OF THEIR SCOURGE
Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put
a picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
Lakelands upper terrace-walk.
‘Queer little water-wagtail it is!’ And Lady Grace Halley and Miss
Graves and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the
pretty likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature
the happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a
Bewick tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day. It imbedded the
day in an idea that it had been rural.
We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of
us until such a work of binding and labelling is done. And should the
definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
Anecdotes of England’s happiest man were related, outlines of
his personal history requested. His nomination in chief among the
traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale
of his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories. Heroes conducted up Fame’s
temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau
of a final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from. Miss Priscilla Graves
now fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.
Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
Nesta. She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
the dear friend’s ear and tell her she loved her. The presence of the
German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman,
even to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise
of her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise. She bore the
national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not
heal since her country was overthrown and dismembered. Colney Durance
could excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
concentrated aim of her France. In the Gallic mind of our time, France
appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
sepulture. Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by
her speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his
talk savoured of a German. Our holding of the balance, taking two sides,
is incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body
and soul. She was of Breton blood. Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch
any thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or
gay, and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.
Nataly was not so sympathetic. Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick
at the feelings of the Celtic French. Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock;
she had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized
North, and a taste for mademoiselle’s fine breeding, with a distaste
for the singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
the commercial boor was obtrusive. She said of her to Colney, as they
watched the couple strolling by the lake below: ‘Nesta brings her out of
her frosts. I suppose it’s the presence of Dr. Schlesien. I have known
it the same after an evening of Wagner’s music.’
‘Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,’
said Colney. ‘She comes of a blood that never forgives.’
‘“Never forgives” is horrible to think of! I fancied you liked your
“Kelts,” as you call them.’
Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
coming. ‘You English won’t descend to understand what does not resemble
you. The French are in a state of feverish patriotism. You refuse to
treat them for a case of fever. They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
to be at rest!’
‘You know I am fond of them.’
‘And the Kelts, as they are called, can’t and won’t forgive injuries;
look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot. Have you heard them
talk? It happened in the year 1400: it’s alive to them as if it were
yesterday. Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
uses of cattle. The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing
than any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this
day; the crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and
denied, but they have it and betray the effects; and it’s patent in
their Journals, all over their literature. Where it’s not seen, another
blood’s at work. The Kelt won’t accept the form of slavery. Let him be
servile, supple, cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving,
he will always remember his day of manly independence and who robbed
him: he is the poetic animal of the races of modern men.’
‘You give him Pagan colours.’
‘Natural colours. He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
be kicked after a knock to the ground. Instead of asking him to forgive,
which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire. A mercantile community
guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult. However, there ‘s the secret
of him; that I respect in him. His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
doing great deeds, wins him entirely. He is an active spirit, not your
negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults, short
of ferocity, are amusing.’
‘But the fits of ferocity!’
‘They are inconscient, real fits. They come of a hot nerve. He is
manageable, sober too, when his mind is charged. As to the French
people, they are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are
packed with contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply
logical; free-thinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous,
tenacious; the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these
qualities; and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism. Below your
level, they’re above it: a paradox is at home with them!’
‘My friend, you speak seriously--an unusual compliment,’ Nataly said,
and ungratefully continued: ‘You know what is occupying me. I want your
opinion. I guess it. I want to hear--a mean thirst perhaps, and you
would pay me any number of compliments to avoid the subject; but let me
hear:--this house!’
Colney shrugged in resignation. ‘Victor works himself out,’ he replied.
‘We are to go through it all again?’
‘If you have not the force to contain him.’
‘How contain him?’
Up went Colney’s shoulders.
‘You may see it all before you,’ he said, ‘straight as the Seine
chaussee from the hill of La Roche Guyon.’
He looked for her recollection of the scene.
‘Ah, the happy ramble that year!’ she cried. ‘And my Nesta just seven.
We had been six months at Craye. Every day of our life together looks
happy to me, looking back, though I know that every day had the same
troubles. I don’t think I’m deficient in courage; I think I could
meet.... But the false position so cruelly weakens me. I am no woman’s
equal when I have to receive or visit. It seems easier to meet the worst
in life-danger, death, anything. Pardon me for talking so. Perhaps we
need not have left Craye or Creckholt...?’ she hinted an interrogation.
‘Though I am not sorry; it is not good to be where one tastes poison.
Here it may be as deadly, worse. Dear friend, I am so glad you remember
La Roche Guyon. He was popular with the dear French people.’
‘In spite of his accent.’
‘It is not so bad?’
‘And that you’ll defend!’
‘Consider: these neighbours we come among; they may have heard...’
‘Act on the assumption.’
‘You forget the principal character. Victor promises; he may have learnt
a lesson at Creckholt. But look at this house he has built. How can
I--any woman--contain him! He must have society.’
‘Paraitre!’
‘He must be in the front. He has talked of Parliament.’
Colney’s liver took the thrust of a skewer through it. He spoke as in
meditative encomium: ‘His entry into Parliament would promote himself
and family to a station of eminence naked over the Clock Tower of the
House.’
She moaned. ‘At the vilest, I cannot regret my conduct--bear what I may.
I can bear real pain: what kills me is, the suspicion. And I feel it
like a guilty wretch! And I do not feel the guilt! I should do the same
again, on reflection. I do believe it saved him. I do; oh! I do, I do.
I cannot expect my family to see with my eyes. You know them--my brother
and sisters think I have disgraced them; they put no value on my saving
him. It sounds childish; it is true. He had fallen into a terrible black
mood.’
‘He had an hour of gloom.’
‘An hour!’
‘But an hour, with him! It means a good deal.’
‘Ah, friend, I take your words. He sinks terribly when he sinks at
all.--Spare us a little while.--We have to judge of what is good in the
circumstances: I hear your reply! But the principal for me to study is
Victor. You have accused me of being the voice of the enamoured woman.
I follow him, I know; I try to advise; I find it is wisdom to submit. My
people regard my behaviour as a wickedness or a madness. I did save him.
I joined my fate with his. I am his mate, to help, and I cannot oppose
him, to distract him. I do my utmost for privacy. He must entertain.
Believe me, I feel for them--sisters and brother. And now that my
sisters are married... My brother has a man’s hardness.’
‘Colonel Dreighton did not speak harshly, at our last meeting.’
‘He spoke of me?’
‘He spoke in the tone of a brother.’
‘Victor promises--I won’t repeat it. Yes, I see the house! There appears
to be a prospect, a hope--I cannot allude to it. Craye and Creckholt may
have been some lesson to him. Selwyn spoke of me kindly? Ah, yes, it is
the way with my people to pretend that Victor has been the ruin of me,
that they may come round to family sentiments. In the same way,
his relatives, the Duvidney ladies, have their picture of the woman
misleading him. Imagine me the naughty adventuress!’--Nataly falsified
the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding: ‘I do not say I am
blameless.’ It was a concession to the circumambient enemy, of whom even
a good friend was apart, and not better than a respectful emissary. The
dearest of her friends belonged to that hostile world. Only Victor, no
other, stood with her against the world. Her child, yes; the love of her
child she had; but the child’s destiny was an alien phantom, looking at
her with harder eyes than she had vision of in her family. She did not
say she was blameless, did not affect the thought. She would have wished
to say, for small encouragement she would have said, that her case could
be pleaded.
Colney’s features were not inviting, though the expression was not
repellent. She sighed deeply; and to count on something helpful by
mentioning it, reverted to the ‘prospect’ which there appeared to be.
‘Victor speaks of the certainty of his release.’
His release! Her language pricked a satirist’s gallbladder. Colney
refrained from speaking to wound, and enjoyed a silence that did it.
‘Do you see any possibility?--you knew her,’ she said coldly.
‘Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is
bound to believe it near at hand.’
‘You don’t?’ she asked: her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for
the answer: and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the
answer herself.
He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it,
pitying the woman. ‘And you don’t,’ he said. ‘You catch at delusions,
to excuse the steps you consent to take. Or you want me to wear the
blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes. You see it as well as
I: If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at
Creckholt:--and he’ll be the first to take fright.’
‘He finds you in tears: he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to
protect “his Nataly.”’
‘No: you are unjust to him. He would fling up all:’--
‘But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire? As you please!’
She bowed to her chastisement. One motive in her consultation with him
came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in
the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him;
together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be
read by the letter of his words: and in consequence, she could bear
the lash from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an
unjustly-treated self to cherish.--But in very truth she was a woman who
loved to hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position
reduced her to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her;
she selected for counsellor him who would apply it: so far she went on
the straight way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the
mouth of a trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an
anxious hope of the reverse of what was to come and what she herself
apprehended, such as checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.
The reason being, not that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical,
but that, living at an intenser strain upon her nature than she or any
around her knew, her strength snapped, she broke down by chance there
where Colney was rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her
inconsequent if not puling sex.
She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing
chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak: she
felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her
father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of
Victor’s nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the
necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme,
and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection
of those dear to him.
At night he was particularly urgent with her for the harmonious duet in
praise of Lakelands; and plied her with questions all round and about
it, to bring out the dulcet accord. He dwelt on his choice of costly
marbles, his fireplace and mantelpiece designs, the great hall, and
suggestions for imposing and beautiful furniture; concordantly enough,
for the large, the lofty and rich of colour won her enthusiasm; but
overwhelmingly to any mood of resistance; and strangely in a man who had
of late been adopting, as if his own, a modern tone, or the social and
literary hints of it, relating to the right uses of wealth, and the duty
as well as the delight of living simply.
‘Fredi was pleased.’
‘Yes, she was, dear.’
‘She is our girl, my love. “I could live and die here!” Live, she may.
There’s room enough.’
Nataly saw the door of a covert communication pointed at in that remark.
She gathered herself for an effort to do battle.
‘She’s quite a child, Victor.’
‘The time begins to run. We have to look forward now:--I declare, it’s I
who seem the provident mother for Fredi!’
‘Let our girl wait; don’t hurry her mind to... She is happy with her
father and mother. She is in the happiest time of her life, before those
feelings distract.’
‘If we see good fortune for her, we can’t let it pass her.’
A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which
would be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden
curtain opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in
Nataly’s bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was
not his match. To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the
effort; and hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not the
anticipation of a set contest to animate the woman’s naturally valiant
heart; he was too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in
advance, fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
remembered how and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married
sister, containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting. An
unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
world bestows on its orderly subjects.
They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
Victor Radnor’s name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it,
the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was,
that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving
in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness. She was frigid
because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power
would never have struck so meanly. But the mainspring of the feeling
in an almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of
retrospective physical distaste on Victor’s part;--hard to keep from a
short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant
male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness,
to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman’s unspoken pleading ideas
of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of
Nature.
Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could
argue her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where
women under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do
deliver their minds. She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature
against the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of
revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who
was designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed
them and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself
holy--she had Nature’s logic, Nature’s voice, for self-defence. It was
eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
feel elementally. The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals. But the remembrance
of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor
were one at heart. The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and
a thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
abyss.
Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a
woman blindfold to follow his lead. But no; we may be rebels against
our time and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.
Nataly’s untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to
plead for her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of
a young man of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially
insurgent-stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come. The
Nature upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled. Pitiable
to reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in
a tolerating country! How was the young man to be warned? How, under the
happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family! And such a family, if
consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money. It
was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord’s. Humiliation hung
on the scheme; it struck to scorching in the contemplation of it. And it
darkened her reading of Victor’s character.
She did not ask for the specification of a ‘good fortune that might
pass’; wishing to save him from his wonted twists of elusiveness, and
herself with him from the dread discussion it involved upon one point.
‘The day was pleasant to all, except perhaps poor mademoiselle,’ she
said.
‘Peridon should have come?’
‘Present or absent, his chances are not brilliant, I fear.’
‘And Pempton and Priscy!’
‘They are growing cooler!’
‘With their grotesque objections to one another’s habits at table!’
‘Can we ever hope to get them over it?’
‘When Priscy drinks Port and Pempton munches beef, Colney says.’
‘I should say, when they feel warmly enough to think little of their
differences.’
‘Fire smoothes the creases, yes; and fire is what they’re both wanting
in. Though Priscy has Concert-pathos in her voice:--couldn’t act a bit!
And Pempton’s ‘cello tones now and then have gone through me--simply
from his fiddle-bow, I believe. Don’t talk to me of feeling in a couple,
within reach of one another and sniffing objections.--Good, then, for a
successful day to-day so far?’
He neared her, wooing her; and she assented, with a franker smile than
she had worn through the day.
The common burden on their hearts--the simple discussion to come of the
task of communicating dire actualities to their innocent Nesta--was laid
aside.