A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner. But the
surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at
his watch, were not so profound as Fenellan’s, on finding himself
exchangeing the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison.
His friend’s rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was
known: Fenellan’s wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished
him again, as that he should be called upon again to wonder at his
astonishment. He did; and he observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly:
aided by dropping remarks. Before the evening was over, he gathered
enough of the facts, and had to speculate only on the designs. Dr.
Themison had received a visit from the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor
concerning her state of health. At an interview with the lady, laughter
greeted him; he was confused by her denial of the imputation of a single
ailment: but she, to recompose him, let it be understood, that she was
anxious about her husband’s condition, he being certainly overworked;
and the husband’s visit passed for a device on the part of the wife. She
admitted a willingness to try a change of air, if it was deemed good
for her husband. Change of air was prescribed to each for both. ‘Why not
drive to Paris?’ the doctor said, and Victor was taken with the phrase.
He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by
the sea, on the South coast. Which of her maladies might be in the
ascendant, he did not know. He knew little. He fancied that Dr. Themison
was unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
private affairs. What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison? He
treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could
be expected to impose upon her conduct. Fenellan appreciated his own
discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may
be put, and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective
reflection to ensue, that he had not done anything. It disposed him
to think a happy passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.
We should let Fortune perform her part at the wheel in working out her
ends, should we not?--for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are
thwarting her if we stretch out a hand. And with the range of enjoyments
possessed by Victor, why this unceasing restlessness? Why, when we are
not near drowning, catch at apparent straws, which may be instruments
having sharp edges? Themison, as Mrs. Burman’s medical man, might tell
the lady tales that would irritate her bag of venom.
Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast
over his negligent hedonism by Victor’s boiling pressure, drove him
into the seat of judgement. As a consequence, he was rather a dull
table-guest in the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked
to anticipate high entertainment from him. He did nothing to bridge the
crevasse and warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal
intentionally to draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of
one fair member of a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed
establishment of our chain-mail marriage-tie. An anecdote of immediate
diversion was wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating
upon whether the doctor knew of a cupboard locked. So that Dr. Themison
was carried on by Lady Grace Halley’s humourous enthusiasm for the
subject to dilate and discuss and specify, all in the irony of a
judicial leaning to the side of the single-minded social adventurers,
under an assumed accord with his audience; concluding: ‘So there’s an
end of Divorce.’
‘By the trick of multiplication,’ Fenellan, now reassured, was content
to say. And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
women being present.
Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by
Mr. Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue. As regarded her
personal feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about
her to keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one
of its culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from
an infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
mother’s lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind’s pudency
in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much. Here
was the mother’s dilemma: her girl--Victor’s girl, as she had to think
in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off
the table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific
heights of surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful
healthiness brought her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice
received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a
seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal
evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here
and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in
great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of
anguish, how witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent
creature shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a
flameful soul, as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very
princeliest of men in gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.
And the provident mother knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his
wife.
Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
her father’s child.
At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
partook of the French mother, Nesta’s Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly
nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast
of Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful
serenader, that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their
performances, and knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious
show; a sciential rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern
circles as Eve’s own old deuce from Eden’s garden whereupon, opportunity
inviting, both the fool and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of
insular eulogy, and the sham one, are in a perilous pass.
Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly
amid a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings;
when vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming
its existence with tableau and trumpet. Nataly encountered her girl’s
questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy. The questions had soon
ceased. Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to
be learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only
will keep the little out. Only stupidity will suppose that it can be
done for the livelier young. English mothers forethoughtful for their
girls, have to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble
Old England, that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things,
which can be had but in semblance under the conditions allowed by
laziness to subsist, and so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to
worship in the concrete an hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract. Nataly
could smuggle or confiscate here and there a newspaper; she could not
interdict or withhold every one of them, from a girl ardent to be in
the race on all topics of popular interest: and the newspapers are
occasionally naked savages; the streets are imperfectly garmented even
by day; and we have our stumbling social anecdotist, our spot-mouthed
young man, our eminently silly woman; our slippery one; our slimy one,
the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary the maid and the footman
William. A vigilant mother has to contend with these and the like in an
increasing degree. How best?
There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated. The girl’s
intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it. Since, as he argued,
we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.
Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences. Besides he was a
bachelor; therefore but a theorist. And his illustrations of his
theory were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to
consume, in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The
satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly
had excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with
them then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it
seemed painfully possible to be sowing in the girl’s mind something
like the reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a
rebelliousness partly or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly’s chief
and her appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
good promise in the moral department. She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they
see, to, promise a future stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley
Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
naughtiness on earth.
Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of
the young of the sex. Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome
for girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is
a fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic
innocence is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current
human life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in
the newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless
we cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when
their adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom,
is harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
English girls! He was one of the many men to whose minds women come
in pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves. Like his
numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
exclaimed. He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father’s
running counter to love. Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants. But
love was unknown to the girl.
Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor’s
traditional hospitality. Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: ‘Lady
Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital! Just
three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes. It’s the drive
we want. Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour
at night and we’re sure of sleep.’ It had a sweet simple air, befitting
him; as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children. For
travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of
the child’s inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt. That is
the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily
chase. Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival.
She enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased
to show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands. Her only regret was
on account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because
of happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that
his bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
Continent. Fenellan reported Colney to be ‘busy in the act of distilling
one of his Prussic acid essays.’ Fenellan would have jumped to go. He
informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
at periods ‘fearfully necrological! Inexplicably, he was not invited.
Did it mean, that he was growing dull? He looked inside instead of out,
and lost the clue.
His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well
as Colney been excluded. Two carriages and a cab conveyed the
excursionists, as they merrily called themselves, to the terminus.
They were Victor’s guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of
the nipper reckonings which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss.
Fenellan’s enviousness drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter
jumped to the seat beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles
and Mr. Sowerby facing them. Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind,
heard Nesta’s laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming
little girls, that laugh at nothings. She questioned Fenellan.
‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.’
She smiled: ‘And who are in the cab?’
‘Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin. Those two
would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the
way to the station. Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through
the body. They’re a fabulous couple.’
Victor cut him short. ‘I deny that those two are absurd.’
‘And Catkin’s toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.’
Nataly strongly denied it. Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
withering breath they dreaded.
Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with
a pitchfork’s exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles
in the principles of each. The pair were offending the amatory corner in
the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities,
except by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of
Miss Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge. She wondered
at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
tribulation-bell. Fenellan’s graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the
one most wretched light is Inebriation’s nose; and of the vegetarian
violoncello’s horror at his vision of the long procession of the
flocks and herds into his lady’s melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and
delighted her antipathy. She was amused to transports at the station, on
hearing Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: ‘No, I carry no
instrument.’ The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
forgotten when it sounded.
Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
under Victor’s ear: ‘Where are those two?’
‘Bid me select the couple,’ said he.
She rejoined: ‘Silly man’; and sleepily gave him her hand for good
night, and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued
junction by saying more than he intended: ‘If they come to an
understanding!’
‘Plain enough on one side.’
‘You think it suitable?’
‘Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.’ ‘This is really
my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.’
‘Go on.’
‘How?’
‘Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic.’
‘I can hate.’
‘Not me?’
Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a
never so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots
within us both straight and far and round the corners. There you have
Nature, if you want her naked in her elements, for a text. He loved his
Nataly truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked
about at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the
chance warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so
remarkably surcharging him. But it was without kindling. The lady, the
much cooler person, did nurse a bit of flame. She had a whimsical liking
for the man who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and
it became a fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his
adventurous enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.
Women who dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk
his ball-room trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to
intoxicate them.
For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies. Nataly lay
in the cabin. She used to be where Lady Grace was lying. A sort of
pleadable, transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old
service induced him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer’s
pillow, and fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his
head to the soft mouth murmuring thanks. The women who can dare the nuit
blanche, and under stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their
thirtieth, are rare; they are precious. Nataly nevertheless was approved
for guarding her throat from the nightwind. And a softer southerly
breath never crossed Channel! The very breeze he had wished for! Luck
was with him.
Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise. Mr. Sowerby in
passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary. Once
he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass
at the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native
land, it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was
very beautiful.
‘He speaks grammatical French,’ Nesta commented on his achievement. ‘He
contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,’ mademoiselle rejoined.
Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be near these ladies, and
he passed them but once. His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
notorious. Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the
man who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales. And say, that she
is uprooted;--he does but roll a log. Mr. Peridon’s efforts to perfect
himself in the French tongue touched her.
A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
greying. Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.
The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
refuge on any far fisher-sail.
Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed. The
girl’s cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was
a languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
securest of slumbers.
Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes. He was near; and
quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him. Her look was grave,
straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis
for penetration. He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if
that young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof. Man could not be
more guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
vexation, he execrated tobacco. And ask not why, where reason never was.
Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
silvery French chimes.
Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
they had been observing every variation in it. He spoke happily of
the pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of
the excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night;
the prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of
speculation--apparently a sourness that did not exist. Nesta had a
singular notion, coming of a girl’s mingled observation and intuition,
that the impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike
him till late. Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she
remembered to have noticed the same in many small things. And it was a
pointed perception.
Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
sunlight over the waters. Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
her eyes like a string of bubbles in ascent. ‘Victor, Victor, it seems
only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
Dear French people! I share your love for France.’
‘Home of our holidays!--the “drives”; and they may be the happiest.
And fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.’
Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: ‘Sir
Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands! She understood that Lady
Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of
brine to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands. He told Sir
Rodwell the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the
hotel the impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand
the doctor’s certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to
appear, and waved it, within a step of suicide. ‘Well, to be brief, my
wife--“noble dame Anglaise,” as the man announced her on the Concert
platform, undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure
contralto voice, as you will say; with the result that there was
a perfect tumult of enthusiasm. Next day, the waiters of the hotel
presented her with a bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central
violets. It was in the Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d’outre
Manche--I think that was it?’ he asked Nataly.
‘I forget,’ said she.
He glanced at her: a cloud had risen. He rallied her, spoke of the old
Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude. She nodded
an excellent artificial brightness.
And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into
rock-caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and
will be left to emptiness again. Nataly had the intimation visiting
us when, in a decline of physical power, the mind’s ready vivacity to
conjure illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force
impelling her against it, and no hope of deviation. And this is the
featureless thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to
throw them into it to look at us.
Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and
hardly less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters,
the skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from
under the globe of fire.