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.