.
+
+He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself injured, though
+there were contrary outcries, and he admitted that he stood free; he had
+not been inextricably deceived.
+
+The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.
+Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that
+was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered
+deeper sentiments; which were a diver’s wreck, where an armoured livid
+subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in
+heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like
+a bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the
+mournful spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the
+world above, whereby he was deafened yet sustained. One tug at it, and
+he was up on the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully
+no more that burly phantom cleaving green slime, free! and the roaring
+stopped; the world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise.
+His wreck, animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it
+winked lurefully when abandoned.
+
+The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as
+heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only
+can describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something
+more than is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets.
+He had--and had it not the less because he fain would not have
+had--sufficient stuff to furnish forth a soul’s epic encounter between
+Nature and Circumstance: and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the
+fraternity of old lamps for lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be
+rubbed, that we may get a glimpse of the fray.
+
+Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time
+humbly and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family
+to pronounce the decision: such was the second stage of Dudley’s
+perturbation after the blow. A letter of Nesta’s writing was in his
+pocket: he knew her address. He could not reply to her until he had seen
+her father: and that interview remained necessarily prospective until he
+had come to his exact resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the
+sentences giving it shape, stamp, dignity--a noble’s crest, as it were.
+
+Nesta wrote briefly. The apostrophe was, ‘Dear Mr. Sowerby.’ She
+had engaged to send her address. Her father had just gone. The Miss
+Duvidneys had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing
+the sea. According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and
+had that morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and
+company, one of whom was ‘an agreeable lady.’
+
+He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the ‘Delphica’ of
+Mr. Durance’s incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which,
+as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun;
+and she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it
+or anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been
+humiliated by the obedience to her lead: she had offended by her harping
+upon Delphica. However, here it was unmentioned. He held the letter out
+to seize it in the large, entire.
+
+Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable
+lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived
+in her--if she knew her position. She might be ignorant of it. And to
+strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of
+the loathsome name, was not materially important. Marriage altered the
+view. He sided with his family.
+
+He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a vision of the earldom
+coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which
+his unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance
+with a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality. Who
+would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the
+righteous? And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really
+a sense of duty, sense of honour! That she must be a lady, Dudley
+was convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal
+respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking
+him drearly like a distant great mansion’s conflagration across moorland
+at midnight, of a lady’s breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How
+had it been concealed? In Dudley’s upper sphere, everything was exposed:
+Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But
+still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now,
+she must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would
+Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death:...
+grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!
+Not in time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother’s confession,
+cannot protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a
+round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.
+
+He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so
+well, that he was presently striving to be insensible. The former state,
+was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.
+There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father’s agonized
+amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles
+and pecuniary requirements; his mother’s blunt mention of the abominable
+name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families
+indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church:
+a blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,
+crying out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of
+himself. The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
+There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them
+and the commonalty.
+
+His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,
+with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect
+of six or so, excluding Sir John’s estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a
+fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as
+they ripened. A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted
+to love. He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become
+obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not
+extinct. Sight of her was to be dreaded.
+
+Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That constituted the
+unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which
+had his world’s blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and
+enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
+Can innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it might be
+possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws
+governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
+They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His
+conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward
+post of resistance. Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having
+a heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present
+instance. When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he
+attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair
+face.--Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes. She led him--she did
+lead him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought,
+into refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished
+the juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications:
+and really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl’s education, she could
+boast her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in
+commerce with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed
+and was a needle for humour: she taught him at times to put away his
+contempt of the romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed
+contempt of it disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the
+foolishness of it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence
+and senses gave her the form and glory of young morning.
+
+Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her
+youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,
+exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary
+feminine of himself. Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether
+the very sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not
+at some time or other show trace of the origin, surged up. If he could
+only have been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous
+ardour, in reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated
+Dudley to quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of
+those monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the
+House of Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive
+the nameless girl and prodigious heiress. His family’s instruction of
+him, and his inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped
+of the clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish: we grant her
+certain steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and
+when she violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary
+wicked old beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices. An alliance
+with any of her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his
+house, his class, and his tenets. And nevertheless he was haunted by a
+cry of criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.
+
+He would not decide to be ‘precipitate,’ and the days ran their course,
+until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow. Lady Cantor spoke
+to her of Dudley’s unfathomable gloom. Lady Grace took him aside.
+
+She said, without preface: ‘You’ve heard, have you!’
+
+‘You were aware of it?’ said he, and his tone was irritable with a
+rebuke.
+
+‘Coming through town, for the first time yesterday. I had it--of all
+men!--from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about
+my husband’s shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it
+came out. He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes,
+respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret. Hum? He had heard
+of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.: “esteemed” it--you know
+the City dialect--his duty to mention, etc. That was after I had spied
+on his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth. What are you
+going to do?’
+
+‘What can I do!’
+
+‘Are you fond of the girl?’
+
+An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case. She was not a
+woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet
+he saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to
+understand his dilemma. Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons
+universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression
+of his feelings. They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he
+wanted, was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a
+recomposed picture of the world. He had already taken six days. He
+pleaded the shock to his family.
+
+‘You won’t have such a chance again,’ she said. Shrugs had set in.
+
+They agreed as to the behaviour of the girl’s mother. It reflected on
+the father, he thought.
+
+‘Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement!’ Her shoulders were
+restless.
+
+‘When a man’s feelings get entangled!’
+
+‘Oh! a man’s feelings! I’m your British Jury for, a woman’s.’
+
+‘He has married her?’
+
+She declared to not knowing particulars. She could fib smoothly.
+
+The next day she was on the line to London, armed with the proposal of
+an appointment for the Hon. Dudley to meet ‘the girl’s father.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF
+THE CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
+
+Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master’s private room, and
+entertained her during his master’s absence. He had buried his wife,
+he said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one
+shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,
+to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation
+for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking
+the acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his
+hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
+fare.
+
+A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman’s
+bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at
+night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public
+house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
+floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse ‘the ravens’
+flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of
+the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming
+into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer
+is not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone. Thinking which,
+he was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way:
+who inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She described
+him, and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she
+insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions
+to withdraw him from ‘that snare of Satan,’ he had accompanied her, and
+he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down. But friends, or
+the acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were ‘in
+drink,’ and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young
+man’s arm, quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the name
+of Englishmen--and it was hardly much better if they pleaded
+intoxication!--they were not content to tear the young man from her
+grasp, they hustled her, pushed her out, dragged her in the street.
+
+‘It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,’ said Skepsey. ‘She
+had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she
+did not recriminate. I was able to release her and the young man she
+protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my
+proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against
+me were not a proper match. And of course, they jeered, but they had
+the evidence, on the pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily
+oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was a bigger
+man; they laughed at the little one. I told them, it depended upon a
+knowledge of first principles, and the power to apply them. I will not
+boast, my lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down
+a second time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing
+but first principles put into action. I mention the incident, for the
+extreme relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.’
+
+‘So you cured your grief!’ said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his
+master.
+
+Victor’s festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the
+window-sill, lamps inside.
+
+‘Am I so welcome?’ There was a pull of emotion at her smile. ‘What with
+your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come
+here. He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician,
+the putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the
+widowed:--meant most kindly! and it’s a thousand pities women haven’t
+their padded gloves.’
+
+‘Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough. You have something to
+say, I see.’
+
+‘How do you see?’
+
+‘Tusk, tush.’
+
+The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked
+to suit her laden look. ‘You hit it. I come from Dudley. He knows the
+facts. I wish to serve you, in every way.’
+
+Victor’s head had lifted.
+
+‘Who was it?’
+
+‘No enemy.’
+
+‘Her mother. She did rightly!
+
+‘Certainly she did,’ said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of
+the thing done. ‘Oh, then she spoke to him! She has kept it from me.
+For now nearly a week--six days--I’ve seen her spying for something she
+expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She has not been
+half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from
+him, of him:--the decision, whatever it’s to be!’
+
+‘I can’t aid you there,’ said Lady Grace. ‘He’s one of the unreadables.
+He names Tuesday next week.’
+
+‘By all means.’
+
+‘She?’
+
+‘Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing.
+Here is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she
+lives. Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical,
+lives by sheer force of will--it’s a miracle of the power of a human
+creature to .... I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they
+can’t guess what she holds on, to keep her breath. All the happiness in
+life!--if only it could benefit her. But it ‘s the cause of death to us.
+Do you see, dear friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,’ he took her
+hand, and held and pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to
+emphasis; and having this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with
+it. ‘The friend I need! You have courage. My Nataly, poor dear--she can
+endure, in her quiet way. A woman of courage would take her place beside
+me and compel the world to do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile
+does it! She would never be beaten. Of course, we could have lived under
+a bushel--stifled next to death! But I am for light, air-battle, if you
+like. I want a comrade, not a--not that I complain. I respect, pity,
+love--I do love her, honour: only, we want something else--courage--to
+face the enemy. Quite right, that she should speak to Dudley Sowerby. He
+has to know, must know; all who deal closely with us must know. But see
+a moment: I am waiting to see the impediment dispersed, which puts
+her at an inequality with the world: and then I speak to all whom it
+concerns--not before: for her sake. How is it now? Dudley will ask...
+you understand. And when I am forced to confess, that the mother,
+the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is not yet in that state
+herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle has crumbled
+to dust! I say, probably: I have information--doctors, friends,
+attendants--they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But you are
+here--true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me. A woman’s hand?
+Well, yes: I read by the touch of a woman’s hand:--betrays more than her
+looks or her lips!’ He sank his voice. ‘I don’t talk of condoling: if
+you are in grief, you know I share it.’ He kissed her hand, and laid it
+on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her eyes, and
+lost himself. A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say: ‘As for
+guilt, if it were known... a couple of ascetics--absolutely!’ But this
+was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology to his
+conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one who
+was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed
+in enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the
+thoroughbred’s contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught
+the word ‘guilt,’ to hide the Philistine citizen’s lapse, by relating
+historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
+of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
+guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
+of it.
+
+‘Fiddle,’ said Lady Grace. ‘The thing happened. You have now to carry it
+through. You require a woman’s aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
+what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain
+with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has
+no aversion?’
+
+‘Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.’
+
+‘Good enough beginning.’ She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
+heavy. ‘And if one proves to be of aid, you’ll own that a woman has her
+place in the battle.’
+
+The fair black-clad widow’s quick and singular interwreathing of the
+evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind
+on a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his
+chin, her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.
+
+Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
+shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct
+to the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
+pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
+visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
+impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle
+with the King of Terrors for the other poor harper’s half-night
+capped Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the
+solicitude, a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call
+it a fact, to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty
+youth in its coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of
+the regiment absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the
+cross of a track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very
+much more, and which affects us at times so much less than did the
+pressure of a soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On
+the contrary, we triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our
+pains; we commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big
+fact.
+
+The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
+and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
+eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed,
+she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness
+of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit
+nor glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
+tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal
+of them. He glowed transparently. He said: ‘You are the woman to take
+a front place in the battle!’ With this woman beside him, it was a
+conquered world.
+
+Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
+favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
+stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
+that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
+She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman
+had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would
+have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as
+bring her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her
+thought of reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent
+in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And
+she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
+superior being to direct and restrain a gambler’s hand perhaps for the
+fee of a temporary pressure.
+
+‘I may be able to help a little--I hope!’ she fetched a breath to say,
+while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
+inheritance of property in stocks and shares.
+
+Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
+projects he entertained:--Parliament! ‘But I have only to mention it at
+home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.’
+
+He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.
+
+‘You succeed in everything you do,’ said she, and she cordially believed
+it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
+her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.
+
+‘I can’t consent to fail, it’s true, when my mind is on a thing,’ Victor
+rejoined.
+
+He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.
+These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
+perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
+Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though
+she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him
+a grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how
+greatly relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the
+capturing intrepidity.
+
+‘I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?’ she suggested.
+
+‘At any hour he pleases to appoint.’
+
+‘A visit signifies...’
+
+‘Whatever it signifies!’
+
+‘I’m thinking of the bit of annoyance.’
+
+‘To me? Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.’
+
+Her smile was flatteringly bright. ‘By the way, keep your City people
+close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,’ she said.
+
+‘At home?’
+
+‘Better. Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.
+There’s no drawing back now. And I will meet them.’
+
+She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.
+
+But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.
+
+The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor stated the figures; he
+saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top
+of them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had
+her experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.
+Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.
+Compared with other players, this man was gifted.
+
+Victor went in to Mr. Inchling’s room, and kept Inchling from speaking,
+that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what.
+The good fellow was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called
+the wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could
+not but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful. He
+had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his
+wife being always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think
+in private--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not
+originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak
+of obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could
+illumine to give him back splendid reflections. Inchling and his wife,
+it was: because the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him,
+knowing all the story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.
+
+They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand. So it
+had been.
+
+He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and
+let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had
+no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls
+of his room.
+
+Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.
+
+He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled
+affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
+this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
+him for gentle treatment.
+
+‘You have not seen any one?’ she asked.
+
+‘City people. And you, my love?’
+
+‘Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
+some friend there.’ She added, in pain of thought: ‘I have seen Dartrey.
+He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects
+he will have to take him to Brighton.’
+
+‘Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!’
+
+Her breast heaved. ‘If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
+to me for a day:
+
+‘But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
+her.’
+
+‘It is becoming imperative that I should.’
+
+‘No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week. And I must see
+Dartrey, on business, at once!’
+
+She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had minutes to spare
+before dinner, and flew. She was not inquisitive.
+
+Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her. She had
+little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint. After her interview
+with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to
+secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII. MRS. MARSETT
+
+Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of Colney Durance,
+and he ran down to Brighton, to give the exiled Nesta some taste of
+her friendly London circle. The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded
+gentleman had a regard for the girl. Their own, which was becoming
+warmer than they liked to think, was impressed by his manner of
+conversing with her. ‘Child though she was,’ he paid her the compliment
+of a sober as well as a satirical review of the day’s political
+matter and recent publications; and the ladies were introduced, in
+a wonderment, to the damsel Delphica. They listened placidly to a
+discourse upon her performances, Japanese to their understandings.
+
+At New York, behold, another adventurous representative and advocate
+of the European tongues has joined the party: Signor Jeridomani: a
+philologer, of course; a politician in addition; Macchiavelli redivivus,
+it seems to fair Delphica. The speech he delivers at the Syndicate
+Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York Press as a
+masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be the only one of the party
+who has an eye for the dark. She fancies she may know a more widely
+awake in the abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric
+laughter over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the
+concurrents are all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the
+American public. Dr. Bouthoin’s eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures
+his name by greatly gaping. Shall they return to their Great Britain
+indignant? Patriotism, with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no
+cost to the private purse, restrains them. Moreover, there is no sign of
+any one of the others intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians
+has done a marvel or two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up
+where she can. What is painfully extraordinary to our couple, they find
+in the frigid attitude of the Americans toward their ‘common tongue’;
+together with the rumour of a design to despatch an American rival
+emissary to Japan.
+
+Nesta listened, inquired, commented, laughed; the ladies could not have
+a doubt that she was interested and understood. She would have sketches
+of scenes between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young
+Germania was cleverly ingenuous indeed--a seminary Celimene; and between
+Delphica and M. Mytharete, with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly
+amoebaean of Homer. Dr. Gannius holds a trump card in his artless
+daughter, conjecturally, for the establishment of the language of the
+gutturals in the far East. He has now a suspicion, that the inventive M.
+Falarique, melted down to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle
+their camp by the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent
+on establishing alliances; frightens the supple Signor Jeridomani to
+lingual fixity; eulogizes Football, with Dr. Bouthoin; and retracts, or
+modifies, his dictum upon the English, that, ‘masculine brawn they have
+in their bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds’;
+to exalt them, for a signally clean, if a dense, people: ‘Amousia, not
+Alousia, is their enemy:’--How, when we have the noblest crop of poets?
+‘You have never heartily embraced those aliens among you until you
+learnt from us, that you might brag of them.’--Have they not endowed us
+with the richest of languages? ‘The words of which are used by you,
+as old slippers, for puns.’ Mr. Semhians has been superciliously
+and ineffectively punning in foreign presences: he and his chief are
+inwardly shocked by a new perception; What if, now that we have the
+populace for paymaster, subservience to the literary tastes of the
+populace should reduce the nation to its lowest mental level, and render
+us not only unable to compete with the foreigner, but unintelligible to
+him, although so proudly paid at home! Is it not thus that nations are
+seen of the Highest to be devouring themselves?
+
+‘For,’ says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, ‘this excessive and
+applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile, in
+your modern literature, is it ever a crop? Is it even the restorative
+perishable stuff of the markets? Is it not rather your street-pavement’s
+patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?’ Mr.
+Semhians appeals to Delphica. ‘Genius you have,’ says she, stiffening
+his neck-band, ‘genius in superabundance’:--he throttles to the
+complexion of the peony:--‘perhaps criticism is wanting.’ Dr. Gannius
+adds: ‘Perhaps it is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an
+unrivalled splendid rabble!’
+
+Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a
+famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before
+an enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages.
+‘I hear,’ says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily
+extending), ‘that the tickets cost ten dollars!’
+
+There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.
+
+Colney asked: ‘Have you seen any of our band?’
+
+‘No,’ she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a
+funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by
+Dudley. A funny and a naughty reason, was it? Not so very naughty: but
+it was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an
+inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.
+
+Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical
+evening, as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the
+ladies to bed, made them share her father’s amused view of the lamb
+of the flock this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious
+instrument tucked under his chin. He was a guest for the night. Dressing
+in the early hour, Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon
+joined him, to hear him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine.
+‘These lengths of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!’ were the
+satirist’s present black beast. ‘So these moneyed English shoulder
+to the front place; and that is the appearance they offer to their
+commercial God!’ He gazed along the miles of ‘English countenance,’
+drearily laughing. Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle.
+Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation: ‘Capital!’
+
+‘Come where the shops are,’ said Nesta.
+
+‘And how many thousand parsons have you here?’
+
+‘Ten, I think,’ she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him
+contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the Rev. Septimus; Mr.
+Sowerby.
+
+‘News of our friend of the whimpering flute?’
+
+‘Here? no. I have to understand you!’
+
+Colney cast a weariful look backward on the ‘regiments of Anglo-Chinese’
+represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said: ‘The face of a
+stopped watch!--the only meaning it has is past date.’
+
+He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby. But it might have been an allusion
+to the general view of the houses. But again, ‘the meaning of it past
+date,’ stuck in her memory. A certain face close on handsome, had a
+fatal susceptibility to caricature.
+
+She spoke of her ‘exile’: wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned
+over the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the reason for the long
+separation from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.
+
+They turned on to the pier.
+
+Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her
+visit to the place when she was a child:
+
+         ‘“And then along the pier we sped,
+          And there we saw a Whale
+          He seemed to have a Normous Head,
+          And not a bit of Tail!”’
+
+‘Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
+condition rules,’ Colney said.
+
+         ‘“And then we scampered on the beach,
+          To chase the foaming wave;
+          And when we ran beyond its reach
+          We all became more brave.”’
+
+Colney remarked: ‘I was a poet--for once.’
+
+A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very
+enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry
+of pleasure and--a silvery ‘You dear!’ at sight of Nesta; then at sight
+of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
+conventional. ‘We ride to-day?’
+
+‘I shall be one,’ said Nesta.
+
+‘It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you were absent.’
+
+‘Till eleven, then!’
+
+‘After my morning letter to Ned.’
+
+She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the adieu, blushed,
+blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the underone, and
+passed in a discomposure.
+
+‘The lady?’ Colney asked.
+
+‘She is--I meet her in the troop conducted by the riding-master: Mrs.
+Marsett.’
+
+‘And who is Ned?’
+
+‘It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning. He is a captain in
+the army, or was. He is in Norway, fishing.’
+
+‘Then the probability is, that the English officer continues his
+military studies.’
+
+‘Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance?’
+
+‘Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed it and toned it a
+little!
+
+‘She is different, if you are alone with her.’
+
+‘It is not unusual,’ said Colney.
+
+At eleven o’clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Marsett
+amid the troop.
+
+A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of
+brilliance under the sun.
+
+‘I took a liberty this morning, I called you “Dear” this morning,’
+the lady said. ‘It’s what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out
+everything I feel, and I was ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared
+ridiculous. I got quite nervous.’
+
+‘You would not be ridiculous to me.’
+
+‘I remember I spoke of Ned!
+
+‘You have spoken of him before.’
+
+‘Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck out my heart and pitch
+it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim. That’s a funny
+idea, isn’t it! I tell you everything that comes up. What shall I
+do when I lose you! You always make me feel you’ve a lot of poetry
+ready-made in you.’
+
+‘We will write. And you will have your husband then.’
+
+‘When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and
+behaved like a fool for several minutes. I can’t bear the thought of
+losing you!’
+
+‘But you don’t lose me,’ said Nesta; ‘there is no ground for your
+supposing that you will. And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you
+more closely.’
+
+‘If you knew!’ Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery tongue, and she
+carolled: ‘If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a
+naked lot of people we should be!’
+
+They were crossing the passage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end
+of the East Cliff. One among them, large and dominant, with a playful
+voice of brass, cried out:
+
+‘And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett--ha? Beautiful morning?’
+
+Mrs. Marsett’s figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level
+ahead. Her woman’s red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.
+
+‘He did not salute you,’ Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having
+responded.
+
+The lady breathed a low thunder: ‘Coward!’
+
+‘He cannot have intended to insult you,’ said Nesta.
+
+‘That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast. He will learn that
+I carry a horsewhip.’
+
+‘Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?’
+
+The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett.
+
+‘Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself
+that I was born “one of the frail sex.” We are, or we should ride at the
+coward and strike him to the ground. Pray, pray do not look distressed!
+Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man barks it out on the
+roads. It doesn’t matter.’
+
+‘He has offended you before?’
+
+‘You are near me. They can’t hurt me, can’t touch me, when I think that
+I ‘m talking with you. How I envy those who call you by your Christian
+name!’
+
+‘Nesta,’ said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced, that she might show
+kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.
+
+Mrs. Marsett opened her lips: ‘Oh, my God, I shall be crying!--let’s
+gallop. No, wait, I’ll tell you. I wish I could! I will tell you of that
+man. That man is Major Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to
+their grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome woman, above him
+in rank, with money; a good woman. She was a good woman, or she would
+have had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her. She must
+have loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox. He spent her money and
+he deceived her.--You innocent! Oh, you dear! I’d give the world to have
+your eyes. I’ve heard tell of “crystal clear,” but eyes like yours have
+to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for them to be in! I did
+pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you--I said
+Nesta--might never have to go through other women’s miseries. Ah me! I
+have to tell you he deceived her. You don’t quite understand.’
+
+‘I do understand,’ said Nesta.
+
+‘God help you!--I am excited to-day. That man is poison to me. His wife
+forgave him three times. On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave
+him. He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She walked
+out one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious
+creature. You know there are bad women. They passed her, laughing. And
+look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.’ Mrs. Marsett pointed
+her whip hard out. ‘The poor lady went down from the height here; she
+walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and
+she plunged; she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major
+Worrell--I ‘ve told you enough.’
+
+‘We ‘ll gallop now,’ said Nesta.
+
+Mrs. Marsett’s talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with
+those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great
+elements are conspiring. She felt that there was a cause why she had to
+pity, did pity her. It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was
+of inferior station,’ and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
+The supposition seemed probable. The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as
+the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?
+She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled to some
+breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance:
+not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of
+our life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.
+But she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.
+
+Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
+to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
+mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
+beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend
+Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved
+reason: she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady
+seemed to need her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for
+swallowing and digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.
+
+At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
+wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to
+hear praises of ‘innocence’; and women can do so little to cure that
+‘wickedness of men,’ among the lady’s conversational themes; and ‘love’
+too: it may be a ‘plague,’ and it may be ‘heaven’: it is better left
+unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett’s looks and tones
+touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
+signification in the girl’s bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
+ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett’s quieted good looks had a shadow of
+a tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.
+
+These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English
+was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce
+and drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated
+ladies in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature
+betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta’s maid Mary’s. Mrs.
+Marsett liked love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite
+noble poet, and she begged Nesta’s pardon for naming him, and she would
+not name him, and told her she must not read him until she was a married
+woman, because he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one
+of her silences, emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever
+read him. She did not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard! he fought his
+battle: he shall not be named for the brand on the name. He has lit a
+sulphur match for the lover of nature through many a generation; and to
+be forgiven by sad frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil’s
+agent to them at the perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastisement
+enough. This it is to be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity
+sitting in judgement will grant, that they were part of his honest
+battle with the hypocrite English Philistine, without being dupe of the
+plea or at all the thirsty swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Marsett
+expressed aloud her gladness of escape in never having met a man like
+him; followed by her regret that ‘Ned’ was so utterly unlike; except
+‘perhaps’--and she hummed; she was off on the fraternity in wickedness.
+
+Nesta’s ears were fatigued. ‘My mother writes of you,’ she said, to vary
+the subject.
+
+Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright: ‘I have had my dream of
+a friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother
+objects?’
+
+‘She has inquired, nothing more.’
+
+‘I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you.
+I know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that
+water first, and take Mrs. Worrell’s plunge:--the last bath; a thorough
+cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn’t want it, as
+we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!
+Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you
+to call me Judith. Damnable name!’ Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of
+the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of
+the girl’s alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves
+and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady’s
+lips. She murmured: ‘Forgive me,’ and had the passion to repeat the
+epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the
+twitch of Nesta’s brows made her say: ‘Do pardon me. I did something
+in Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me
+riding with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended
+you.’
+
+‘We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing
+else.’
+
+‘They frighten you.’
+
+‘They make me shut; that is all.’
+
+‘Supposing you were some day to discover... ta-tata, all the things
+there are in the world.’ Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup.
+‘You must have some ideas of me.’
+
+‘I think you have had unhappy experiences.’
+
+‘Nesta... just now and then! the first time we rode out together,
+coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was
+enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were
+not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she’s
+bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you
+did--you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel
+of compassion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget
+the words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so.
+I worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to
+find out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could
+hear you, and only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven! Unhappy
+experiences? Yes. But when men get women on the slope to their
+perdition, they have no mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they
+are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder. They’re never
+hanged for it. They make the Laws! And then they become fathers of
+families, and point the finger at the “wretched creatures.” They have a
+dozen names against women, for one at themselves.’
+
+‘It maddens me at times to think...!’ said Nesta, burning with the sting
+of vile names.
+
+Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and
+the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and
+execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!’
+
+‘I blame women--if I may dare, at my age,’ said Nesta, and her bosom
+heaved. ‘Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the
+names; they should go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they
+are sisters! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean--Christ shows it does
+not. He changes the tone of Scripture. The women who are made outcasts,
+must be hopeless and go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be
+better, step between them and that. There cannot be any goodness unless
+it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on
+canvas. You speak to me of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only
+a picture and does no work to help to rescue? I fear I think most of the
+dreadful names that redden and sicken us.--The Old Testament!--I have a
+French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines--you should hear her: she
+is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not:
+but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex! I love
+her. It is love. She will never marry until she meets a man who has
+the respect for women, for all women. We both think we cannot separate
+ourselves from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when she
+speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty
+when they have succeeded. She is right, it is the--brute: there is no
+other word.’
+
+‘And French and good!’ Mrs. Marsett ejaculated. ‘My Ned reads French
+novels, and he says, their women.... But your mademoiselle is a real
+one. If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she
+talk much about men and women?’
+
+‘Not often: we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at
+present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and
+the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create
+an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them;
+but we groan at the slowness of it.’
+
+Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad
+as men. ‘I don’t think I could take up with a profession. Unless to be a
+singer. Ah! Do you sing?’
+
+Nesta smiled: ‘Yes, I sing.’
+
+‘How I should like to hear you! My Ned’s a thorough
+Englishman--gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting,
+Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He’s
+immensely proud of England in those things. And such muscle he has!
+though he begins to fancy his heart’s rather weak. It’s digestion, I
+tell him. But he takes me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he
+can’t stand German. Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me,
+when there ‘s company, he has--I’m sure you sing beautifully. When I
+hear beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my
+word, it’s true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I’m new-made:
+I can’t bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the
+end of next week?--it would do me such real good, you can’t guess how
+much; if I could persuade you! I know I’m asking something out of rules.
+For just half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do
+me good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
+don’t think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
+on me? once!’
+
+‘No,’ said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
+awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
+intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they
+were; or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her
+vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the
+stamp of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed
+and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to
+inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust
+those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel,
+the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled
+to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when
+nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of
+accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune’s issue, if
+we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from
+these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the
+Fates. Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad
+incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain;
+the latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the
+simply feminine claim on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of
+the flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that
+the good predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires
+when nature speaks.
+
+She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.
+
+‘An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?’ she was asked, and she said: ‘This
+afternoon, if you like.’
+
+So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
+felt in the prospect.
+
+The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name
+of Marsett to be a reputable County name. ‘There was a Leicestershire
+baronet of the name of Marsett.’ They arranged to send their
+button-blazing boy at Nesta’s heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a
+side-street not very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly
+terrace of the glassy stare at sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX. SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN’S
+MIND
+
+Nasta and her maid were brought back safely through the dusk by their
+constellation of a boy, to whom the provident ladies had entrusted her.
+They could not but note how short her syllables were. Her face was
+only partly seen. They had returned refreshed from their drive on the
+populous and orderly parade---so fair a pattern of their England!--after
+discoursing of ‘the dear child,’ approving her manners, instancing
+proofs of her intelligence, nay, her possession of ‘character.’ They did
+so, notwithstanding that these admissions were worse than their
+growing love for the girl, to confound established ideas. And now, in
+thoughtfulness on her behalf, Dorothea said, ‘We have considered, Nesta,
+that you may be lonely; and if it is your wish, we will leave our
+card on your new acquaintance.’ Nesta took her hand and kissed it; she
+declined, saying, ‘No,’ without voice.
+
+They had two surprises at the dinner-hour. One was the card of Dartrey
+Fenellan, naming an early time next day for his visit; and the other was
+the appearance of the Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest. He had come to
+meet his Bishop.
+
+He had come also with serious information for the ladies, regarding
+the Rev. Abram Posterley. No sooner was this out of his mouth than both
+ladies exclaimed:
+
+‘Again!’ So serious was it, that there had been a consultation at the
+Wells; Mr. Posterley’s friend, the Rev. Septimus Barmby, and his own
+friend, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit
+upon the case: and, ‘One hoped,’ Mr. Stuart Rem said, ‘poor Posterley
+would be restored to the senses he periodically abandoned.’ He laid a
+hand on Tasso’s curls, and withdrew it at a menace of teeth. Tasso would
+submit to rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow Mr.
+Stuart Rem to touch him. Why was that? Perhaps for the reason of Mr.
+Posterley’s being so emotional as perpetually to fall a victim to some
+bright glance and require the rescue of his friends; the slave of woman
+had a magnet for animals!
+
+Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate sentiments, in spite
+of the provokeing recurrence of Mr. Posterley’s malady. He had not
+an income to support a wife. Always was this unfortunate gentleman
+entangling himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it
+was desperate, a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his
+taking it so severely because of his very scrupulous good conduct.
+They pardoned a little wound to their delicacy, and asked: ‘On this
+occasion?’ Mr. Stuart Rem named a linendraper’s establishment near the
+pantiles, where a fair young woman served. ‘And her reputation?’ That
+was an article less presentable through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr.
+Stuart Rem drew a prolonged breath into his nose.
+
+‘It is most melancholy!’ they said in unison. ‘Nothing positive,’ said
+he. ‘But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem! You will not
+permit it?’ He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence.
+Dorothea said: ‘When I think of Mr. Posterley’s addiction to ceremonial
+observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that
+fell from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our
+Church: he called it:--you frown! and I would only quote Mr. Durance
+to you in support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the
+candles, the vestments, Confession, alas! he called it, “Rome and a
+wife.”’
+
+Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention
+of Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.
+
+The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased,
+considerately signified to him, that a young maiden was present.
+
+The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum
+of summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any
+way. She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem’s attentive scrutiny of her from time
+to time. She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her.
+To-morrow she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect,
+for an escape from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the
+hours she had yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her
+soul through a weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still
+did it with her ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much
+of the world’s flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and
+so coldly, previous to Mrs. Marsett’s lift of the veil in her story
+of herself: a skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose
+comparison of the previously suspected things with the things now
+revealed imposed the thought of her having been both a precocious and
+a callous young woman: a kind of ‘Delphica without the erudition,’ her
+mind phrased it airily over her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley
+proved him to have discovered his error in choosing such a person--he
+was wise, and she thanked him. She had an envy of the ignorant-innocents
+adored by the young man she cordially thanked for quitting her. She
+admired the white coat of armour they wore, whether bestowed on them by
+their constitution or by prudence. For while combating mankind now on
+Judith Marsett’s behalf, personally she ran like a hare from the mere
+breath of an association with the very minor sort of similar charges;
+ardently she desired the esteem of mankind; she was at moments abject.
+But had she actually been aware of the facts now known?
+
+Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding
+senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
+visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them
+away from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the
+wilfully or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by
+touch: only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse
+as our society’s matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized
+man--a creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously
+exacts. The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is
+after all in his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she
+appears as a phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer;
+and he insists upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he
+is to have sense of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount
+she seems to know of our construction, history, and dealings, when it
+is not more than her sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the
+facts of life profuse about her, and prompts her through one or other of
+the instincts, often vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to
+her; or haply her filly nature is having a fling at the social harness
+of hypocrisy. If you (it is usually through the length of ears of
+your Novelist that the privilege is yours) have overheard queer
+communications passing between girls, and you must act the traitor
+eavesdropper or Achilles masquerader to overhear so clearly, these,
+be assured, are not specially the signs of their corruptness. Even the
+exceptionally cynical are chiefly to be accused of bad manners. Your
+Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he stamps infamy, on them, or on our
+later generation, for the kick they have at grandmother decorum, because
+you do not or cannot conceal from them the grinning skeleton behind it.
+
+Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
+for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover
+could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to
+pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the
+world had ever loved. Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the
+tree, woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar,
+serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown. The choice her parents had
+made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her
+dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November
+day instead of springing up and into the dawn’s blue of full summer
+with swallows on wing. Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful
+rich, under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley’s
+courtship, subdued her to the world’s decrees; phrased thus: ‘I am not
+to be a heroine.’ The one golden edge to the view was, that she would
+greatly please her father.
+
+Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist’s pressed weed.
+But after hearing Judith Marsett’s wild sobs, it had no place in her
+cherishing. For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have
+been the cause of her misery. She moaned of ‘her Ned’; of his goodness,
+his deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his
+friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience. It was done
+for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta’s friendship: that she might
+be renounced, and embraced. She told the pathetic half of her story, to
+suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion.
+How deep the compassion, mixed with the girl’s native respect for the
+evil-fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang
+that she was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and
+Ned and Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together
+in leaping and shifting involutions.
+
+A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she was not one to
+shrink beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say
+within herself many times, ‘I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,’ for
+a recovery and a nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at
+her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men’s views of
+her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his
+not at heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright
+across her scope. ‘He is good to women.’ Fragments of conversation,
+principally her father’s, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most
+manfully tolerant toward a frivolous wife.
+
+He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.
+
+Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him. His words,
+his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes,
+and new ones. Yes, he was her hero. But his manner made him also an
+adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life. He sat
+square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest
+turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a
+brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone. He
+rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing
+at Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of
+England:--that ‘One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she
+takes.’
+
+‘Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,’ she cried; his
+voice was reassuring also in other directions: it rang of true man.
+
+He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly
+lost something of the great nation’s proper conception of Force: the
+meaning of it, virtue of it, and need for it. ‘She bleats for a lesson,
+and will get her lesson.’
+
+But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through! So said the
+sparkle of Nesta’s eyes.
+
+‘She is very like her father,’ he said to the ladies.
+
+‘We think so,’ they remarked.
+
+‘There’s the mother too,’ said he; and Nesta saw that the ladies
+shadowed.
+
+They retired. Then she begged him to ‘tell her of her own dear mother.’
+The news gave comfort, except for the suspicion, that the dear mother
+was being worn by her entertaining so largely. ‘Papa is to blame,’ said
+Nesta.
+
+‘A momentary strain. Your father has an idea of Parliament; one of the
+London Boroughs.’
+
+‘And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?’
+
+‘Your mother comes down to consult with you. And now, do we ride
+together?’
+
+‘You are free?’
+
+‘My uncle, Lord Clan, lets me out.’
+
+‘To-day?’
+
+‘Why, yes!’
+
+‘This morning?’
+
+‘In an hour’s time.’
+
+‘I will be ready.’
+
+Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in a fervent
+adjective for balm.
+
+That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct of the hallowing
+squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta on horseback beside Dartrey
+Fenellan at the steps of a huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs.
+Blathenoy was about to mount. Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and coloured,
+but she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that embraced her
+cavalier. Nesta waved hand to her, and nodded. Mrs. Marsett withdrew her
+eyes; her doing so, silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea
+of the shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she heard in
+the questions discernible through the attitude of the cavalier and of
+the lady, who paused to stare, before the leap up in the saddle. ‘Who
+is she?--what is she?--how did you know her?--where does she come
+from?--wears her hat on her brows!--huge gauntlets out of style!--shady!
+shady! shady!’ And as always during her nervous tumults, the name of
+Worrell made diapason of that execrable uproar. Her hat on her brows had
+an air of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew. But she
+scanned her gauntlets disapprovingly. This town, we are glad to think,
+has a bright repute for glove-shops. And Mrs. Marsett could applaud
+herself for sparing Ned’s money; she had mended her gloves, if they were
+in the fashion.--But how does the money come? Hark at that lady and that
+gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of everything, everything in the world
+about her! Not a word do they get from Miss Radnor. And it makes them
+the more inquisitive. Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round, are
+so inquisitive! And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for the notice of her,
+maddened by the sting of tongues it was causing, heard the wash of the
+beach, without consciousness of analogies, but with a body ready to jump
+out of skin, out of life, in desperation at the sound.
+
+She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary stratagem
+occasionally directing it. Arrived at her lodgings, she wrote to Nesta:
+‘I entreat you not to notice me, if you pass me on the road again. Let
+me drop, never mind how low I go. I was born to be wretched. A line from
+you, just a line now and then, only to show me I am not forgotten. I
+have had a beautiful dream. I am not bad in reality; I love goodness,
+I know. I cling to the thought of you, as my rescue, I declare. Please,
+let me hear: if it’s not more than “good day” and your initials on a
+post-card.’
+
+The letter brought Nesta in person to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX. THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
+
+Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
+Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron
+door shut upon a thing alive. The very asking froze her, almost to
+stopping her throbs of pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with
+any one; but with no one. Not with her mother even. Toward her mother,
+she felt guilty of knowing. Her mother had a horror of that curtain.
+Nesta had seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from
+it; the more when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would
+have been another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend
+could not state. Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the
+theme precluded writing.
+
+It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
+unaided. In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
+Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
+them. The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly
+of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
+cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley’s malady--as girls in these
+terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed
+to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
+Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman
+of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
+eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet’s divine ignorance; inoffensive
+in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
+struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
+painful independence.
+
+They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
+if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence;
+such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth
+as ever by the morning’s flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of
+accidents--accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we
+think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the
+generations to follow. Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them;
+yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought
+coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness
+what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.
+Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our
+evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded,
+trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one
+out of the fold.
+
+She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
+pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey. The
+next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
+man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
+spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
+to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
+in the girl’s eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in
+her breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the
+blue smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not
+mean hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the
+unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was
+the man who would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be
+given besides the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness
+and the world’s need for it were printed on her understanding. For what
+could women do in aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself
+very despicably her hero’s inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In
+a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be;
+and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world
+allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature’s
+blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it
+suffers to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in
+worship to the man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who
+locked her mouth for shame.
+
+Thus was she, too, being put into her woman’s harness of the bit and
+the blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
+parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
+and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of
+hero Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress
+impregnable, not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have
+her feelings; she must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have
+a sufficient intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the
+possessing man. It is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate,
+but a happy composition. You see the world which comes of the pair.
+
+This burning Nesta, Victor’s daughter, tempered by Nataly’s milder
+blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life,
+perforce of the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for
+generous imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses
+or set them through speculation touching heat; they were taken up
+and consumed by the fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the
+abhorrences, in a heart all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore.
+Self was as urgent in her as in most of the young; but the gift of
+humour, which had previously diverted it, was now the quick feeling for
+her sisterhood, through the one piteous example she knew; and broadening
+it, through her insurgent abasement on their behalf, which was her
+scourged pride of sex. She but faintly thought of blaming the men whom
+her soul besought for justice, for common kindness, to women. There was
+the danger, that her aroused young ignorance would charge the whole of
+the misery about and abroad upon the stronger of those two: and another
+danger, that the vision of the facts below the surface would discolour
+and disorder her views of existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the
+lighted world; and she had figures of male friends, to which to cling;
+and they helped in animating glorious historical figures on the world’s
+library-shelves or under yet palpitating earth. Promise of a steady
+balance of her nature, too, was shown in the absence of any irritable
+urgency to be doing, when her bosom bled to help. Beyond the resolve,
+that she would not abandon the woman who had made confession to her, she
+formed no conscious resolutions. Far ahead down her journey of the years
+to come, she did see muffled things she might hope and would strive to
+do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above all, she flew her blind quickened
+heart on the wings of an imaginative force; and those of the young
+who can do that, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge,
+irradiated under darkness in the mind. Let but the throb be kept for
+others. That is the one secret, for redemption; if not for preservation.
+
+Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
+regrets at Fredi’s absence from the great whirl ‘overhead,’ as places of
+multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
+was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
+first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He challenged her
+to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up
+by his gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being
+spontaneous. And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and
+looked at herself in his laughter, with the thought, that she could
+not have become so changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her
+humour. Victor turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one
+sunny beam of delight and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty
+Nesta’s victim, and although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak
+in such a manner of a clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were
+the opposite partners of a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were
+tired out.
+
+Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday. The ladies
+remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart
+Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.
+
+‘And what did he say?’ said Victor.
+
+Nesta shook her head: ‘It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.
+His duty compelled him, though he loves music. He had the look of a
+Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.’
+
+Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.
+They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem
+in the act of repudiating secular song.
+
+‘Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a child, stood before
+a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan; when he and her mother noticed
+the child’s very studious graveness; and they had talked of it; he
+remarking, that she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she
+was taken with Hagar’s face.
+
+He seemed surprised at her not having heard from Dudley.
+
+‘How is that?’ said he.
+
+‘Most probably because he has not written, papa.’
+
+He paused after the cool reply. She had no mournful gaze at all; but
+in the depths of the clear eyes he knew so well, there was a coil of
+something animate, whatever it might be. And twice she drew a heavy
+breath.
+
+He mentioned it in London. Nataly telegraphed at night for her girl to
+meet her next day at Dartrey’s hotel.
+
+Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each,
+though it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother,
+daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them. They held
+hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with
+full warm truth, and looked into eyes and surely saw one another. But
+the heart of each was in a battle of its own, taking wounds or crying
+for supports. Whether to speak to her girl at once, despite the now
+vehement contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly’s deliberation, under
+the thought of the young creature’s perplexity in not seeing her at the
+house of the Duvidney ladies: while Nesta conjured in a flash the past
+impressions of her mother’s shrinking distaste from any such hectic
+themes as this which burdened and absorbed her; and she was almost
+joining to it, through sympathy with any thought or feeling of one in
+whom she had such pride; she had the shudder of revulsion. Further,
+Nataly put on, rather cravenly an air, of distress, or she half
+designingly permitted her trouble to be seen, by way of affecting her
+girl’s recollection when the confession was to come, that Nesta might
+then understand her to have been restrained from speaking, not evasive
+of her duty. The look was interpreted by Nesta as belonging to
+the social annoyances dating, in her calendar, from Creckholt,
+apprehensively dreaded at Lakelands. She hinted asking, and her mother
+nodded; not untruthfully; but she put on a briskness after the nod; and
+a doubt was driven into Nesta’s bosom.
+
+Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday, she was glad
+to hear. Of Dudley, there was no word. Nataly shunned his name, with
+a superstitious dread lest any mention of him should renew pretensions
+that she hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn. So she had told
+poor Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his humble request to know. He had
+seen Dudley on the pantiles, walking with a young lady, he said. And
+‘he feared,’ he said; using, a pardonable commonplace of deceit. Her
+compassion accounted for the ‘fear’ which was the wish, and caused her
+not to think it particularly strange, that he should imagine Dudley to
+have quitted the field. Now that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at
+hand, poor Mr. Barmby could have no chance.
+
+Dartrey came to her room by appointment. She wanted to see him alone,
+and he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy was in the hotel, and would
+certainly receive and amuse Nesta for any length of time.
+
+‘I will take her up,’ said Nataly, and rose, and she sat immediately,
+and fluttered a hand at her breast. She laughed: ‘Perhaps I’m tired!’
+
+Dartrey took Nesta.
+
+He returned, saying: ‘There’s a lift in the hotel. Do the stairs affect
+you at all?’
+
+She fenced his sharp look. ‘Laziness, I fancy; age is coming on. How is
+it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?’
+
+‘Well! how?’ ‘Foolish curiosity?’ ‘I think I have made her of service.
+I did not bring the lady here.’ ‘Of service to whom?’ ‘Why, to Victor!’
+‘Has Victor commissioned you?’ ‘You can bear to hear it. Her husband
+knows the story. He has a grudge... commercial reasons. I fancy it is,
+that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the Bank. Blathenoy
+vowed blow for blow. But I think the little woman holds him in. She says
+she does.’ ‘Victor prompted you?’ ‘It occurred as it occurred.’ ‘She
+does it for love of us?--Oh! I can’t trifle. Dartrey!’ ‘Tell me.’
+‘First, you haven’t let me know what you think of my Nesta.’ ‘She’s a
+dear good girl.’ ‘Not so interesting to you as a flighty little woman!’
+‘She has a speck of some sort on her mind.’ Nataly spied at Dudley’s
+behaviour, and said: ‘That will wear away. Is Mr. Blathenoy much here?’
+‘As often as he can come, I believe.’ ‘That is...?’ ‘I have seen him
+twice.’ ‘His wife remains?’ ‘Fixed here for the season.’ ‘My friend!’
+‘No harm, no harm!’ ‘But-to her!’ ‘You have my word of honour.’ ‘Yes:
+and she is doing you a service, at your request; you occasionally reward
+her with thanks; and she sees you are a man of honour. Do you not know
+women?’
+
+Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions. ‘There’s very little
+left of the Don Amoroso in me. Women don’t worship stone figures.’
+
+‘They do: like the sea-birds. And what do you say to me, Dartrey?--I can
+confess it: I am one of them: I love you. When last you left England,
+I kissed your hand. It was because of your manly heart in that stone
+figure. I kept from crying: you used to scorn us English for the
+“whimpering fits” you said we enjoy and must have in books, if we can’t
+get them up for ourselves. I could have prayed to have you as brother
+or son. I love my Victor the better for his love of you. Oh!--poor
+soul--how he is perverted since that building of Lakelands! He cannot
+take soundings of the things he does. Formerly he confided in me, in all
+things: now not one;--I am the chief person to deceive. If only he had
+waited! We are in a network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice in
+London--tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who naturally have
+their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate me, fascinated by
+him:--or bribed--it has to be said. There are ways of bribeing. I trust
+he may not have in the end to pay too heavily for succeeding. He seems
+a man pushed by Destiny; not irresponsible, but less responsible than
+most. He is desperately tempted by his never failing. Whatever he
+does!.. it is true! And it sets me thinking of those who have never had
+an ailment, up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes. Latterly
+I have seen into him: I never did before. Had I been stronger, I might
+have saved, or averted.... But, you will say, the stronger woman would
+not have occupied my place. I must have been blind too. I did not
+see, that his nature shrinks from the thing it calls up. He dreads the
+exposure he courts--or has to combat with all his powers. It has been
+a revelation to me of him life as well. Nothing stops him. Now it is
+Parliament--a vacant London Borough. He counts on a death: Ah! terrible!
+I have it like a snake’s bite night and day.’
+
+Nataly concluded: ‘There: it has done me some good to speak. I feel so
+base.’ She breathed heavily.
+
+Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it. ‘Happy the woman who has
+not more to speak! How long will Nesta stay here?’
+
+‘You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays-her father wishes--up
+to--ah! We can hardly be in such extreme peril. He has her doctor, her
+lawyer, and her butler--a favourite servant--to check, and influence,
+her: She--you know who it is!--does not, I am now convinced, mean
+persecution. She was never a mean-minded woman. Oh! I could wish she
+were. They say she is going. Then I am to be made an “honest woman
+of.” Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until... You
+understand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with
+those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for having you near.
+Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us! Daily I have to
+pass through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot
+ploughshares--and without the innocence, dear friend! But it’s best that
+my girl should not have to be doing the same; though she would have the
+innocence. But she writhes under any shadow of a blot. And for her
+to learn the things that are in the world, through her mother’s
+history!--and led to know it by the falling away of friends, or say,
+acquaintances! However ignorant at present, she learns from a mere
+nothing. I dread!.... In a moment, she is a blaze of light. There have
+been occurrences. Only Victor could have overcome them! I had to think
+it better for my girl, that she was absent. We are in such a whirl up
+there! So I work round again to “how long?” and the picture of myself
+counting the breaths of a dying woman. The other day I was told I was
+envied!’
+
+‘Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!’ said Dartrey
+sharply, to clip a softness: ‘except when one’s attending on an invalid
+uncle. Then it’s peace; rather like extinction. And I can’t be crying
+for the end either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out
+of his hearing; make believe I’m patient. Now I ‘ll fetch Nesta.’
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta’s shoulder. She held a
+telegram, and said to Nataly--
+
+‘What can this mean? It’s from my husband; he puts “Jacob”: my husband’s
+Christian name:--so like my husband, where there’s no concealment!
+There--he says:
+
+“Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow.” Can it signify, affairs
+are bad with my husband in the city?’
+
+It had that signification to Nataly’s understanding. At the same time,
+the pretty little woman’s absurd lisping repetition of ‘my husband’ did
+not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.
+
+In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a
+silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after
+contrasting her fortunes with Nataly’s, on her way downstairs, she had
+comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was
+not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation
+in the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
+figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he
+admired less, if at all, legally could say.
+
+‘I must leave you to interpret,’ Nataly remarked.
+
+Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For this
+reason, she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the
+‘singular-looking lady’ seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and
+as to whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now,
+when questioned, spoken very clearly. So the mother’s alarms were not
+raised.
+
+And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently;
+finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor’s visit; it was a pity,
+because a young woman in Miss Radnor’s position should not by any
+possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
+appearance.
+
+She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship
+bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor’s
+conduct. He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by
+‘looking here,’ and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was
+petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at. And it was
+then--and then only or chiefly through Nataly’s recent allusion--that
+the man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was
+planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest. For
+she was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present
+education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic
+patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to
+her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of
+the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted
+after taken: an old duet to the moon.
+
+Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend. The friend was
+Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good
+esteem with the authorities. He had not forgiven Dartrey for the
+intemperateness which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service. He
+was reduced to acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling defence
+for him to reply with, in the shape of a fortune gained and where we
+have a Society forcing us to live up to an expensive level, very
+trying to a soldier’s income, a fortune gained will offer excuses for
+misconduct short of disloyal or illegal. They talked of the state of the
+Army: we are moving. True, and at the last Review, the ‘march past’
+was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on
+breast. Our English military ‘moving’ may now be likened to Somnolency
+on Horseback. ‘Oh, come, no rancour,’ said the colonel; ‘you know he’s a
+kind old boy at heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!’
+
+‘So the sycophants are sure of posts!’
+
+‘Come, I say! He’s devoted to the Service.’
+
+‘Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.’
+
+‘He’s not so responsible as the taxpayer.’
+
+‘There you touch home. Mother Goose can’t imagine the need for defence
+until a hand’s at her feathers.’
+
+‘What about her shrieks now and then?’
+
+‘Indigestion of a surfeit?’
+
+They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel’s
+came near. One of them recognized Dartrey. He changed a prickly subject
+to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars. His
+companion said: ‘Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?’ He flavoured
+eulogies of the girl’s good looks in easy garrison English. She was
+praised for sitting her horse well. One had met her on the parade, in
+the afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett. Colonel Sudley had seen them
+on horseback. He remarked to Dartrey:
+
+‘And by the way, you’re a clean stretch ahead of us. I’ve seen you go
+by these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty
+woman on the other too.’
+
+‘Nothing is unseen in this town!’ Dartrey rejoined.
+
+Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed
+to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta. How had
+she come to know this Mrs. Marsett? But he was more seriously thinking
+of what Colney Durance called ‘The Mustard Plaster’; the satirist’s
+phrase for warm relations with a married fair one: and Dartrey, clear of
+any design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations
+of pricks and burns. They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory
+internal conditions. They were really hard on him, who had none to be
+cured.
+
+The hour was nigh midnight. As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off
+to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady
+had left it at half-past nine. Left it?--Then the lady could not be the
+alarming lady. He was relieved. The words of the letter were cabalistic;
+these, beneath underlined address:
+
+‘I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this evening. It is
+urgent; you will excuse me when I explain. Not late to-morrow. I am sure
+you will not fail to come. I could write what would be certain to bring
+you. I dare not trust any names to paper.’
+
+The signature was, Judith Marsett.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI. SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR’S SERVICE HAVE AT
+TIMES TO DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
+
+By the very earliest of the trains shot away to light and briny air from
+London’s November gloom, which knows the morning through increase of
+gasjets, little Skepsey was hurried over suburban chimneys, in his
+friendly third-class carriage; where we have reminders of ancient
+pastoral times peculiar to our country, as it may chance; but where a
+man may speak to his neighbour right off without being deemed offensive.
+That is homely. A social fellow knitting closely to his fellows when he
+meets them, enjoys it, even at the cost of uncushioned seats he can, if
+imps are in him, merryandrew as much as he pleases; detested punctilio
+does not reign there; he can proselytize for the soul’s welfare; decry
+or uphold the national drink; advertize a commercial Firm deriving
+prosperity from the favour of the multitude; exhort to patriotism. All
+is accepted. Politeness is the rule, according to Skepsey’s experience
+of the Southern part of the third-class kingdom. And it is as well to
+mark the divisions, for the better knowledge of our countrymen. The
+North requires volumes to itself.
+
+The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built the land, and is
+to the front when we are at our epic work. Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy
+character, by shouldering roughly among the children of civilization.
+Skepsey, journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in both
+senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy; an intoxicated,
+he was compelled by his manly modesty to desire to think; whose loathly
+talk, forced upon the hearing of a decent old woman opposite him,
+passed baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened;
+subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at
+the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it
+should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy
+spark to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity;
+and he as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a
+breakage of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So
+they went forth.
+
+Skepsey alluded to the incident, for an example of the lamentable
+deficiency in science betrayed by most of our strong men when put to it;
+and the bitter thought, that he could count well nigh to a certainty on
+the total absence of science in the long-armed navvy, whose fist on
+his nose might have been as the magnet of a pin, was chief among his
+reminiscences after the bout, destroying pleasure for the lover of Old
+England’s might. One blow would have sent Skepsey travelling. He was not
+seriously struck once. They parted, shaking hands; the navvy confessing
+himself to have ‘drunk a drop’; and that perhaps accounted for his
+having been ‘topped by a dot on him.’
+
+He declined to make oath never to repeat his offence; but said, sending
+his vanquisher to the deuce, with an amicable push at his shoulder,
+‘Damned if I ever forget five foot five stretched six foot flat!’
+
+Skepsey counted his feet some small amount higher; but our hearty
+rovers’ sons have their ballad moods when giving or taking a thrashing.
+One of the third-class passengers, a lad of twenty, became Skepsey’s
+pupil, and turned out clever with the gloves, and was persuaded to enter
+the militia, and grew soon to be a corporal. Thus there was profit of
+the affair, though the navvy sank out of sight. Let us hope and pray he
+will not insult the hearing of females again. If only females knew how
+necessary it is, for their sakes, to be able to give a lesson now and
+then! Ladies are positively opposed. And Judges too, who dress so like
+them. The manhood of our country is kept down, in consequence. Mr.
+Durance was right, when he said something about the state of war being
+wanted to weld our races together: and yet we are always praying for the
+state of peace, which causes cracks and gaps among us! Was that what
+he meant by illogical? It seemed to Skepsey--oddly, considering his
+inferior estimate of the value of the fair sex--that a young woman with
+whom he had recently made acquaintance; and who was in Brighton now,
+upon missionary work; a member of the ‘Army,’ an officer of advancing
+rank, Matilda Pridden, by name; was nearer to the secret of the right
+course of conduct for individual citizens and the entire country than
+any gentleman he knew.
+
+Yes, nearer to it than his master was! Thinking of Mr. Victor Radnor,
+Skepsey fetched a sigh. He had knocked at his master’s door at the
+office one day, and imagining the call to enter, had done so, and had
+seen a thing he could not expunge. Lady Grace Halley was there. From
+matters he gathered, Skepsey guessed her to be working for his master
+among the great folks, as he did with Jarniman, and Mr. Fenellan with
+Mr. Carling. But is it usual; he asked himself--his natural veneration
+framing the rebuke to his master thus--to repay the services of a
+lady so warmly?--We have all of us an ermined owl within us to sit in
+judgement of our superiors as well as our equals; and the little man,
+notwithstanding a servant’s bounden submissiveness, was forced to hear
+the judicial pronouncement upon his master’s behaviour. His master had,
+at the same time, been saying most weighty kind words more and more of
+late: one thing:--that, if he gave all he had to his fellows, and
+did all he could, he should still be in their debt. And he was a very
+wealthy gentleman. What are we to think? The ways of our superiors are
+wonderful. We do them homage: still we feel, we painfully feel, we are
+beginning to worship elsewhere. It is the pain of a detachment of the
+very roots of our sea-weed heart from a rock. Mr. Victor Radnor was an
+honour to his country. Skepsey did not place the name of Matilda Pridden
+beside it or in any way compare two such entirely different persons. At
+the same time and most earnestly, while dreading to hear, he desired
+to have Matilda Pridden’s opinion of the case distressing him. He never
+could hear it, because he could never be allowed to expound the case to
+her. Skepsey sighed again: he as much as uttered: Oh, if we had a few
+thousands like her!--But what if we do have them? They won’t marry!
+There they are, all that the country requires in wives and mothers; and
+like Miss Priscilla Graves, they won’t marry!
+
+He looked through sad thoughts across the benches of the compartments
+to the farther end of the carriage, where sat the Rev. Septimus Barmby,
+looking at him through a meditation as obscure if not so mournful. Few
+are the third-class passengers outward at that early hour in the winter
+season, and Skepsey’s gymnastics to get beside the Rev. Septimus were
+unimpeded; though a tight-packed carriage of us poor journaliers would
+not have obstructed them with as much as a sneer. Mr. Barmby and Skepsey
+greeted. The latter said, he had a holiday, to pay a visit to Miss
+Nesta. The former said, he hoped he should see Miss Nesta. Skepsey then
+rapidly brought the conversation to a point where Matilda Pridden was
+comprised. He discoursed of the ‘Army’ and her position in the Army,
+giving instances of her bravery, the devotion shown by her to the cause
+of morality, in all its forms. Mr. Barmby had his fortunes on his hands
+at the moment, he could not lend an attentive ear; and he disliked this
+Army, the title it had taken, and the mixing of women and men in its
+ranks; not to speak of a presumption in its proceedings, and the public
+marching and singing. Moreover, he enjoyed his one or two permissible
+glasses: he doubted that the Chiefs of the Army had common benevolence
+for the inoffensive pipe. But the cause of morality was precious to him;
+morality and a fit of softness, and the union of the happiest contrast
+of voices, had set him for a short while, before the dawn of Nesta’s
+day, hankering after Priscilla Graves. Skepsey’s narrative of Matilda
+Pridden’s work down at the East of London; was effective; it had the
+ring to thrill a responsive chord in Mr. Barmby, who mused on London’s
+East, and martyrly service there. His present expectations were of a
+very different sort; but a beautiful bride, bringing us wealth, is no
+misleading beam, if we direct the riches rightly. Septimus, a solitary
+minister in those grisly haunts of the misery breeding vice, must needs
+accomplish less than a Septimus the husband of one of England’s chief
+heiresses:--only not the most brilliant, owing to circumstances known to
+the Rev. Groseman Buttermore: strangely, and opportunely, revealed: for
+her exceeding benefit, it may be hoped. She is no longer the ignorant
+girl, to reject the protecting hand of one whose cloth is the best of
+cloaking. A glance at Dudley Sowerby’s defection, assures our worldly
+wisdom too, that now is the time to sue.
+
+Several times while Mr. Barmby made thus his pudding of the desires of
+the flesh and the spirit, Skepsey’s tales of Matilda Pridden’s heroism
+caught his attention. He liked her deeds; he disliked the position in
+which the young woman placed herself to perform them; and he said so.
+Women are to be women, he said.
+
+Skepsey agreed: ‘If we could get men to do the work, sir!’
+
+Mr. Barmby was launching forth: Plenty of men!--His mouth was blocked by
+the reflection, that we count the men on our fingers; often are we, as
+it were, an episcopal thumb surveying scarce that number of followers!
+He diverged to censure of the marchings and the street-singing: the
+impediment to traffic, the annoyance to a finely musical ear.
+He disapproved altogether of Matilda Pridden’s military display,
+pronouncing her to be, ‘Doubtless a worthy young person.’
+
+‘Her age is twenty-seven,’ said Skepsey, spying at the number of his
+own.
+
+‘You have known her long?’ Mr. Barmby asked.
+
+‘Not long, sir. She has gone through trouble. She believes very strongly
+in the will:--If I will this, if I will that, and it is the right
+will, not wickedness, it is done--as good as done; and force is quite
+superfluous. In her sermons, she exhorts to prayer before action.’
+
+‘Preaches?’
+
+‘She moves a large assembly, sir.’
+
+‘It would seem, that England is becoming Americanized!’ exclaimed
+the Conservative in Mr. Barmby. Almost he groaned; and his gaze was
+fish-like in vacancy, on hearing the little man speak of the present
+intrepid forwardness of the sex to be publicly doing. It is for men the
+most indigestible fact of our century: one that--by contrast throws an
+overearthly holiness on our decorous dutiful mothers, who contentedly
+worked below the surface while men unremittingly attended to their
+interests above.
+
+Skepsey drew forth a paper-covered shilling-book: a translation from the
+French, under a yelling title of savage hate of Old England and cannibal
+glee at her doom. Mr. Barmby dropped his eyelashes on it, without
+comment; nor did he reply to Skepsey’s forlorn remark: ‘We let them
+think they could do it!’
+
+Behold the downs. Breakfast is behind them. Miss Radnor likewise: if the
+poor child has a name. We propose to supply the deficiency. She does not
+declare war upon tobacco. She has a cultured and a beautiful voice. We
+abstain from enlargeing on the charms of her person. She has resources,
+which representatives of a rival creed would plot to secure.
+
+‘Skepsey, you have your quarters at the house of Miss Radnor’s
+relatives?’ said Mr. Barmby, as they emerged from tunnelled chalk.
+
+‘Mention, that I think of calling in the course of the day.’
+
+A biscuit had been their breakfast without a name.
+
+They parted at the station, roused by the smell of salt to bestow a
+more legitimate title on the day’s restorative beginning. Down the
+hill, along by the shops, and Skepsey, in sight of Miss Nesta’s terrace,
+considered it still an early hour for a visitor; so, to have the sea
+about him, he paid pier-money, and hurried against the briny wings of
+a South-wester; green waves, curls of foam, flecks of silver, under
+low-flying grey-dark cloud-curtains shaken to a rift, where at one
+shot the sun had a line of Nereids nodding, laughing, sparkling to him.
+Skepsey enjoyed it, at the back of thoughts military and naval. Visible
+sea, this girdle of Britain, inspired him to exultations in reverence.
+He wished Mr. Durance could behold it now and have such a breastful.
+He was wishing he knew a song of Britain and sea, rather fancying Mr.
+Durance to be in some way a bar to patriotic poetical recollection, when
+he saw his Captain Dartrey mounting steps out of an iron anatomy of the
+pier, and looking like a razor off a strap.
+
+‘Why, sir!’ cried Skepsey.
+
+‘Just a plunge and a dozen strokes,’ Dartrey said; ‘and you’ll come to
+my hotel and give me ten minutes of the “recreation”; and if you don’t
+come willingly, I shall insult your country.’
+
+‘Ah! I wish Mr. Durance were here,’ Skepsey rejoined.
+
+‘It would upset his bumboat of epigrams. He rises at ten o’clock to
+a queasy breakfast by candlelight, and proceeds to composition. His
+picture of the country is a portrait of himself by the artist.’
+
+‘But, sir, Captain Dartrey, you don’t think as Mr. Durance does of
+England!’
+
+‘There are lots to flatter her, Skepsey! A drilling can’t do her harm.
+You’re down to see Miss Nesta. Ladies don’t receive quite so early.
+And have you breakfasted? Come on with me quick.’ Dartrey led him on,
+saying: ‘You have an eye at my stick. It was a legacy to me, by word of
+mouth, from a seaman of a ship I sailed in, who thought I had done him a
+service; and he died after all. He fell overboard drunk. He perished
+of the villain stuff. One of his messmates handed me the stick in Cape
+Town, sworn to deliver it. A good knot to grasp; and it ‘s flexible
+and strong; stick or rattan, whichever you please; it gives point or
+caresses the shoulder; there’s no break in it, whack as you may. They
+call it a Demerara supple-jack. I’ll leave it to you.’
+
+Skepsey declared his intention to be the first to depart. He tried
+the temper of the stick, bent it a bit, and admired the prompt
+straightening.
+
+‘It would give a good blow, sir.’
+
+‘Does its business without braining.’
+
+Perhaps for the reason, that it was not a handsome instrument for
+display on fashionable promenades, Dartrey chose it among his collection
+by preference; as ugly dogs of a known fidelity are chosen for
+companions. The Demerara supple-jack surpasses bull-dogs in its fashion
+of assisting the master; for when once at it, the clownish-looking thing
+reflects upon him creditably, by developing a refined courtliness of
+style, while in no way showing a diminution of jolly ardour for the
+fray. It will deal you the stroke of a bludgeon with the playfulness of
+a cane. It bears resemblance to those accomplished natural actors,
+who conversationally present a dramatic situation in two or three
+spontaneous flourishes, and are themselves again, men of the world, the
+next minute.
+
+Skepsey handed it back. He spoke of a new French rifle. He mentioned, in
+the form of query for no answer, the translation of the barking little
+volume he had shown to Mr. Barmby: he slapped at his breast-pocket,
+where it was. Not a ship was on the sea-line; and he seemed to deplore
+that vacancy.
+
+‘But it tells both ways,’ Dartrey said. ‘We don’t want to be hectoring
+in the Channel. All we want, is to be sure of our power, so as not to
+go hunting and fawning for alliances. Up along that terrace Miss Nesta
+lives. Brighton would be a choice place for a landing.’
+
+Skepsey temporized, to get his national defences, by pleading the
+country’s love of peace.
+
+‘Then you give-up your portion of the gains of war--an awful
+disgorgement,’ said Dartrey. ‘If you are really for peace, you toss all
+your spare bones to the war-dogs. Otherwise, Quakerly preaching is taken
+for hypocrisy.’
+
+‘I ‘m afraid we are illogical, sir,’ said Skepsey, adopting one of the
+charges of Mr. Durance, to elude the abominable word.
+
+‘In you run, my friend.’ Dartrey sped him up the steps of the hotel.
+
+A little note lay on his breakfast-table. His invalid uncle’s valet gave
+the morning’s report of the night.
+
+The note was from Mrs. Blathenoy: she begged Captain Dartrey, in double
+underlinings of her brief words, to mount the stairs. He debated, and he
+went.
+
+She was excited, and showed a bosom compressed to explode: she had been
+weeping. ‘My husband is off. He bids me follow him. What would you have
+me do?’
+
+‘Go.’
+
+‘You don’t care what may happen to your friends, the Radnors?’
+
+‘Not at the cost of your separation from your husband.’
+
+‘You have seen him!’
+
+‘Be serious.’
+
+‘Oh, you cold creature! You know--you see: I can’t conceal. And you tell
+me to go. “Go!” Gracious heavens! I’ve no claim on you; I haven’t been
+able to do much; I would have--never mind! believe me or not. And now
+I’m to go: on the spot, I suppose. You’ve seen the man I ‘m to go to,
+too. I would bear it, if it were not away from... out of sight of I’m a
+fool of a woman, I know. There’s frankness for you! and I could declare
+you’re saying “impudence” in your heart--or what you have for one. Have
+you one?’
+
+‘My dear soul, it ‘s a flint. So just think of your duty.’ Dartrey
+played the horrid part of executioner with some skill.
+
+Her bosom sprang to descend into abysses.
+
+‘And never a greater fool than when I sent for you to see such a face
+as I’m showing!’ she cried, with lips that twitched and fingers that
+plucked at her belt. ‘But you might feel my hatred of being tied
+to--dragged about over the Continent by that... perhaps you think a
+woman is not sensible of vulgarity in her husband! I ‘m bothering you? I
+don’t say I have the slightest claim. You never made love to me, never!
+Never so much as pressed my hand or looked. Others have--as much as I
+let them. And before I saw you, I had not an idea of another man but
+that man. So you advise me to go?’
+
+‘There’s no other course.’
+
+‘No other course. I don’t see one. What have I been dreaming of! Usually
+a woman feeling...’ she struck at her breast, ‘has had a soft word in
+her ear. “Go!” I don’t blame you, Captain Dartrey. At least, you ‘re not
+the man to punish a woman for stripping herself, as I ‘ve done. I call
+myself a fool--I’m a lunatic. Trust me with your hand.’
+
+‘There you are.’
+
+She grasped the hand, and shut her eyes to make a long age of the
+holding on to him. ‘Oh, you dear dear fellow!--don’t think me unwomanly;
+I must tell you now: I am naked and can’t disguise. I see you are
+ice--feel: and if you were different, I might be. You won’t be hurt by
+hearing you’ve made yourself dear to me--without meaning to, I know!
+It began that day at Lakelands; I fell in love with you the very first
+minute I set eyes on you! There’s a confession for a woman to make! and
+a married woman! I’m married, and I no more feel allegiance, as they
+call it, than if there never had been a ceremony and no Jacob Blathenoy
+was in existence. And why I should go to him! But you shan’t be
+troubled. I did not begin to live, as a woman, before I met you. I can
+speak all this to you because--we women can’t be deceived in that--you
+are one of the men who can be counted on for a friend.’
+
+‘I hope so,’ Dartrey said, and his mouth hardened as nature’s
+electricity shot sparks into him from the touch and rocked him.
+
+‘No, not yet: I will soon let it drop,’ said she, and she was just then
+thrillingly pretty; she caressed the hand, placing it at her throat and
+moving her chin on it, as women fondle birds. ‘I am positively to go,
+then?’
+
+‘Positively, you are to go; and it’s my command.’
+
+‘Not in love with any one at all?’
+
+‘Not with a soul.’
+
+‘Not with a woman?’
+
+‘With no woman.’
+
+‘Nor maid?’
+
+‘No! and no to everything. And an end to the catechism!’
+
+‘It is really a flint that beats here?’ she said, and with a shyness
+in adventurousness, she struck the point of her forefinger on the rib.
+‘Fancy me in love with a flint! And running to be dutiful to a Jacob
+Blathenoy, at my flint’s command. I’m half in love with doing what I
+hate, because this cold thing here bids me do it. I believe I married
+for money, and now it looks as if I were to have my bargain with poverty
+to bless it.’
+
+‘There I may help,’ said Dartrey, relieved at sight of a loophole, to
+spring to some initiative out of the paralysis cast on him by a pretty
+little woman’s rending of her veil. A man of honour alone with a woman
+who has tossed concealment to the winds, is a riddled target indeed:
+he is tempted to the peril of cajoleing, that he may escape from the
+torment and the ridicule; he is tempted to sigh for the gallant spirit
+of his naughty adolescence. ‘Come to me--will you?--apply to me, if
+there’s ever any need. I happen to have money. And forgive me for naming
+it.’
+
+She groaned: ‘Don’t! I’m, sure, and I thought it from the first, you’re
+one of the good men, and the woman who meets you is lucky, and wretched,
+and so she ought to be! Only to you should I!... do believe that! I
+won’t speak of what excuses I’ve got. You’ve seen.’
+
+‘Don’t think of them: there’ll be danger in it.
+
+‘Shall you think of me in danger?’
+
+‘Silly, silly! Don’t you see you have to do with a flint! I’ve gone
+through fire. And if I were in love with you, I should start you off to
+your husband this blessed day.’
+
+‘And you’re not the slightest wee wee bit in love with me!’
+
+‘Perfectly true; but I like you; and if we’re to be hand in hand, in the
+time to come, you must walk firm at present.’
+
+‘I’m to go to-day?’
+
+‘You are.’
+
+‘Without again.’
+
+The riddled target kicked. Dartrey contrasted Jacob Blathenoy with the
+fair wife, and commiseratingly exonerated her; he lashed at himself
+for continuing to be in this absurdest of postures, and not absolutely
+secure for all that. His head shook. ‘Friends, you’ll find best.’
+
+‘Well!’ she sighed, ‘I feel I’m doomed to go famished through life.
+There’s never to be such a thing as, love, for me! I can’t tell you no
+woman could: though you’ll say I’ve told enough. I shall burn with shame
+when I think of it. I could go on my knees to have your arms round me
+once. I could kill myself for saying it!--I should feel that I had one
+moment of real life.--I know I ought to admire you. They say a woman
+hates if she’s refused. I can’t: I wish I were able to. I could have
+helped the Radnors better by staying here and threatening never to go to
+him unless he swore not to do them injury. He’s revengeful. Just as you
+like. You say “Go,” and I go. There. I may kiss your hand?’
+
+‘Give me yours.’
+
+Dartrey kissed the hand. She kissed the mark of his lips. He got himself
+away, by promising to see her to the train for Paris. Outside her door,
+he was met by the reflection, coming as a thing external, that he
+might veraciously and successfully have pleaded a passionate hunger for
+breakfast: nay, that he would have done so, if he had been downright in
+earnest. For she had the prettiness to cast a spell; a certain curve at
+the lips, a fluttering droop of the eyelids, a corner of the eye, that
+led long distances away to forests and nests. This little woman had the
+rosy-peeping June bud’s plumpness. What of the man who refused to kiss
+her once? Cold antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent
+vacuity; perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor. Some sense of
+right-doing also, we hope. Dartrey angrily attributed his good conduct
+to the lowest motives. He went so far as to accuse himself of having
+forborne to speak of breakfast, from a sort of fascinated respect for
+the pitch of a situation that he despised and detested. Then again, when
+beginning to eat, his good conduct drew on him a chorus of the jeers of
+all the martial comrades he had known. But he owned he would have had
+less excuse than they, had he taken advantage of a woman’s inability, at
+a weak moment, to protect herself: or rather, if he had not behaved in
+a manner to protect her from herself. He thought of his buried wife, and
+the noble in the base of that poor soul; needing constantly a present
+helper, for the nobler to conquer. Be true man with a woman, she must be
+viler than the devil has yet made one, if she does not follow a strong
+right lead:--but be patient, of course. And the word patience here means
+more than most men contain. Certainly a man like Jacob Blathenoy was a
+mouthful for any woman: and he had bought his wife, he deserved no
+pity. Not? Probably not. That view, however, is unwholesome and opens
+on slides. Pity of his wife, too, gets to be fervidly active with her
+portrait, fetches her breath about us. As for condemnation of the poor
+little woman, her case was not unexampled, though the sudden flare of it
+startled rather. Mrs. Victor could read men and women closely. Yes, and
+Victor, when he schemed--but Dartrey declined to be throwing blame right
+or left. More than by his breakfast, and in a preferable direction, he
+was refreshed by Skepsey’s narrative of the deeds of Matilda Pridden.
+
+‘The right sort of girl for you to know, Skepsey,’ he said. ‘The best in
+life is a good woman.’
+
+Skepsey exhibited his book of the Gallic howl.
+
+‘They have their fits now and then, and they’re soon over and
+forgotten,’ Dartrey said. ‘The worst of it is, that we remember.’
+
+After the morning’s visit to his uncle, he peered at half a dozen sticks
+in the corner of the room, grasped their handles, and selected the
+Demerara supple-jack, for no particular reason; the curved knot was
+easy to the grasp. It was in his mind, that this person signing herself
+Judith Marsett, might have something to say, which intimately concerned
+Nesta. He fell to brooding on it, until he wondered why he had not been
+made a trifle anxious by the reading of the note overnight. Skepsey was
+left at Nesta’s house.
+
+Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting on Mrs. Marsett.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII. SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN
+GET HER WEAPON
+
+Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta’s hero. She was
+flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
+after the first severe formalities.
+
+Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was at the same time
+burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
+should come, as a manner of slapping the world’s cheek for the state
+to which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
+insult, and laugh.
+
+Men complaining of the ‘peace which is near their extinction,’ have but
+to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
+if they had passed off land on to sea.
+
+Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements
+women can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett,
+following so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.
+
+But this handsome woman’s look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
+that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
+alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.
+
+She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions
+where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling. The
+talk at the Club recurred to him. How could Nesta have come to know the
+woman? His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched
+Nesta simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently
+involving the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating
+her case to the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story
+different from that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of
+censors under conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured,
+highly prized; spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of
+the flesh is taken for a spiritual ascendancy.
+
+In spite of her turbulent breast’s burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett’s
+feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
+Nesta’s praises of him. She liked his build and easy carriage of a
+muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey’s figure,
+as she would have said, though the estimate came second, she liked his
+manner with her. Not a doubt was there, that he read her position. She
+could impose upon some: not upon masculine eyes like these. They did
+not scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at petty
+impressions; and they were not cynically intimate or dominating or
+tentatively amorous: clear good fellowship was in them. And it was a
+blessedness (whatever might be her feeling later, when she came to thank
+him at heart) to be in the presence of a man whose appearance breathed
+of offering her common ground, whereon to meet and speak together,
+unburdened by the hunting world, and by the stoneing world. Such common
+ground seems a kind of celestial to the better order of those excluded
+from it.
+
+Dartrey relieved her midway in a rigid practice of the formalities: ‘I
+think I may guess that you have something to tell me relating to Miss
+Radnor?’
+
+‘It is.’ Mrs. Marsett gathered up for an immediate plunge, and deferred
+it. ‘I met her--we went out with the riding-master. She took to me.
+I like her--I could say’ (the woman’s voice dropped dead low, in a
+tremble), ‘I love her. She is young: I could kneel to her. Do you know a
+Major Worrell?’
+
+‘Worrell? no.’
+
+‘He is a-calls himself a friend of my--of Captain Marsett’s. He met us
+out one day.’
+
+‘He permitted himself to speak to Miss Radnor?’
+
+She rejoiced in Dartrey’s look. ‘Not then. First let me tell you. I can
+hardly tell you. But Miss Radnor tells me you are not like other men.
+You have made your conclusions already. Are you asking what right I
+had to be knowing her? It is her goodness. Accident began it; I did not
+deceive her; as soon as ever I could I--I have Captain Marsett’s promise
+to me: at present he’s situated, he--but I opened my heart to her: as
+much as a woman can. It came! Did I do very wrong?’
+
+‘I’m not here to decide: continue, pray.’
+
+Mrs. Marsett aimed at formal speech, and was driving upon her natural in
+anger. ‘I swear I did it for the best. She is an innocent girl... young
+lady: only she has a head; she soon reads things. I saw the kind of
+cloud in her. I spoke. I felt bound to: she said she would not forsake
+me.--I was bound to! And it was enough to break my heart, to think of
+her despising me. No, she forgave, pitied;--she was kind. Those are the
+angels who cause us to think of changeing. I don’t care for sermons, but
+when I meet charity: I won’t bore you!’
+
+‘You don’t.’
+
+‘My... Captain Marsett can’t bear--he calls it Psalmody. He thinks
+things ought always to be as they are, with women and men; and women
+preachers he does detest. She is not one to preach. You are waiting to
+hear what I have to tell. That man Major Worrell has tried to rob me of
+everything I ever had to set a value on:--love, I ‘d say;--he laughs at
+a woman like me loving.’
+
+Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.
+
+‘She came here.’ Mrs. Marsett’s tears had risen. ‘I ought not to have
+let her come. I invited her--for once: I am lonely. None of my sex--none
+I could respect! I meant it for only once. She promised to sing to me.
+And, Oh! how she sings! You have heard her. My whole heart came out. I
+declare I believe girls exist who can hear our way of life--and I’m not
+so bad except compared with that angel, who heard me, and was and is, I
+could take oath, no worse for it. Some girls can; she is one. I am all
+for bringing them up in complete innocence. If I was a great lady,
+my daughters should never know anything of the world until they were
+married. But Miss Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt. She is
+above us. Oh! what a treasure for a man!--and my God! for any man born
+of woman to insult a saint, as she is!--He is a beast!’
+
+‘Major Worrell met her here?’
+
+‘Blame me as much as you like: I do myself. Half my rage with him is at
+myself for putting her in the way of such a beast to annoy. Each time
+she came, I said it was to be the last. I let her see what a mercy from
+heaven she was to me. She would come. It has not been many times. She
+wishes me either to... Captain Marsett has promised. And nothing seems
+hard--to me when my own God’s angel is by. She is! I’m not such a
+bad woman, but I never before I knew her knew the meaning of the word
+virtue. There is the young lady that man worried with his insulting
+remarks! though he must have known she was a lady:--because he found her
+in my rooms.’
+
+‘You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?’
+
+‘I was. Here it commenced; and he would see her downstairs.’
+
+‘You heard?’
+
+‘Of course, I never left her.’
+
+‘Give me a notion...’
+
+‘To get her to make an appointment: to let him conduct her home.’
+
+‘She was alone?’
+
+‘Her maid was below.’
+
+‘And this happened...?’
+
+‘Yesterday, after dark. My Ned--Captain Marsett encourages him to be
+familiar. I should be the lowest of women if I feared the threats of
+such a reptile of a man. I could tell you more. I can’t always refuse
+his visits, though if Ned knew the cur he is! Captain Marsett is
+easy-going.’
+
+‘I should like to know where he lives.’
+
+She went straight to the mantelpiece, and faced about with a card,
+handing it, quite aware that it was a charge of powder.
+
+Desperate things to be done excused the desperate said; and especially
+they seemed a cover to the bald and often spotty language leaping out of
+her, against her better taste, when her temper was up.
+
+‘Somewhere not very distant,’ said Dartrey perusing. ‘Is he in the town
+to-day, do you know?’
+
+‘I am not sure; he may be. Her name...’
+
+‘Have no fear. Ladies’ names are safe.’
+
+‘I am anxious that she may not be insulted again.’
+
+‘Did she show herself conscious of it?’
+
+‘She stopped speaking: she looked at the door. She may come again--or
+never! through that man!’
+
+‘You receive him, at his pleasure?’
+
+‘Captain Marsett wishes me to. He is on his way home. He calls Major
+Worrell my pet spite. All I want is; not to hear of the man. I swear he
+came yesterday on the chance of seeing--for he forced his way up past my
+servant; he must have seen Miss Radnor’s maid below.’
+
+‘You don’t mean, that he insulted her hearing?’
+
+‘Oh! Captain Fenellan, you know the style.’
+
+‘Well, I thank you,’ Dartrey said. ‘The young lady is the daughter of my
+dearest friends. She’s one of the precious--you’re quite right. Keep the
+tears back.’
+
+‘I will.’ She heaved open-mouthed to get physical control of the tide.
+‘When you say that of her!--how can I help it? It’s I fear, because I
+fear... and I’ve no right to expect ever... but if I’m never again to
+look on that dear face, tell her I shall--I shall pray for her in my
+grave. Tell her she has done all a woman can, an angel can, to save my
+soul. I speak truth: my very soul! I could never go to the utter bad
+after knowing her. I don’t--you know the world--I’m a poor helpless
+woman!--don’t swear to give up my Ned if he does break the word he
+promised once; I can’t see how I could. I haven’t her courage. I
+haven’t--what it is! You know her: it’s in her eyes and her voice. If I
+had her beside me, then I could starve or go to execution--I could, I am
+certain. Here I am, going to do what you men hate. Let me sit.’
+
+‘Here’s a chair,’ said Dartrey. ‘I’ve no time to spare; good day, for
+the present. You will permit me to call.’
+
+‘Oh! come’; she cried, out of her sobs, for excuse. They were genuine,
+or she would better have been able to second her efforts to catch a
+distinct vision of his retreating figure.
+
+She beheld him, when he was in the street, turn for the district where
+Major Worrell had his lodgeings. That set her mind moving, and her tears
+fell no longer.
+
+Major Worrell was not at home. Dartrey was informed that he might be at
+his Club.
+
+At the Club he heard of the major as having gone to London and being
+expected down in the afternoon. Colonel Sudley named the train: an
+early train; the major was engaged to dine at the Club. Dartrey had
+information supplied to him concerning Major Worrell and Captain
+Marsett, also Mrs. Marsett. She had a history. Worthy citizens read the
+description of history with interest when the halo of Royalty is round
+it. They may, if their reading extends, perceive, that it has been the
+main turbid stream in old Mammon’s train since he threw his bait for
+flesh. They might ask, too, whether it is likely to cease to flow while
+he remains potent. The lady’s history was brief, and bore recital in a
+Club; came off quite honourably there. Regarding Major Worrell, the tale
+of him showed him to have a pass among men. He managed cleverly to
+get his pleasures out of a small income and a ‘fund of anecdote.’ His
+reputation indicated an anecdotist of the table, prevailing in the
+primitive societies, where the art of conversing does not come by
+nature, and is exercised in monosyllabic undertones or grunts until
+the narrator’s well-masticated popular anecdote loosens a digestive
+laughter, and some talk ensues. He was Marsett’s friend, and he boasted
+of not letting Ned Marsett make a fool of himself.
+
+Dartrey was not long in shaping the man’s character: Worrell belonged
+to the male birds of upper air, who mangle what female prey they are
+forbidden to devour. And he had Miss Radnor’s name: he had spoken her
+name at the Club overnight. He had roused a sensation, because of a man
+being present, Percy Southweare, who was related to a man as good as
+engaged to marry her. The major never fell into a quarrel with sons of
+nobles, if he could help it, or there might have been a pretty one.
+
+So Colonel Sudley said.
+
+Dartrey spoke musing: ‘I don’t know how he may class me; I have an
+account to square with him.’
+
+‘It won’t do in these days, my good friend. Come and cool yourself; and
+we’ll lunch here. I shan’t leave you.’
+
+‘By all means. We’ll lunch, and walk up to the station, and you will
+point him out to me.’
+
+Dartrey stated Major Worrell’s offence. The colonel was not astonished;
+but evidently he thought less of Worrell’s behaviour to Miss Radnor in
+Mrs. Marsett’s presence than of the mention of her name at the Club: and
+that, he seemed to think, had a shade of excuse against the charge of
+monstrous. He blamed the young lady who could go twice to visit a Mrs.
+Marsett; partly exposed a suspicion of her. Dartrey let him talk. They
+strolled along the parade, and were near the pier.
+
+Suddenly saying: ‘There, beside our friend in clerical garb: here she
+comes; judge if that is the girl for the foulest of curs to worry, no
+matter where she’s found.’ Dartrey directed the colonel’s attention to
+Nesta and Mr. Barmby turning off the pier and advancing.
+
+He saluted. She bowed. There was no contraction of her eyelids; and her
+face was white. The mortal life appeared to be deadened in her cold wide
+look; as when the storm-wind banks a leaden remoteness, leaving blown
+space of sky.
+
+The colonel said: ‘No, that’s not the girl a gentleman would offend.’
+
+‘What man!’ cried Dartrey. ‘If we had a Society for the trial of your
+gentleman!--but he has only to call himself gentleman to get grant of
+licence: and your Society protects him. It won’t punish, and it won’t
+let you. But you saw her: ask yourself--what man could offend that
+girl!’
+
+‘Still, my friend, she ought to keep clear of the Marsetts.’
+
+‘When I meet him, I shall treat him as one out of the law.’
+
+‘You lead on to an ultimate argument with the hangman.’
+
+We ‘ll dare it, to waken the old country. Old England will count none
+but Worrells in time. As for discreet, if you like!--the young lady
+might have been more discreet. She’s a girl with a big heart. If we were
+all everlastingly discreet!’
+
+Dartrey may have meant, that the consequence of a prolonged conformity
+would be the generation of stenches to shock to purgeing tempests the
+tolerant heavens over such smooth stagnancy. He had his ideas about
+movement; about the good of women, and the health of his England. The
+feeling of the hopelessness of pleading Nesta’s conduct, for the perfect
+justification of it to son or daughter of our impressing conventional
+world--even to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous
+man--drove him back in a silence upon his natural brotherhood with souls
+that dare do. It was a wonder, to think of his finding this kinship in
+a woman. In a girl?--and the world holding that virgin spirit to be
+unclean or shadowed because its rays were shed on foul places? He
+clasped the girl. Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh
+after torture, bent him in devotion to her image.
+
+The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:
+quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little ‘blue
+butterfly’ of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard
+of Dudley Sowerby’s pretensions to; her hand. Nesta’s youthfulness cast
+double age on him from the child’s past. He pictured the child; pictured
+the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate
+wide world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly,
+painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman’s
+mind. And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.
+
+They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper
+urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed
+expression. He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
+proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or
+two off our native level is relaxed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII. A PAIR OF WOOERS
+
+That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our mortal wounds,
+was caused by deeper convulsions in Nesta’s bosom than Dartrey could
+imagine.
+
+She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading the omen of his tones
+in the request. Dorothea and Virginia would have her go. The clerical
+gentleman, a friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who deplored
+poor Mr. Posterley’s infatuation; and one besides who belonged to
+Nesta’s musical choir in London: seemed a safe companion for the child.
+The grand organ of Mr. Barmby’s voice, too, assured them of a devout
+seriousness in him, that arrested any scrupulous little questions. They
+could not conceive his uttering the nonsensical empty stuff, compliments
+to their beauty and what not, which girls hear sometimes from
+inconsiderate gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned. Moreover,
+Nesta had rashly promised her father’s faithful servant Skepsey to walk,
+out with him in the afternoon; and the ladies hoped she would find the
+morning’s walk to have been enough; good little man though Skepsey was,
+they were sure. But there is the incongruous for young women of station
+on a promenade.
+
+Mr. Barmby headed to the pier. After pacing up and down between the
+briny gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the
+glass-sheltered seats fronting East: where, as his enthusiasm for the
+solemnity of the occasion excited him to say, ‘We have a view of the
+terraces and the cliffs’; and where not more than two enwrapped
+invalid figures were ensconsed. Then it was, that Nesta recalled her
+anticipation of his possible design; forgotten by her during their talk
+of her dear people: Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and
+Simeon Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey likewise; and the very
+latest news of her mother. She wished she could have run before him, to
+spare him. He would not notice a sign. Girls must wait and hear.
+
+It was an oratorio. She watched the long wave roll on to the sinking
+into its fellow; and onward again for the swell and the weariful lapse;
+and up at last bursting to the sheet of white. The far-heard roar and
+the near commingled, giving Mr. Barmby a semblance to the powers of
+ocean.
+
+At the first direct note, the burden of which necessitated a pause, she
+petitioned him to be her friend, to think of himself as her friend.
+
+But a vessel laden with merchandize, that has crossed wild seas for this
+particular port, is hardly to be debarred from discharging its goods
+on the quay by simple intimations of their not being wanted. We are
+precipitated both by the aim and the tedium of the lengthened voyage to
+insist that they be seen. We believe perforce in their temptingness; and
+should allurement fail, we fall back to the belief in our eloquence. An
+eloquence to expose the qualities they possess, is the testification in
+the promise of their excellence. She is to be induced by feeling to see
+it. We are asking a young lady for the precious gift of her hand.
+We respect her; and because of our continued respect, despite an
+obstruction, we have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude;
+could she but be led to understand how different we are from some other
+man!--from one hitherto favoured among them, unworthy of this prize,
+however personally exalted and meritorious.
+
+The wave of wide extension rolled and sank and rose, heaving lifeless
+variations of the sickly streaks on its dull green back.
+
+Dudley Sowerby’s defection was hinted at and accounted for, by the
+worldly test of worldly considerations.
+
+What were they?--Nesta glanced.
+
+An indistinct comparison was modestly presented, of one unmoved by
+worldly considerations.
+
+But what were they? She was wakened by a lamp, and her darkness was all
+inflammable to it.
+
+‘Oh! Mr. Barmby, you have done me the honour to speak before; you know
+my answer,’ she said.
+
+‘You were then subject to an influence. A false, I may say wicked,
+sentiment upholding celibacy.’
+
+‘My poor Louise? She never thought of influencing me. She has her views,
+I mine. Our friendship does not depend on a “treaty of reciprocity.”
+ We are one at heart, each free to judge and act, as it should be in
+friendship. I heard from her this morning. Her brother will be able to
+resume his military duties next month. Then she will return to me.’
+
+‘We propose!’ rejoined Mr. Barmby.
+
+Beholding the involuntary mercurial rogue-dimple he had started from a
+twitch at the corner, of her lips, the good gentleman pursued: ‘Can we
+dare write our designs for the month to come? Ah!--I will say--Nesta!
+give me the hope I beg to have. See the seriousness. You are at liberty.
+That other has withdrawn his pretensions. We will not blame him. He
+is in expectation of exalted rank. Where there is any shadow...!’ Mr.
+Barmby paused on his outroll of the word; but immediately, not intending
+to weigh down his gentle hearer with the significance in it, resumed at
+a yet more sonorous depth: ‘He is under the obligation to his family;
+an old, a venerable family. In the full blaze of public opinion! His
+conduct can be palliated by us, too. There is a right and wrong in minor
+things, independent of the higher rectitude. We pardon, we can partly
+support, the worldly view.’
+
+‘There is a shadow?’ said Nesta; and her voice was lurefully
+encouraging.
+
+He was on the footing where men are precipitated by what is within them
+to blunder. ‘On you--no. On you personally, not at all. No. It could not
+be deemed so. Not by those knowing, esteeming--not by him who loves
+you, and would, with his name, would, with his whole strength, envelop,
+shield ... certainly, certainly not.’
+
+‘It is on my parents?’ she said.
+
+‘But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought! To confound the innocent with
+the guilty!... and excuses may exist. We know but how little we know!’
+
+‘It is on both my parents?’ she said; with a simplicity that induced him
+to reply: ‘Before the world. But not, I repeat...’
+
+The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flourished on their
+termination of a waltz.
+
+She had not heeded their playing. Now she said:
+
+‘The music is over; we must not be late at lunch’; and she stood up and
+moved.
+
+He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out:
+
+‘I shall have your answer to-day, this evening? Nesta!’
+
+‘Mr. Barmby, it will be the same. You will be kind to me in not asking
+me again.’
+
+He spoke further. She was dumb.
+
+Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he named the shadow
+on her parents? He dwelt more on her than on himself: he would not have
+wounded her to win the blest affirmative. Could she have been entirely
+ignorant?--and after Dudley Sowerby’s defection? For such it was: the
+Rev. Stuart Rem had declared the union between the almost designated
+head of the Cantor family and a young person of no name, of worse than
+no birth, impossible: ‘absolutely and totally impossible,’ he, had said,
+in his impressive fashion, speaking from his knowledge of the family,
+and an acquaintance with Dudley. She must necessarily have learnt why
+Dudley Sowerby withdrew. No parents of an attractive daughter should
+allow her to remain unaware of her actual position in the world. It is
+criminal, a reduplication of the criminality! Yet she had not spoken as
+one astonished. She was mysterious. Women are so: young women most
+of all. It is undecided still whether they do of themselves conceive
+principles, or should submit to an imposition of the same upon them in
+terrorem. Mysterious truly, but most attractive! As Lady Bountiful of a
+district, she would have in her maturity the majestic stature to suit
+a dispensation of earthly good things. And, strangely, here she was, at
+this moment, rivalling to excelling all others of her sex (he verified
+it in the crowd of female faces passing), when they, if they but knew
+the facts, would visit her very appearance beside them on a common
+footing as an intrusion and a scandal. To us who know, such matters are
+indeed wonderful!
+
+Moved by reflective compassion, Mr. Barmby resumed the wooer’s note,
+some few steps after he had responded to the salutation of Dartrey
+Fenellan and Colonel Sudley. She did not speak. She turned her forehead
+to him; and the absence of the world from her eyes chilled his tongue.
+
+He declined the pleasure of the lunch with the Duvidney ladies. He
+desired to be alone, to question himself fasting, to sound the deed he
+had done; for he had struck on a suspicion of selfishness in it: and
+though Love must needs be an egoism, Love is no warrant for the doing
+of a hurt to the creature beloved. Thoughts upon Skepsey and the tale
+of his Matilda Pridden’s labours in poor neighbourhoods, to which he had
+been inattentive during the journey down to the sea, invaded him; they
+were persistent. He was a worthy man, having within him the
+spiritual impulse curiously ready to take the place where a material
+disappointment left vacancy. The vulgar sort embrace the devil at that
+stage. Before the day had sunk, Mr. Barmby’s lowest wish was, to be a
+light, as the instrument of his Church in her ministrations amid the
+haunts of sin and slime, to such plain souls as Daniel Skepsey and
+Matilda Pridden. And he could still be that, if Nesta, in the chapters
+of the future, changed her mind. She might; for her good she would; he
+reserved the hope. His light was one to burn beneath an extinguisher.
+
+At the luncheon table of the Duvidney ladies, it was a pain to Dorothea
+and Virginia to witness how poor the appetite their Nesta brought in
+from the briny blowy walk. They prophesied against her chances of a good
+sleep at night, if she did not eat heartily. Virginia timidly remarked
+on her paleness. Both of them put their simple arts in motion to let her
+know, that she was dear to them: so dear as to make them dread the hour
+of parting. They named their dread of it. They had consulted in private
+and owned to one another, that they did really love the child, and dared
+not look forward to what they would do without her. The dear child’s
+paleness and want of appetite (they remembered they were observing
+a weak innocent girl) suggested to them mutually the idea of a young
+female heart sickening, for the old unhappy maiden reason. But, if
+only she might return with them to the Wells, the Rev. Stuart Rem would
+assure her to convince her of her not being quite, quite forsaken. He,
+or some one having sanction from Victor, might ultimately (the ladies
+waiting anxiously in the next room, to fold her on the warmth of their
+bosoms when she had heard) impart to her the knowledge of circumstances,
+which would, under their further tuition concerning the particular
+sentiments of great families and the strict duties of the scions of
+the race, help to account for and excuse the Hon. Dudley Sowerby’s
+behaviour.
+
+They went up to the drawing-room, talking of Skepsey and his tale of
+Miss Pridden, for Nesta’s amusement. Any talk of her Skepsey usually
+quickened her lips to reminiscent smiles and speech. Now she held on to
+gazeing; and sadly, it seemed; as if some object were not present.
+
+For a vague encouragement, Dorothea said: ‘One week, and we are back
+home at Moorsedge!’--not so far from Cronidge, was implied, for the
+administering of some foolish temporary comfort. And it was as when a
+fish on land springs its hollow sides in alien air for the sustaining
+element; the girl panted; she clasped Dorothea’s hand and looked at
+Virginia: ‘My mother--I must see her!’ she said. They were slightly
+stupefied by the unwonted mention of her mother. They made no reply.
+They never had done so when there was allusion to her mother. Their
+silence now struck a gong at the girl’s bosom.
+
+Dorothea had it in mind to say, that if she thirsted for any special
+comfort, the friends about her would offer consolation for confidence.
+
+Before she could speak, Perrin the footman entered, bearing the card of
+the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby begged for an immediate interview with Miss Radnor.
+
+The ladies were somewhat agitated, but no longer perplexed as to their
+duties. They had quitted Moorsedge to avoid the visit of his family.
+If he followed, it signified that which they could not withstand:--The
+‘Tivoli falls!’ as they named the fateful tremendous human passion, from
+the reminiscences of an impressive day on their travels in youth; when
+the leaping torrent had struck upon a tale of love they were reading.
+They hurriedly entreated Nesta to command her nerves; peremptorily
+requested her to stay where she was; showed her spontaneously, by way of
+histrionic adjuration, the face to be worn by young ladies at greetings
+on these occasions; kissed her and left her; Virginia whispering: ‘He is
+true!’
+
+Dudley entered the drawing-room, charged with his happy burden of a love
+that had passed through the furnace. She stood near a window, well in
+the light; she hardly gave him welcome. His address to her was hurried,
+rather uncertain, coherent enough between the drop and the catch of
+articulate syllables. He found himself holding his hat. He placed it on
+the table, and it rolled foolishly; but soon he was by her side, having
+two free hands to claim her one.
+
+‘You are thinking, you have not heard from me! I have been much
+occupied,’ he said. ‘My brother is ill, very ill. I have your pardon?’
+
+‘Indeed you have--if it has to be asked.’
+
+‘I have it?’
+
+‘Have I to grant it?’
+
+‘I own to remissness!
+
+‘I did not blame you.’
+
+‘Nesta...!’
+
+Her coldness was unshaken.
+
+He repeated the call of her name. ‘I should have written--I ought to
+have written!--I could not have expressed... You do forgive? So many
+things!’
+
+‘You come from Cronidge to-day?’
+
+‘From my family--to you.’
+
+She seemed resentful. His omissions as a correspondent were explicable
+in a sentence. It had to be deferred.
+
+Reviewing for a moment the enormous internal conflict undergone by
+him during the period of the silence between them, he wondered at the
+vastness of the love which had conquered objections, to him so poignant.
+
+There was at least no seeing of the public blot on her birth when
+looking on her face. Nor when thinking of the beauty of her character,
+in absence or in presence, was there any. He had mastered distaste to
+such a degree, that he forgot the assistance he had received from the
+heiress for enabling him to appreciate the fair young girl. Money is the
+imperious requirement of superior station; and more money and more: in
+these our modern days of the merchant’s wealth, and the miner’s, and the
+gigantic American and Australian millionaires, high rank is of necessity
+vowed, in peril of utter eclipse; to the possession of money. Still it
+is, when assured, a consideration far to the rear with a gentleman in
+whose bosom love and the buzzing world have fought their battle out. He
+could believe it thoroughly fought out, by the prolonged endurance of
+a contest lasting many days and nights; in the midst of which, at
+one time, the task of writing to tell her of his withdrawal from the
+engagement, was the cause of his omission to write.
+
+As to her character, he dwelt on the charm of her recovered features, to
+repress an indicative dread of some intrepid force behind it, that might
+be unfeminine, however gentle the external lineaments. Her features,
+her present aristocratic deficiency of colour, greatly pleased him; her
+character would submit to moulding. Of all young ladies in the world,
+she should be the one to shrink from a mental independence and hold to
+the guidance of the man ennobling her. Did she? Her eyes were reading
+him. She had her father’s limpid eyes, and when they concentrated rays,
+they shot.
+
+‘Have you seen my parents, Mr. Sowerby?’
+
+He answered smilingly, for reassuringly: ‘I have seen them.’
+
+‘My mother?’
+
+‘From your mother first. But am I not to be Dudley?’
+
+‘She spoke to you? She told you?’
+
+‘And yesterday your father--a second time.’
+
+Some remainder of suspicion in the dealing with members of this family,
+urged Dudley to say: ‘I understood from them, you were not?... that you
+were quite...?’
+
+‘I have heard: I have guessed: it was recently--this morning, as
+it happened. I wish to go to my mother to-day. I shall go to her
+to-morrow.’
+
+‘I might offer to conduct you-now!’
+
+‘You are kind; I have Skepsey.’ She relieved the situation of its
+cold-toned strain in adding: ‘He is a host.’
+
+‘But I may come?--now! Have I not the right? You do not deny it me?’
+
+‘You are very generous.’
+
+‘I claim the right, then. Always. And subsequently, soon after, my
+mother hopes to welcome you at Cronidge. She will be glad to hear of
+your naming of a day. My father bids me... he and all our family.’
+
+‘They are very generous.’
+
+‘I may send them word this evening of a day you name?’
+
+‘No, Mr. Sowerby.
+
+‘Dudley?’
+
+‘I cannot say it. I have to see my parents.’
+
+‘Between us, surely?’
+
+‘My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me. I am unable to say
+more.’
+
+He had again observed and he slightly crisped under the speculative
+look she directed on him: a simple unstrained look, that had an air of
+reading right in, and was worse to bear with than when the spark
+leaped upon some thought from her eyes: though he had no imagination of
+anything he concealed--or exposed, and he would have set it down to her
+temporary incredulousness of his perfect generosity or power to overcome
+the world’s opinion of certain circumstances. That had been a struggle!
+The peculiar look was not renewed. She spoke warmly of her gratitude.
+She stated, that she must of necessity see her parents at once. She
+submitted to his entreaty to conduct her to them on the morrow. It
+was in the manner of one who yielded step by step, from inability to
+contend.
+
+Her attitude continuing unchanged, he became sensible of a monotony
+in the speech with which he assailed it, and he rose to leave, not
+dissatisfied. She, at his urgent request, named her train for London in
+the early morning. He said it was not too early. He would have desired
+to be warmed; yet he liked her the better for the moral sentiment
+controlling the physical. He had appointments with relatives or
+connections in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping for
+the speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the
+house.
+
+No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot! That was the
+thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious, in Nesta: and while
+her heart was exalting him for his generosity. Under her present sense
+of the chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful
+to him for the golden beams which his generosity cast about her. But she
+had an intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though she was; and with the
+mark in sight, however distant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis
+for blood of beasts: those shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find
+a champion, athirst for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any
+judicial to pronounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect. She
+raised him high; she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of the
+struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped him, she believed.
+And she was melted; and not the less did the girl’s implacable intuition
+read with the keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division
+in him, where warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete
+forming a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen. She, too, was
+divided: she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to
+judge--or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her mind upon a
+man proving so generous with her. She was pulled this way and that
+by sensibilities both inspiring to blind gratitude and quickening her
+penetrative view. The certainty of an unerring perception remained.
+
+Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their
+carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley’s departure; soon
+after, Nesta entered to them. She swam up to Dorothea’s lap, and dropped
+her head on it, kneeling.
+
+The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea patted her thick brown
+twisted locks of hair. Unhappiness following such an interview, struck
+them as an ill sign.
+
+Virginia bent to the girl’s ear, and murmured: ‘All well?’
+
+She replied: ‘He has been very generous.’
+
+Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her
+on the descent of stairs. For sensibilities sharp as Nesta’s, are not to
+be had without their penalties: and she who had gone nigh to summing in
+a flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often
+besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:--the
+fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine attitude
+and opinion. Young men know well what it is: and if young women have
+by chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of
+the trim pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation. It
+becomes a subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast
+off. Soon it assumed its material form for the contention between
+her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Marsett. The Nesta who had been
+instructed to know herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost
+justified Dudley’s reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance
+of the unhappy woman, for having visited her, for having been, though
+but for a minute, at the mercy of a coarse gentleman’s pursuit. The
+recollection was a smart buffet.
+
+Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley’s
+words, should news of her relations with Mrs. Marsett reach him:--and
+she would have to tell him. Would he not say: ‘I have borne with
+the things concerning your family. All the greater reason why I must
+insist’--he would assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the
+word, as being the very word one could foresee and clearly see him
+uttering in a fit of vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of ‘that
+woman.’
+
+And with Nesta’s present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her
+parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the
+majority. Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett
+put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to
+class them together?
+
+These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a
+battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the
+girl’s face was hidden on Dorothea’s lap, and her breast heaved and
+heaved.
+
+She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her
+mother.
+
+They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said: ‘Yes,
+dear; any day you like.’
+
+‘To-morrow--I must go to her to-morrow!’
+
+A suggestion of her mother’s coming down, was faintly spoken by one
+lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.
+
+Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to
+give their promise that they would invite her again.
+
+Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced
+her: not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of
+the pernicious new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of
+morality; which warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite
+justifiable behaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of the
+guiltless creature loved by them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV. CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
+
+All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to
+meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would
+have felt at home; more at home than with her parents. He and the cool
+world he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his
+giving of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present
+to her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and
+round, now and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried
+his head semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he
+was, he appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives
+inducing to speculation.
+
+She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
+and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
+anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
+gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
+people.
+
+The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
+them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as
+a muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
+blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
+them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
+into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls
+are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
+up to the parent Spirit.
+
+She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
+and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole
+true life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by
+Dudley’s generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for
+her uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected
+quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
+obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of
+what she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover’s generosity. So her
+keen intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus
+divided) thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred
+passion lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a
+quiring cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with
+an unwelcome touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving
+tenderness for her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother.
+Could he love the daughter without some little, which a more intimate
+knowledge of her dear mother would enlarge? The girl’s heart flew to her
+mother, clung to her, vindicated her dumbly. It would not inquire, and
+it refused to hear, hungering the while. She sent forth her flights
+of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird
+after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast
+ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her
+never losing her filial hold of the beloved. She and her mother grew
+together, they were one. Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one
+beneath it. She had neither vision nor active thought of her father, in
+whom her pride was.
+
+At the hour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment of their sweet
+reward. Manton, their maid, came down to sit with Nesta on the watch for
+Skepsey. Perrin, the footman, returning, as late as twenty minutes to
+eleven, from his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to Manton
+‘a row in town’; and he repeated to Nesta the policeman’s opinion and
+his own of the ‘Army’ fellows, and the way to treat them. Both were for
+rigour.
+
+‘The name of “Army” attracts poor Skepsey so, I am sure he would join
+it, if they would admit him,’ Nesta said.
+
+‘He has an immense respect for a young woman, who belongs to his “Army”;
+and one doesn’t know what may have come,’ said Manton.
+
+Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the bell gained
+admission for some person: whispering was heard in the passage.
+
+Manton played eavesdropper, and suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested
+him when about to dash upstairs. His young mistress’s voice was a
+sufficient command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and stepped
+into her presence for his countenance to be seen, or the show of a
+countenance, that it presented.
+
+‘Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good night to me?’ said
+she; leaving unnoticed, except for woefulness of tone, his hurried
+shuffle of remarks on ‘his appearance,’ and ‘little accidents’; ending
+with an inclination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and a
+petition: ‘If I might, Miss Nesta?’ The implied pathetic reference to
+a surgically-treated nose under a cross of strips of plaster, could not
+obtain dismissal for him. And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing
+beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had
+couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two eyes blinked rapidly.
+He was a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring to be sent into
+concealment.
+
+The cruelty of detaining him was evident.
+
+‘Yes, if you must,’ Nesta said. ‘But, dear Skepsey, will it be the
+magistrate again to-morrow?’
+
+He feared it would be; he fancied it would needs be. He concluded
+by stating, that he was bound to appear before the magistrate in the
+morning; and he begged assistance to keep it from the knowledge of the
+Miss Duvidneys, who had been so kind to him.
+
+‘Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?’
+
+‘A good gentleman, a resident,’ he replied; ‘a military gentleman;
+indeed, a colonel of the cavalry; but, it may so be, retired; and
+anxious about our vast possessions; though he thinks a translation of
+a French attack on England unimportant. He says, the Germans despise us
+most.’
+
+‘Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?’
+
+‘He is a friend of Captain Dartrey’s.’
+
+Hearing that name, Nesta said: ‘Now, Skepsey, you must tell me
+everything. You are not to mind your looks. I believe, I do always
+believe you mean well.’
+
+‘Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate’s not being prejudiced
+against the street-processionists!
+
+‘But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if your case is good?’
+
+‘I would not say no, Miss Nesta. But we find, the opinion of the public
+has its effect with magistrates--their sentences. They are severe on
+boxing. They have latterly treated the “Army” with more consideration,
+owing to the change in the public view. I myself have changed.’
+
+‘Have you joined it?’
+
+‘I cannot say I am a member of it.’
+
+‘You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were maltreated? Your friend
+was there?’
+
+‘I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along the pavement.’
+
+‘I hope she came out of it unhurt?’
+
+‘It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?’
+
+This time Nesta looked her question.
+
+Manton interposed: ‘You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey’; and she stopped a
+flood of narrative, that was knocking in his mind to feel its head and
+to leap--an uninterrupted half-minute more would have shaped the story
+for the proper flow.
+
+He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a manner to
+correct them rather than solace; and the beginning was the end:
+‘Captain Dartrey rescued us, before Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to
+mention--the chin, slight, teeth unshaken; a beautiful set. She is angry
+with Captain Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her defence: it
+is against her principles. “Then you die,” she says; and our principles
+are to gain more by death. She says, we are alive in them; but worse if
+we abandon them for the sake of living.--I am a little confused; she is
+very abstruse.--Because, that is the corruptible life, she says. I have
+found it quite impossible to argue with her; she has always a complete
+answer; wonderful. In case of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the
+Lord; and the Lord’s will shall be manifested. If we are robbed, we ask,
+How came we by the goods? It is unreasonable; it strikes at rights
+of property. But I have to go on thinking. When in danger, she sings
+without excitement. When the blow struck her, she stopped singing only
+an instant. She says, no one fears, who has real faith. She will not let
+me call her brave. She cannot admire Captain Dartrey. Her principles are
+opposed. She said to him, “Sir, you did what seemed to you right.” She
+thinks every blow struck sends us back to the state of the beasts. Her
+principles...’
+
+‘How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present, Skepsey?’
+
+‘She is very firm. You cannot move her.--Captain Dartrey was on his way
+to the station, to meet a gentleman from London, Miss Nesta. He carried
+a stick--a remarkable stick--he had shown to me in the morning, and he
+has given it me now. He says, he has done his last with it. He seems to
+have some of Matilda Pridden’s ideas about fighting, when it’s over. He
+was glad to be rid of the stick, he said.’
+
+‘But who attacked you? What were the people?’
+
+‘Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head while she breeds
+young women like Matilda Pridden: right or wrong, he says: it is the
+substance.’
+
+Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little man with
+a snappish word, to bring him to attention. She got him together
+sufficiently for him to give a lame version of the story; flat until
+he came to his heroine’s behaviour, when he brightened a moment, and
+he sank back absorbed in her principles and theories of life. It was
+understood by Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace,
+found their way blocked and were assaulted in one of the sidestreets;
+and that Skepsey rushed to the defence of Matilda Pridden; and that,
+while they were engaged, Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the
+street, and recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the
+worst of it, owing to numbers. ‘I will show you the stick he did it
+with, Miss Nests’; said Skepsey, regardless of narrative; and darted
+out of the room to bring in the Demerara supple-jack; holding which, he
+became inspired to relate something of Captain Dartrey’s deeds.
+
+They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly perceived:--thus it
+is with the fair sex ever, so fond of heroes! She shut her eyes from
+the sight of the Demerara supple-jack descending right and left upon the
+skulls of a couple of bully lads. ‘That will do--you were rescued. And
+now go to bed, Skepsey; and be up at seven to breakfast with me,’ Nesta
+said, for his battle-damaged face would be more endurable to behold
+after an interval, she hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate
+its evil look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.
+
+The thought of her hero taking active part in a streetfray, was
+repulsive to her; it swamped his brilliancy. And this distressed her, by
+withdrawing the support which the thought of him had been to her since
+mid-day. She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain, under
+oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, bloodshedding men. It was
+long before she grew mindful of the absurdity of the moan recurring
+whenever reflection wearied. Translated into speech, it would have run:
+
+‘In a street of the town! with a stick!’--The vulgar picture pursued her
+to humiliation; it robbed her or dimmed her possession of the one bright
+thing she had remaining to her. So she deemed it during the heavy sighs
+of night; partly conscious, that in some strange way it was as much
+as tossing her to the man who never could have condescended to the
+pugnacious using of a stick in a street. He, on the contrary, was a
+cover to the shamefaced.
+
+Her heart was weak that night. She hovered above it, but not so detached
+as to scorn it for fawning to one--any one--who would offer her and her
+mother a cover from scorn. And now she exalted Dudley’s generosity,
+now clung to a low idea of a haven in her father’s wealth; and she was
+unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first. She did know
+herself cowardly: she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at
+the creature who could think of purchasing the world’s respect. Dudley’s
+generosity sprang up to silence the voice. She could praise him, on a
+review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under
+a more positive obligation. Her sense of it was not without a toneless
+quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously
+caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win
+their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of
+high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.
+Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets
+and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may
+imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay. If
+she had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of
+one of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been
+thus abject. Skepsey’s discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey’s behaviour
+behind it, threw her upon Dudley’s generosity, as being the shield for
+an outcast. Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in
+its appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
+suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she
+could think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.
+
+According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea
+and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the
+good-bye to them and their Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a
+silken ball in a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his
+being unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their
+bedroom. Dorothea, kissing her, said: ‘Adieu, dear child; and there is
+home with us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however it may
+be, you will, for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our
+orders--Manton--your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to
+accompany you. We will not have it on our consciences, that by any
+possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge. The good
+innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to
+him; we are sure of that.’
+
+Nesta said: ‘Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.’
+
+‘However it may be,’ Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.
+
+Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso’s temper he enjoyed
+ordinarily a slumber of half an hour’s longer duration. He was, Dorothea
+feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia murmured: ‘Except once!’
+and both were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,
+nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem’s published
+beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the
+night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could
+reply to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart
+Rem at his loftiest: ‘“Let us not bring into the sacred precincts
+Dirt from the roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a
+fructification.”’ Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise
+weighty. Nesta stood between the thin division of their beds, her right
+hand given to one, her left to the other. They had the semblance of a
+haven out of storms.
+
+She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing
+with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember
+how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten;
+and she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that
+would not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort. Luxurious quiet
+people were as ripening glass-house fruits. Her bitter gathering of the
+knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even
+in the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow
+soil. But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might
+have been snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and
+conventional, or shed the pity which is charity’s contempt. She had only
+to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to
+them at once. And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women
+embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now
+bore, her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear
+the shock of other knowledge! How would she have borne it before she
+knew of the infinitely evil? Saving for the tender compassion weeping
+over her mother, she had not much acute personal grief.
+
+For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that
+infinitely evil! Her intellect fortified her to be combative by
+day, after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so
+serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed
+the world snorting Dragon’s breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
+vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half
+withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The daylight, spreading thin at the
+windows, restored her from that weakness. ‘We will quit England,’ she
+said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father’s
+surely following them. She sighed thankfully, half way through the
+breakfast with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was
+hurriedly sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at
+a chance that Dudley would be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly
+feeling not so well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on
+her mother in Dudley’s company.
+
+Skepsey’s face was just sufferable by light of day, if one pitied
+reflecting on his honest intentions; it ceased to discolour another.
+He dropped a few particulars of his hero in action; but the heroine
+eclipsed. He was heavier than ever with his Matilda Pridden. At the
+hour for departure, Perrin had a conveyance at the door. Nesta sent off
+Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dartrey. Her maid Mary
+begged her to finish her breakfast; Manton suggested the waiting a
+further two or three minutes. ‘We must not be late,’ Nesta said; and
+when the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the drive to the
+station, she took her seat and started, keeping her face resolutely
+set seaward, having at her ears the ring of a cry that was to come
+from Manton. But Manton was dumb; she spied no one on the pavement who
+signalled to stop them. And no one was at the station to greet them.
+They stepped into a carriage where they were alone. Dudley with his
+dreaded generosity melted out of Nesta’s thoughts, like the vanishing
+steam-wreath on the dip between the line and the downs.
+
+She passed into music, as she always did under motion of carriages and
+trains, whether in happiness or sadness: and the day being one that
+had a sky, the scenic of music swung her up to soar. None of her heavy
+burdens enchained, though she knew the weight of them, with those of
+other painful souls. The pipeing at her breast gave wings to large and
+small of the visible; and along the downs went stateliest of flowing
+dances; a copse lengthened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught
+grey for flights through enchantment. Cottage-children, wherever seen in
+groups, she wreathed above with angels to watch them. Her mind all the
+while was busy upon earth, embracing her mother, eyeing her father.
+Imagination and our earthly met midway, and still she flew, until she
+was brought to the ground by a shot. She struggled to rise, uplifting
+Judith Marsett: a woman not so very much older than her own teens, in
+the count of years, and ages older; and the world pulling at her heels
+to keep her low. That unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help
+her: and how she clung to the slender help! Who else was there?
+
+The good and the bad in the woman struck separate blows upon the
+girl’s resonant nature. She perceived the good, and took it into her
+reflections. The bad she divined: it approached like some threat of
+inflammation. Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, are
+quick at the wells of understanding: and she had her intimations of the
+world’s wisdom in withholding contagious presences from the very
+mangy of the young, who may not have an aim, or ideal, or strong human
+compassion, for a preservative. She was assured of her possessing it.
+She asked herself in her mother’s voice, and answered mutely. She had
+the certainty: for she rebuked the slavish feverishness of the passion,
+as betrayed by Mrs. Marsett; and the woman’s tone, as of strung wires
+ringing on a rage of the wind. Then followed her cry for the man who
+could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honour. An image of one,
+accompanying the faster beats of her heart, beguiled her to think away
+from the cause. He, the one man known to her, would act the brother’s
+part on behalf of the hapless creature.
+
+Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at once imagination
+came to dust. She had to thank him she knelt to him. For the first
+time of her life she found herself seized with her sex’s shudder in the
+blood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING
+AN ABYSMAL DARKNESS
+
+And if Nesta had looked out of her carriage-window soon after the train
+began to glide, her eagle of imagination would have reeled from the
+heights, with very different feelings, earlier, perhaps a captive, at
+sight of the tardy gentleman rushing along the platform, and bending ear
+to the footman Perrin, and staring for one lost.
+
+The snaky tail of the train imparted to Dudley an apprehension of the
+ominous in his having missed her. It wound away, and left regrets, which
+raised a chorus of harsh congratulations from the opposite party of his
+internal parliament.
+
+Neither party could express an opinion without rousing the other to an
+uproar.
+
+He had met his cousin Southweare overnight. He had heard, that there was
+talk of Miss Radnor. Her name was in the mouth of Major Worrell. It
+was coupled with the name of Mrs. Marsett. A military captain, in the
+succession to be Sir Edward Marsett, bestowed on her the shadow of his
+name.
+
+It could be certified, that Miss Radnor visited the woman at her house.
+What are we to think of Miss Radnor, save that daughters of depraved
+parents!... A torture undeserved is the Centaur’s shirt for driving
+us to lay about in all directions. He who had swallowed so much--a
+thunderbolt: a still undigested discharge from the perplexing heavens
+jumped frantic under the pressure upon him of more, and worse. A girl
+getting herself talked of at a Club! And she of all young ladies should
+have been the last to draw round her that buzz of tongues. On such a
+subject!--The parents pursuing their career of cynical ostentation in
+London, threw an evil eye of heredity on their offspring in the egg;
+making anything credible, pointing at tendencies.
+
+An alliance with her was impossible. So said disgust. Anger came like
+a stronger beast, and extinguished the safety there was in the thing it
+consumed, by growing so excessive as to require tempering with drops of
+compassion; which prepared the way for a formal act of cold forgiveness;
+and the moment that was conceived, he had a passion to commit the
+horrible magnanimity, and did it on a grand scale, and dissolved his
+Heart in the grandeur, and slaved himself again.
+
+Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gave it a stamp and
+an edge. His renewed enslavement set him perusing his tyrant keenly, as
+nauseated captives do; and he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case.
+For this Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it. He had
+mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciousness too long for him
+to see her taking a culprit’s attitude. What she did, she intended to
+do. The mother would not have encouraged her. The father idolized her;
+and the father was a frank hedonist, whose blood... speculation on
+horseback gallops to barren extremes. Eyes like hers--if there had not
+been the miserable dupes of girls! Conduct is the sole guide to female
+character. That likewise may be the hypocrite’s mask.
+
+Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called
+realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a
+man from impact of a cannon-ball on his person. Truly thus it may be
+when flesh contends. But an image of the stricken and scattered mind
+of the man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater
+significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied
+and showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of
+further steps. Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta’s train, one
+half minute too late, according to his desire before he put himself in
+motion, was as wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers
+and threads off the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler.
+He wished every mad antagonism to his wishes: that he might see her, be
+blind to her; embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider. He
+thanked her for the grossness of an offence precluding excuses. He was
+aware of a glimmer of advocacy in the very grossness. He conjured-up her
+features, and they said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at
+him for the dupe he was willing to be. She had enigma’s mouth, with the
+eyes of morning.
+
+More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her
+having ideas--or what he deemed ideas. She struck a toneing warmth
+through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of
+the blood in the frame breathing mountain air. She really helped
+him, incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more
+cheerfully, if not quite hopefully. For she had been the book of Romance
+he despised when it appeared as a printed volume: and which might have
+educated the young man to read some among our riddles in the book of
+humanity. The white he was ready to take for silver the black were all
+black; the spotted had received corruption’s label. Her youthful French
+governess Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the
+mouth conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature
+of her country. In public, the two talked of St. Louis. One of them in
+secret visits a Mrs. Marsett. The Southweare women, the Hennen women,
+and Lady Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early
+days, not transgressing in a glance. Lady Grace Halley had her fit of
+the devotional previous to marriage. No girl known to Dudley by report
+or acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
+Radnor’s: it pertained to the insolently vile.
+
+And on that ground, it started the voluble defence. For certain
+suspected things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are
+very dark. As soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence
+expired. He heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he
+sorrowfully acquiesced. She passed from him.
+
+When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying
+of hers, with the full melody of her voice. One day, treating of modern
+pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a
+quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: ‘To set one’s love
+upon the swallow is a futility.’ And she, weighing it, nodded, and
+replied: ‘May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the
+beauty of the swallow’s flight?’
+
+There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
+course, the picture we are to have of the bird’s wings in motion, it
+has often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
+vague. But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated.
+And the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the
+class of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for
+analysis!
+
+She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
+Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
+means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
+of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have
+put a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations,
+without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her
+father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant,
+whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions
+affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the
+existence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an
+interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead
+her simplicity, was to be absolutely ignorant of her.
+
+He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating
+to Nesta’s precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
+dactylomancy, the ‘psychical’ of women are not disposed in their
+sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
+or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship
+at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of
+foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized
+male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper’s
+view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely
+to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base:
+Nature at flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of
+the good and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as
+well as to thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves,
+to discover how much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or
+representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces;
+and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction
+from the poet’s pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the
+slough, when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they
+have learnt of Nature’s priest to respect her, they will less distrust
+those rare daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her
+out of slime. It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold
+worship at a niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index,
+for the enlargement of your charity.
+
+But facts were Dudley’s teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he
+read the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
+encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
+bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
+unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. Even at his
+darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
+parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him
+the right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude
+for pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a
+stammering speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this
+Nesta Radnor’s character would have said a brave word, but for her
+deeds bearing witness to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous
+temperament.
+
+What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had
+fallen on the promenading crowds. To do nothing, is the wisdom of those
+who have seen fools perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing
+nothing, for a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was
+the reason of how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance
+with the ‘agreeable lady’ she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge. Those
+excellent counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings,
+that the ‘masterly inactive’ part, so greatly esteemed by him for the
+conduct of public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid
+girl: nor a hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the
+sensations are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
+understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable
+at a crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst’s consumptive brothers
+waved faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely. Superb for the
+chances: but what of her offspring? And the other was a girl such as
+the lusty Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the
+heir of the House’s honours for the perpetuation of his race. No doubt:
+and the venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage)
+of the Ages backward, temp: Ed: III. inflated him with a thought of
+her: and his readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical
+regeneration, pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon
+instinct opened mouth to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl
+of his presiding mistrust of Nature.
+
+He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he had from the
+silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may behold how the Conservatism
+of a Class, in a world of all the evidences showing that there is no
+stay to things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality. His
+mistrust was his own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would
+make her his own. Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless
+adviser. It spurred him, nevertheless.
+
+He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom he was not in
+sympathy; and had information that, Southweare said, ‘made the girl
+out all right.’ Girls in these days do things which the sainted
+stay-at-homes preceding them would not have dreamed of doing. Something
+had occurred, relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss Radnor’s name,
+acknowledged himself mistaken or amended his report of her, in some
+way, not quite intelligible. Dudley was accosted by Simeon Fenellan;
+subsequently by Dartrey. There was gossip over the latter gentleman’s
+having been up before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick,
+and Dartrey said, laughing, to Simeon: ‘Rather lucky I bled the
+rascal’;--whatever the meaning. She nursed one of her adorations for
+this man, who had yesterday, apparently, joined in a street-fray; so she
+partook of the stain of the turbid defacing all these disorderly people.
+
+At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished an
+account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan’s participation in the strife, after
+mention of him as nephew of the Earl of Clanconan, ‘now a visitor to
+our town’; and his deeds were accordant with his birth. Such writing
+was enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colney Durance. What a
+people!
+
+Mr. Dartrey Fenellan’s card compelled Dudley presently to receive him.
+
+Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusion to Miss Radnor
+could be conveyed only in the most delicately obscure manner, spared him
+no more than the plain English of his relations with her. Requested to
+come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, that he might hear
+Major Worrell’s personal contradiction of scandal involving the young
+lady’s name, together with his apology, etc., Dudley declined: and he
+was obliged to do it curtly; words were wanting. They are hard to find
+for wounded sentiments rendered complex by an infusion of policy. His
+present mood, with the something new to digest, held the going to Major
+Worrell a wrong step; he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan
+pledged him hardly less. And besides he had a physical abhorrence, under
+dictate of moral reprobation, of the broad-shouldered sinewy man, whose
+look of wiry alertness pictured the previous day’s gory gutters.
+
+Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowed; and went.
+
+
+
+
+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 him,’ 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 the 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
+
+     Admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds
+     All of us an ermined owl within us to sit in judgement
+     An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
+     Aristocratic assumption of licence
+     Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
+     Ask not why, where reason never was
+     Belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience
+     But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
+     Cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness
+     Claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges
+     Consent of circumstances
+     Consent to take life as it is
+     Continued trust in the man--is the alternative of despair
+     Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
+     Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
+     Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear
+     Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
+     Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished
+     Dialogue between Nature and Circumstance
+     Dithyrambic inebriety of narration
+     Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks
+     Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker
+     Exuberant anticipatory trustfulness
+     Fell to chatting upon the nothings agreeably and seriously
+     Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted
+     Fire smoothes the creases
+     Frankness as an armour over wariness
+     Greater our successes, the greater the slaves we become
+     Half designingly permitted her trouble to be seen
+     Half a dozen dozen left
+     Happy the woman who has not more to speak
+     Hard to bear, at times unbearable
+     Haremed opinion of the unfitness of women
+     He sinks terribly when he sinks at all
+     He never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it
+     He never explained
+     He neared her, wooing her; and she assented
+     He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion
+     Heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy
+     Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
+     How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
+     How Success derides Ambition!
+     If only been intellectually a little flexible in his morality
+     If we are robbed, we ask, How came we by the goods?
+     If we are really for Nature, we are not lawless
+     In the pay of our doctors
+     In bottle if not on draught (oratory)
+     Intrusion of hard material statements, facts
+     Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
+     Kelts, as they are called, can’t and won’t forgive injuries
+     Let but the throb be kept for others--That is the one secret
+     Love must needs be an egoism
+     Man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object
+     Memory inspired by the sensations
+     Nation’s half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
+     Naturally as deceived as he wished to be
+     Nature and Law never agreed
+     Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
+     Nature’s logic, Nature’s voice, for self-defence
+     Next door to the Last Trump
+     No companionship save with the wound they nurse
+     Not to go hunting and fawning for alliances
+     Not always the right thing to do the right thing
+     Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments
+     Official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one
+     Once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal
+     One wants a little animation in a husband
+     Optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years
+     People of a provocative prosperity
+     Pessimy is invulnerable
+     Portrait of himself by the artist
+     Put into her woman’s harness of the bit and the blinkers
+     Repeatedly, in contempt of the disgust of iteration
+     Satirist is an executioner by profession
+     Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
+     Self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another
+     Semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord
+     Share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber
+     She was not his match--To speak would be to succumb
+     She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her
+     Slap and pinch and starve our appetites
+     Slave of existing conventions
+     Smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone
+     Smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque (obesity)
+     Snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer
+     Startled by the criticism in laughter
+     State of feverish patriotism
+     Statistics are according to their conjurors
+     Subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man
+     Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at home
+     The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke
+     The homage we pay him flatters us
+     The effects of the infinitely little
+     The night went past as a year
+     The old confession, that we cannot cook (The English)
+     The worst of it is, that we remember
+     The face of a stopped watch
+     The impalpable which has prevailing weight
+     There is little to be learnt when a little is known
+     They helped her to feel at home with herself
+     They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
+     They do not live; they are engines
+     Thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions
+     To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish
+     Universal censor’s angry spite
+     Unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate
+     We have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude
+     We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life
+     We cannot relinquish an idea that was ours
+     We’ve all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us
+     Whimpering fits you said we enjoy and must have in books
+     Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+     Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s One of Our Conquerors, Complete, by George Meredith
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