Armandine did her wonders. There is not in the wide range of the Muses
a more responsive instrument than man to his marvellous cook; and if
his notes were but as flowing as his pedals are zealous, we should be
carried on the tale of the enthusiasm she awakened, away from the rutted
highroad, where History now thinks of tightening her girdle for an
accelerated pace.
The wonders were done: one hundred and seventy guests plenteously fed
at tables across the great Concert Hall, down a length of the
conservatory-glass, on soups, fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under
play of creative sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness;
every dish, one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to be your
partner, instead of passively submitting to the eye of appetite,
consenting to the teeth, as that rather melancholy procession of the
cold, resembling established spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will
appear to do. Whether Armandine had the thought or that she simply acted
in conformity with a Frenchwoman’s direct good sense, we do require to
smell a sort of animation in the meats we consume. We are still perhaps
traceably related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs,
who betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished
a palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we
young-oldsters cherish the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of
the vanquished in it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.
The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out
a breath to meet us. Victor’s crowded saloon-carriage was one voice
of eulogy, to raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting
over Wrensham Station at the start Londonward. How had she managed? We
foolishly question the arts of magicians.
Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is
half a century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the
display of slaughtered herds and their devourers. He had picked out
his vegetable and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them
uncontaminated; enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was,
that he did not complain. When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in
wrath at him for systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on
the maceration of his animal part, he put on his martyr’s pride, which
assumed a perfect contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing
systems: he was drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered
our animal part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that
much of the immorality of the world was due to the present excessive
indulgence in meats. ‘Not in drink?’ Miss Graves inquired. ‘No,’ he said
boldly; ‘not equally; meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking
life--of fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad
blood made: cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be
looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that
pass. I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly,
or at least on the morrow.’
‘Paid by the drunkard’s wife, you should say.’
‘Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the
least-generous of the vices.’
Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare,
that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
sex. They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another’s practises;
they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of
his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were
baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.
He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of
bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves
Vikings.
Nataly interposed. She was vexed with him. He let his eyelids drop: but
the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English,
could not be resisted. Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small
annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr.
John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken
if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a
destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses
he prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at
patients treated as horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the
smoke of tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly
denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his
friend caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to protect the admirer of
her beloved Louise. Her subsiding young excitement of the day set her
Boating on that moony melancholy in Mr. Peridon.
No one could understand the grounds for Colney’s more than usual
waspishness. He trotted out the fulgent and tonal Church of the Rev.
Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that
of Dudley Sowerby’s family; maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar
with Fenellan, ending in a snarl and a shout. Victor said to him: ‘Yes,
here, as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you’ve staggered
that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too; and I
don’t know how many besides. What the pleasure of it can be, I can’t
guess.’
‘Nor I,’ said Fenellan, ‘but I’ll own I feel envious; like the girl
among a family of boys I knew, who were all of them starved in their
infancy by a miserly father, that gave them barely a bit of Graves to
eat and not a drop of Pempton to drink; and on the afternoon of his
funeral, I found them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up,
walking on their hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me,
that her brothers were able so to send the little blood they had in
their bodies to their brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it,
happy, and empowered to deal with the problems of the universe; as they
couldn’t on their legs; but she, poor thing, was forbidden to do the
same! And I’m like her. I care for decorum too much to get the brain
to act on Colney’s behaviour; but I see it enraptures him and may be
comprehensible to the topsy-turvy.’
Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney’s bag of satiric spite.
In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society,
by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor
was wearing a false face over the signification--of Jarniman’s visit
and meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed
bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature. He had a resolve to
pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain
words before the night had ended. But Fenellan took it out of him.
Victor’s show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton’s, incited
Colney to some of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary;
and the heat which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool
epigrams, will not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing him over to
the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting
spices will render an earnest simplicity distasteful. He was invited
by Nataly to come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides
personal, was moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially
benefit them. He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.
‘Work!’ Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right comprehension
of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of
literature. Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly
noticed, without a sign of the reluctance he showed when the others,
including Fenellan, excused themselves.
‘So! we’re alone?’ he said, when the door of the hall had closed
on them. He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she,
observing her mother’s look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied
yawn. She was kissed, and she tripped to her bed.
‘Now we are alone,’ Nataly said.
‘Well, dear, and the day was, you must own... ‘ he sought to trifle with
her heavy voice; but she recalled him: ‘Victor!’ and the naked anguish
in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the one he
filled.
‘Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman. You saw him, I remember. You
recollected him?--stouter than he was. In her service ever since. Well,
a little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.’
‘Victor, is she very ill?’
‘My love, don’t feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme
case: not yet: old and ill. I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment:
he had to do his errand.’
‘What? why did he come?’
‘Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears to have
outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it. But if that woman thinks
of intimidating me now--!’ His eyes brightened; he had sprung from
evasions. ‘Living in flagrant sin, she says: you and I! She will not
have it; warns me. Heard this day at noon of company at Lakelands.
Jarniman off at once. Are to live in obscurity;--you and I! if together!
Dictates from her death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.’
‘Dearest,’ Nataly pressed hand on her left breast, ‘may we not think
that she may be right?’
‘An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming herself wife when she
is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast
the healthy and vigorous! I remember old Colney’s once, in old days,
calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus. It was to me. There I
lay--see myself lying! wasting! Think what you can good of her, by all
means! From her bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside,
with the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow--what imposition
was it I practised?... flagrant sin?--it would have been an infinitely
viler.... She is the cause of suffering enough: I bear no more from her;
I’ve come to the limit. She has heard of Lakelands: she has taken one of
her hatreds to the place. She might have written, might have sent me a
gentleman, privately. No: it must be done in dramatic style-for effect:
her confidential--lawyer?--doctor?--butler! Perhaps to frighten me:--the
boy she knew, and--poor soul! I don’t mean to abuse her: but such
conduct as this is downright brutal. I laugh at it, I snap my fingers.
I can afford to despise it. Only I do say it deserves to be called
abominable.’
‘Victor, has she used a threat?’
‘Am I brought to listen to any of her threats!--Funny thing, I ‘m
certain that woman never can think of me except as the boy she knew. I
saw her first when she was first a widow. She would keep talking to me
of the seductions of the metropolis--kept informing me I was a young
man... shaking her head. I ‘ve told you. She--well, I know we are
mixtures, women as well as men. I can, I hope, grant the same--I believe
I can--allowances to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of
using one sense: though I won’t give Colney his footing; there’s a
better way of reading us. I hold fast to Nature. No violation of Nature,
my good Colney! We can live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that
happiness was meant for us:--just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise all’s
wrong. There’s the right answer to Colney! But when a woman like
that .... and marries a boy: well, twenty-one--not quite that: and an
innocent, a positive innocent--it may seem incredible, after a term of
school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly understand it myself when I
look back. Marries him! And then sets to work to persecute him, because
he has blood in his veins, because he worships beauty; because he seeks
a real marriage, a real mate. And, I say it! let the world take its own
view, the world is wrong! because he preferred a virtuous life to the
kind of life she would, she must--why, necessarily!--have driven him to,
with a mummy’s grain of nature in his body. And I am made of flesh, I
admit it.’
‘Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living at Lakelands.’
‘Pray, don’t speak excitedly, my love,’ he replied to the woman whose
tones had been subdued to scarce more than waver. ‘You see how I meet
it: water off a duck’s back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a
Hindoo! I despise it hardly worth contempt;--But, come: our day was
a good one. Fenellan worked well. Old Colney was Colney Durance, of
course. He did no real mischief.’
‘And you will not determine to enter Lakelands--not yet, dear?’ said
Nataly.
‘My own girl, leave it all to me.’
‘But, Victor, I must, must know.’
‘See the case. You have lots of courage. We can’t withdraw. Her
intention is mischief. I believe the woman keeps herself alive for it:
we’ve given her another lease!--though it can only be for a very short
time; Themison is precise; Carling too. If we hold back--I have great
faith in Themison--the woman’s breath on us is confirmed. We go down,
then; complete the furnishing, quite leisurely; accept--listen--accept
one or two invitations: impossible to refuse!--but they are
accepted!--and we defy her: a crazy old creature: imagines herself the
wife of the ex-Premier, widow of Prince Le Boo, engaged to the Chinese
Ambassador, et caetera. Leave the tussle with that woman to me. No, we
don’t repeat the error of Crayc Farm and Creckholt. And here we
have stout friends. Not to speak of Beaver Urmsing: a picture of Old
Christmas England! You took to him?--must have taken to Beaver Urmsing!
The Marigolds! And Sir Rodwell and Lady Blachington are altogether
above the mark of Sir Humphrey and Lady Pottil, and those half and half
Mountneys. There’s a warm centre of home in Lakelands. But I know my
Nataly: she is thinking of our girl. Here is the plan: we stand our
ground: my dear soul won’t forsake me only there’s the thought of Fredi,
in the event... improbable enough. I lift Fredi out of the atmosphere
awhile; she goes to my cousins the Duvidney ladies.’
Nataly was hit by a shot. ‘Can you imagine it, Victor?’
‘Regard it as done.’
‘They will surely decline!’
‘Their feeling for General Radnor is a worship.’
‘All the more...?’
‘The son inherits it. He goes to them personally. Have you ever known me
personally fail? Fredi stays at Moorsedge for a month or two. Dorothea
and Virginia Duvidney will give her a taste of a new society; good for
the girl. All these little shiftings can be turned to good. Meantime, I
say, we stand our ground: but you are not to be worried; for though we
have gone too far to recede, we need not and we will not make the entry
into Lakelands until--you know: that is, auspiciously, to suit you in
every way. Thus I provide to meet contingencies. What one may really
fancy is, that the woman did but threaten. There’s her point of view to
be considered: silly, crazy; but one sees it. We are not sure that she
struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt. I wonder she never wrote. She was
frightened, when she came to manage her property, of signing her name to
anything. Absurd, that sending of Jarniman! However, it’s her move; we
make a corresponding disposition of our chessmen.’
‘And I am to lose my Nesta for a month?’ Nataly said, after catching
here and there at the fitful gleams of truce or comfort dropped from his
words. And simultaneously, the reproach of her mind to her nature for
again and so constantly yielding to the domination of his initiative:
unable to find the words, even the ideas, to withstand him,--brought
big tears. Angry at herself both for the internal feebleness and the
exhibition of it, she blinked and begged excuse. There might be nothing
that should call her to resist him. She could not do much worse than
she had done to-day. The reflection, that to-day she had been actually
sustained by the expectation of a death to come, diminished her estimate
of to-morrow’s burden on her endurance, in making her seem a less
criminal woman, who would have no such expectation: which was virtually
a stab at a fellow creature’s future. Her head was acute to work in the
direction of the casuistries and the sensational webs and films. Facing
Victor, it was a block.
But the thought came: how could she meet those people about Lakelands,
without support of the recent guilty whispers! She said coldly, her
heart shaking her: ‘You think there has been a recovery?’
‘Invalids are up and down. They are--well, no; I should think she dreads
the...’ he kept ‘surgeon’ out of hearing. ‘Or else she means this for
the final stroke: “though I’m lying here, I can still make him feel.”
That, or--poor woman--she has her notions of right and wrong.’
‘Could we not now travel for a few weeks, Victor?’
‘Certainly, dear; we will, after we have kept our engagements to dine--I
accepted--with the Blathenoys, the Blachingtons, Beaver Urmsing.’
Nataly’s vision of the peaceful lost little dairy cottage swelled to
brilliance, like the large tear at the fall; darkening under her present
effort to comprehend the necessity it was for him to mix and be foremost
with the world. Unable to grasp it perfectly in mind, her compassionate
love embraced it: she blamed herself, for being the obstruction to him.
‘Very well,’ she said on a sigh. ‘Then we shall not have to let our girl
go from us?’
‘Just a few weeks. In the middle of dinner, I scribbled a telegram to
the Duvidneys, for Skepsey to take.’
‘Speaking of Nesta?’
‘Of my coming to-morrow. They won’t stop me. I dine with them, sleep at
the Wells; hotel for a night. We are to be separated for a night.’
She laid her hand in his and gave him a passing view of her face: ‘For
two, dear. I am... that man’s visit--rather shaken: I shall have a
better chance of sleeping if I know I am not disturbing you.’
She was firm; and they kissed and parted. Each had an unphrased
speculation upon the power of Mrs. Burman to put division between them.