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.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Ask not why, where reason never was
Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
Memory inspired by the sensations
Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
Slave of existing conventions
Startled by the criticism in laughter
The impalpable which has prevailing weight
There is little to be learnt when a little is known
They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
[The End]