Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger
RHODA FLEMING, complete
By George Meredith
CONTENTS
BOOK 1.
I. THE KENTISH FAMILY
II. QUEEN ANNE'S FARM
III. SUGGESTS THE MIGHT OF THE MONEY DEMON
IV. THE TEXT FROM SCRIPTURE
V. THE SISTERS MEET
VI. EDWARD AND ALGERNON
VII. GREAT NEWS FROM DAHLIA
VIII. INTRODUCES MRS. LOVELL
IX. ROBERT INTERVENES
X. DAHLIA IS NOT VISIBLE
XI. AN INDICATIVE DUET IN A MINOR KEY
BOOK 2.
XII. AT THE THEATRE.
XIII. THE FARMER SPEAKS
XIV. BETWEEN RHODA AND ROBERT
XI. A VISIT TO WREXBY HALL
XII. AT FAIRLY PARK
XVII. A YEOMAN OF THE OLD BREED
XVIII. AN ASSEMBLY AT THE PILOT INN
XIX. ROBERT SMITTEN LOW
XX. MRS. LOVELL SHOWS A TAME BRUTE
BOOK 3.
XXI. GIVES A GLIMPSE OF WHAT POOR VILLANIES THE STORY CONTAINS
XXII. EDWARD TAKES HIS COURSE
XXIII. MAJOR PERCY WARING
XXIV. WARBEACH VILLAGE CHURCH
XXV. OF THE FEARFUL TEMPTATION WHICH CAME UPON ANTHONY HACKBUT, AND
OF HIS MEETING WITH DAHLIA
XXVI. IN THE PARK
XXVII. CONTAINS A STUDY OF A FOOL IN TROUBLE
XXVIII. EDWARD'S LETTER
XXIX. FURTHERMORE OF THE FOOL
BOOK 4.
XXX. THE EXPIATION
XXXI. THE MELTING OF THE THOUSAND
XXXII. LA QUESTION D'ARGENT
XXXIII. EDWARD'S RETURN
XXXIV. FATHER AND SON
XXXV. THE NIGHT BEFORE
XXXVI. EDWARD MEETS HIS MATCH
XXXVII. EDWARD TRIES HIS ELOQUENCE
XXXVIII. TOO LATE
BOOK 5.
XXXIX. DAHLIA GOES HOME
XL. A FREAK OF THE MONEY-DEMON, THAT MAY HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED
XLI. DAHLIA'S FRENZY
XLII. ANTHONY IN A COLLAPSE
XLIII. RHODA PLEDGES HER HAND
XLIV. THE ENEMY APPEARS
XLV. THE FARMER IS AWAKENED
XLVI. WHEN THE NIGHT IS DARKEST
XLVII. DAWN IS NEAR
XLVIII. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER I
Remains of our good yeomanry blood will be found in Kent, developing
stiff, solid, unobtrusive men, and very personable women. The
distinction survives there between Kentish women and women of Kent, as
a true South-eastern dame will let you know, if it is her fortune to
belong to that favoured portion of the county where the great battle
was fought, in which the gentler sex performed manful work, but on what
luckless heads we hear not; and when garrulous tradition is discreet,
the severe historic Muse declines to hazard a guess. Saxon, one would
presume, since it is thought something to have broken them.
My plain story is of two Kentish damsels, and runs from a home of
flowers into regions where flowers are few and sickly, on to where the
flowers which breathe sweet breath have been proved in mortal fire.
Mrs. Fleming, of Queen Anne's Farm, was the wife of a yeoman-farmer of
the county. Both were of sound Kentish extraction, albeit varieties of
the breed. The farm had its name from a tradition, common to many other
farmhouses within a circuit of the metropolis, that the ante-Hanoverian
lady had used the place in her day as a nursery-hospital for the royal
little ones. It was a square three-storied building of red brick, much
beaten and stained by the weather, with an ivied side, up which the
ivy grew stoutly, topping the roof in triumphant lumps. The house could
hardly be termed picturesque. Its aspect had struck many eyes as being
very much that of a red-coat sentinel grenadier, battered with service,
and standing firmly enough, though not at ease. Surrounding it was a
high wall, built partly of flint and partly of brick, and ringed all
over with grey lichen and brown spots of bearded moss, that bore
witness to the touch of many winds and rains. Tufts of pale grass,
and gilliflowers, and travelling stone-crop, hung from the wall, and
driblets of ivy ran broadening to the outer ground. The royal Arms were
said to have surmounted the great iron gateway; but they had vanished,
either with the family, or at the indications of an approaching rust.
Rust defiled its bars; but, when you looked through them, the splendour
of an unrivalled garden gave vivid signs of youth, and of the taste of
an orderly, laborious, and cunning hand.
The garden was under Mrs. Fleming's charge. The joy of her love for it
was written on its lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic
passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She
cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on
a gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or
freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned
upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the
fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias,
and `Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest
daughter, at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could
last. There was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter
received the name of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space,
as it was known that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective
reading of her Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country
people are not inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for
anything. They find it as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the
midst of larger congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs.
Fleming's proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity
was openly pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance
which her labour lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced
confession of there being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was
then projected in the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a
sober appreciation of the fairness of the face.
Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden
was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had
been heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully
fed. The encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was
indicative of a moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply
her table with plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how
provided, sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated
to have fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right
in the abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said,
`Good bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and
my children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced
by foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby,
in cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers
economies consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman.
Practically it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her.
Though payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost
ones by Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main
secret for mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate
remembrance and regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she
seemed to be only always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded
in theory. Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her
children to stoutness, and but for the blindness of all people, save
artists, poets, novelists, to the grandeur of their own creations, the
inhabitants of this Kentish village might have had an enjoyable pride
in the beauty and robust grace of the young girls,--fair-haired,
black-haired girls, a kindred contrast, like fire and smoke, to look
upon. In stature, in bearing, and in expression, they were, if I may
adopt the eloquent modern manner of eulogy, strikingly above their
class. They carried erect shoulders, like creatures not ashamed of
showing a merely animal pride, which is never quite apart from the pride
of developed beauty. They were as upright as Oriental girls, whose heads
are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to the well. Dark Rhoda might
have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her Rachel. They tossed one
another their mutual compliments, drawn from the chief book of their
reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master of callisthenics
could have set them up better than their mother's receipt for making
good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their systems, had done;
nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter speaking. The
characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to be cravingly
mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by degrees they
adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly grammatical
people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in story-books,
especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the princes talk
in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves; nothing less
than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.
The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to
be seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London.
Naturally, the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they
copied out whole pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was
next to the family Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small
library. The deeds of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy
princes, were assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them
upon millers', farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought
of what manner of youth would propose to marry them became a precocious
tribulation. Rhoda, at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing
to her sister's habit of masking her own dismal internal forebodings
on the subject, under the guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad
chance.
In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model. There came
once to Squire Blancove's unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair
lady. They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow,
Mrs. Lovell by name. They looked at her all through the service, and
the lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any
distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and
often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut
her eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of
herself, as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of
grey-shot silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and
the picture she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many
ensuing years.
Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen,
and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would
allow to her. William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom
the wheels of the world went too fast:--a big man, appearing to be
difficult to kill, though deeply smitten. His cheeks bloomed in spite
of lines and stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that
never gave out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from
what they saw. Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a
mighty grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature
kind, it was her comfort to die and not to know it. This grievance was
rooted in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant. The sight of the
plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged
to his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting
prospect. “Plump 'em up, and make 'em dainty,” he advanced in
contravention of his wife's talk of bread and beef.
But he did not complain. If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled
into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would
come of having dainty children. He could not deny that bread and beef
made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were
in the habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in
the neighbourhood; so he was compelled to have recourse to secret
discontent. The attention, the time, and the trifles of money shed upon
the flower garden, were hardships easier to bear. He liked flowers,
and he liked to hear the praise of his wife's horticultural skill. The
garden was a distinguishing thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he
walked home from church among full June roses, he felt the odour of them
to be so like his imagined sensations of prosperity, that the deception
was worth its cost. Yet the garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow.
His wife had once wounded his vanity. The massed vanity of a silent man,
when it does take a wound, desires a giant's vengeance; but as one can
scarcely seek to enjoy that monstrous gratification when one's wife is
the offender, the farmer escaped from his dilemma by going apart into a
turnip-field, and swearing, with his fist outstretched, never to forget
it. His wife had asked him, seeing that the garden flourished and the
farm decayed, to yield the labour of the farm to the garden; in fact, to
turn nurseryman under his wife's direction. The woman could not see
that her garden drained the farm already, distracted the farm, and most
evidently impoverished him. She could not understand, that in permitting
her, while he sweated fruitlessly, to give herself up to the occupation
of a lady, he had followed the promptings of his native kindness, and
certainly not of his native wisdom. That she should deem herself `best
man' of the two, and suggest his stamping his name to such an opinion
before the world, was an outrage.
Mrs. Fleming was failing in health. On that plea, with the solemnity
suited to the autumn of her allotted days, she persuaded her husband to
advertise for an assistant, who would pay a small sum of money to learn
sound farming, and hear arguments in favour of the Corn Laws. To please
her, he threw seven shillings away upon an advertisement, and laughed
when the advertisement was answered, remarking that he doubted much
whether good would come of dealings with strangers. A young man, calling
himself Robert Armstrong, underwent a presentation to the family. He
paid the stipulated sum, and was soon enrolled as one of them. He was of
a guardsman's height and a cricketer's suppleness, a drinker of water,
and apparently the victim of a dislike of his species; for he spoke of
the great night-lighted city with a horror that did not seem to be an
estimable point in him, as judged by a pair of damsels for whom the
mysterious metropolis flew with fiery fringes through dark space, in
their dreams.
In other respects, the stranger was well thought of, as being handsome
and sedate. He talked fondly of one friend that he had, an officer in
the army, which was considered pardonably vain. He did not reach to the
ideal of his sex which had been formed by the sisters; but Mrs. Fleming,
trusting to her divination of his sex's character, whispered a mother's
word about him to her husband a little while before her death.
It was her prayer to heaven that she might save a doctor's bill. She
died, without lingering illness, in her own beloved month of June; the
roses of her tending at the open window, and a soft breath floating up
to her from the garden. On the foregoing May-day, she had sat on the
green that fronted the iron gateway, when Dahlia and Rhoda dressed the
children of the village in garlands, and crowned the fairest little one
queen of May: a sight that revived in Mrs. Fleming's recollection the
time of her own eldest and fairest taking homage, shy in her white smock
and light thick curls. The gathering was large, and the day was of
the old nature of May, before tyrannous Eastwinds had captured it and
spoiled its consecration. The mill-stream of the neighbouring mill ran
blue among the broad green pastures; the air smelt of cream-bowls
and wheaten loaves; the firs on the beacon-ridge, far southward, over
Fenhurst and Helm villages, were transported nearer to see the show,
and stood like friends anxious to renew acquaintance. Dahlia and Rhoda
taught the children to perceive how they resembled bent old beggar-men.
The two stone-pines in the miller's grounds were likened by them to Adam
and Eve turning away from the blaze of Paradise; and the saying of
one receptive child, that they had nothing but hair on, made the
illustration undying both to Dahlia and Rhoda.
The magic of the weather brought numerous butterflies afield, and one
fiddler, to whose tuning the little women danced; others closer upon
womanhood would have danced likewise, if the sisters had taken partners;
but Dahlia was restrained by the sudden consciousness that she was under
the immediate observation of two manifestly London gentlemen, and she
declined to be led forth by Robert Armstrong. The intruders were youths
of good countenance, known to be the son and the nephew of Squire
Blancove of Wrexby Hall. They remained for some time watching the scene,
and destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like many days of gaiety, the
Gods consenting, this one had its human shadow. There appeared on
the borders of the festivity a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby
cottager, who had left her home and but lately returned to it, with a
spotted name. No one addressed her, and she stood humbly apart. Dahlia,
seeing that every one moved away from her, whispering with satisfied
noddings, wished to draw her in among the groups. She mentioned the name
of Mary Burt to her father, supposing that so kind a man would not fail
to sanction her going up to the neglected young woman. To her surprise,
her father became violently enraged, and uttered a stern prohibition,
speaking a word that stained her cheeks. Rhoda was by her side, and she
wilfully, without asking leave, went straight over to Mary, and stood
with her under the shadow of the Adam and Eve, until the farmer sent a
messenger to say that he was about to enter the house. Her punishment
for the act of sinfulness was a week of severe silence; and the farmer
would have kept her to it longer, but for her mother's ominously growing
weakness. The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident. They
could not fathom the meaning of their father's unkindness, coarseness,
and indignation. Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly. The
Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so
after the Atonement? By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild
spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their
Christianity toward offending and repentant women.