Ver.10/04/01*END*
This etext was produced by Pat Castevans <patcat@ctnet.net>
and David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
RHODA FLEMING
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
RHODA FLEMING
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
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.