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.