A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the
wheels of Victor’s brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on
the walk Westward. Who knew?--who did not know! He had a torpid
consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the
great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had
caught its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He
dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain the power they could stir.
‘The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?’
Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement,
thought ‘there was the look of it.’
‘Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey!--but Dartrey’s an honest fellow
with women. But men are men. Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit
is on her. A little woman-pretty little woman!--wife to Jacob Blathenoy!
She mustn’t at her age have any close choosing--under her hand. And
Dartrey’s just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.’
‘With a husband who’d reduce Minerva’s to tinder, after a month of him!’
‘He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.’ Blathenoy
had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor
Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess--in the usual honeymoon
boasting of a windbag with his bride--wheezed the foul gossip, to hide
his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird.
Probably so. But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared
him. Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the
Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and
unscratched folio sheets on the subject:--as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had
dropped venom.
‘One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?’
‘Dartrey won’t be back for a week or so; and they’re off to Switzerland,
after the dinner they give. I heard from him this morning; one of the
Clanconans is ill.
‘Lucky. But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same “arid
bore,” as old Colney says.’
‘A domestic simoom,’ said Fenellan, booming it: and Victor had a
shudder.
‘Awful thing, marriage, to some women! We chain them to that domestic
round; most of them haven’t the means of independence or a chance of
winning it; and all that’s open to them, if they’ve made a bad cast for
a mate--and good Lord! how are they to know before it’s too late!--they
haven’t a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and
“drape in blight,” as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional
marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!--if he means it. You
never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony.
It’s donkey nonsense, eh?’
‘The very hee-haw of nonsense,’ Fenellan acquiesced.
‘Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,’ Victor
said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal
yoke. ‘They’re donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell!
Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.’
Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness
of his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.
Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his
hand warmly, by way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at
Fenellan’s perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he
stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney’s views upon
the great Marriage Question were the ‘very hee-haw of nonsense.’ They
were not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were
for discussion; there was no bray about them. He could not feel them to
be absurd while Mrs. Burman’s tenure of existence barred the ceremony.
Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan’s talk; calling him, Dear
old boy, to soften the slight.
Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to
be uninformed of her hero’s release; and that was in the order of happy
accidents. She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it
radiated. But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. ‘The good ladies
are ready to receive our girl.’
Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the
idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command
of her.
The note, signed D. and V., was shown.
There stood the words. And last night she had been partly of the opinion
of Colney Durance. She sank down among the unreasoning abject;--not this
time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
under compression. For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should
go. This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped
her mental inquiries.
She begged for a week’s delay; ‘before the parting’; as her dear old
silly mother’s pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and
he smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in
error to expect Dartrey’s return to town before the close of a week; and
then wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who
ran risk of disturbing their daughters’ bosoms with regard to particular
heroes married or not. Dartrey attracted women: he was one of the men
who do it without effort. Victor’s provident mind blamed the mother for
the indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them. But Dudley had
been making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a
Spring flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi
was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons. One could
see, his questions and other little points revealed, that he had a
certain lover’s dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor
understood the feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man
elsewhere in another; though she may know she never can wed the man, and
has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in
this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness, stripped against
all the winds that blow; skinless at times. One gets up a sympathy for
the poor shy dependent shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was young
Dudley waking, visibly becoming bolder. As in the flute-duets, he gained
fire from concert. The distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two
miles and a quarter.
Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which
embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn’s on the last of the
days, when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own
composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from
rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it
pass: eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he doated am the
surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation. The girl’s little
French ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they
were imitative. If Strauscher let this pass... Victor saw Grand Opera
somewhere to follow; England’s claim to be a creative musical nation
vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.
He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn’s; and he imagined a hearing of
his Fredi’s Opera, and her godmother’s delight in it; the once famed
Sanfredini’s consent to be the diva at a rehearsal, and then her
compelling her hidalgo duque to consent further: an event not
inconceivable. For here was downright genius; the flowering aloe of the
many years in formation; and Colney admitted the song to have a streak
of genius; though he would pettishly and stupidly say, that our modern
newspaper Press is able now to force genius for us twenty or so to the
month, excluding Sundays-our short pauses for the incubation of it. Real
rare genius was in that song, nothing forced; and exquisite melody; one
of those melodies which fling gold chains about us and lead us off, lead
us back into Eden. Victor hummed at bars of it on the drive homeward.
His darlings had to sing it again in the half-lighted drawing-room.
The bubble-happiness of the three was vexed only by tidings heard from
Colney during the evening of a renewed instance of Skepsey’s misconduct.
Priscilla Graves had hurried away to him at the close of Mr. John
Cormyn’s Concert, in consequence; in grief and in sympathy. Skepsey was
to appear before the magistrate next morning, for having administered
physical chastisement to his wife during one of her fits of drunkenness.
Colney had seen him. His version of the story was given, however, in the
objectionable humorous manner: none could gather from it of what might
be pleaded for Skepsey. His ‘lesson to his wife in the art of pugilism,
before granting her Captain’s rank among the Defensive Amazons of Old
England,’ was the customary patent absurdity. But it was odd, that
Skepsey always preferred his appeal for help to Colney Durance. Nesta
proposed following Priscilla that night. She had hinted her wish, on the
way home; she was urgent, beseeching, when her father lifted praises
of her: she had to start with her father by the train at seven in the
morning, and she could not hear of poor Skepsey for a number of hours.
She begged a day’s delay; which would enable her, she said, to join them
in dining at the Blachingtons’, and seeing dear Lakelands again. ‘I was
invited, you know.’ She spoke in childish style, and under her eyes she
beheld her father and mother exchange looks. He had a fear that Nataly
might support the girl’s petition. Nataly read him to mean, possible
dangers among the people at Wrensham. She had seemed hesitating. After
meeting Victor’s look, her refusal was firm. She tried to make it one of
distress for the use of the hard word to her own dear girl. Nesta spied
beneath.
But what was it? There was a reason for her going! She had a right to
stay, and see and talk with Captain Dartrey, and she was to be deported!
So now she set herself to remember little incidents at Creckholt:
particularly a conversation in a very young girl’s hearing, upon Sir
Humphrey and Lady Pottil’s behaviour to the speakers, her parents. She
had then, and she now had, an extraordinary feeling, as from a wind
striking upon soft summer weather off regions of ice, that she was in
her parents’ way. How? The feeling was irrational; it could give her
no reply, or only the multitudinous which are the question violently
repeated. She slept on it.
She and her father breakfasted by the London birds’ first twitter.
They talked of Skepsey. She spoke of her going as exile. ‘No,’ said he,
‘you’re sure to meet friends.’
Her cheeks glowed. It came wholly through the suddenness of the
recollection, that the family-seat of one among the friends was near the
Wells.
He was allowed to fancy, as it suited him to fancy, that a vivid secret
pleasure laid the colour on those ingenuous fair cheeks.
‘A solitary flute for me, for a month! I shall miss my sober comrade:
got the habit of duetting: and he’s gentle, bears with me.’
Tears lined her eyelids. ‘Who would not be, dearest dada! But there is
nothing to bear except the honour.’
‘You like him? You and I always have the same tastes, Fredi.’
Now there was a reddening of the sun at the mount; all the sky aflame.
How could he know that it was not the heart in the face! She reddened
because she had perused his wishes; had detected a scheme striking off
from them, and knew a man to be the object of it; and because she had at
the same time the sense of a flattery in her quick divination; and she
was responsively emotional, her blood virginal; often it was a tropical
lightning.
It looked like the heart doing rich painter’s work on maiden features.
Victor was naturally as deceived as he wished to be.
From his being naturally so, his remarks on Dudley had an air of
embracing him as one of the family. ‘His manner to me just hits me.’
‘I like to see him with you,’ she said.
Her father let his tongue run: ‘One of the few young men I feel
perfectly at home with! I do like dealing with a gentleman. I can
confide in a gentleman: honour, heart, whatever I hold dearest.’
There he stopped, not too soon. The girl was mute, fully agreeing,
slightly hardening. She had a painful sense of separation from her dear
Louise. And it was now to be from her mother as well: she felt the pain
when kissing her mother in bed. But this was moderated by the prospect
of a holiday away out of reach of Mr. Barmby’s pursuing voice, whom her
mother favoured: and her mother was concealing something from her;
so she could not make the confidante of her mother. Nataly had no
forewarnings. Her simple regrets filled her bosom. All night she had
been taking her chastisement, and in the morning it seemed good to her,
that she should be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity of having
relatives.
For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the succeeding hours, the
girl had not spoken of any visit her mother was to pay to the Duvidney
ladies or they to her. Latterly she had not alluded to her mother’s
family. It might mean, that the beloved and dreaded was laying finger
on a dark thing in the dark; reading syllables by touch; keeping silence
over the communications to a mind not yet actively speculative, as it is
a way with young women. ‘With young women educated for the market, to
be timorous, consequently secretive, rather snaky,’ Colney Durance had
said. Her Nesta was not one of the ‘framed and glazed’ description,
cited by him, for an example of the triumph of the product; ‘exactly
harmonious with the ninny male’s ideal of female innocence.’ No; but
what if the mother had opened her heart to her girl? It had been of late
her wish or a dream, shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go
through that furnace. Her knowledge of Victor’s objection, restrained
an impulse that had not won spring enough to act against his counsel or
vivify an intelligence grown dull in slavery under him, with regard
to the one seeming right course. The adoption of it would have wounded
him--therefore her. She had thought of him first; she had also thought
of herself, and she blamed herself now. She went so far as to think,
that Victor was guilty of the schemer’s error of counting human
creatures arithmetically, in the sum, without the estimate of
distinctive qualities and value here and there. His return to a
shivering sensitiveness on the subject of his girl’s enlightenment
‘just yet,’ for which Nataly pitied and loved him, sharing it, with
humiliation for doing so, became finally her excuse. We must have some
excuse, if we would keep to life.
Skepsey’s case appeared in the evening papers. He confessed, ‘frankly,’
he said, to the magistrate, that, ‘acting under temporary exasperation,
he had lost for a moment a man’s proper self-command.’ He was as frank
in stating, that he ‘occupied the prisoner’s place before his Worship a
second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr. Colney
Durance, who so kindly stood by him.’ There was hilarity in the Court at
his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which
he delivered with solemnity: ‘He could only plead, not in absolute
justification--an appeal to human sentiments--the feelings of a man of
the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon
things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian
of his household beastly drunk, and destructive.’ Colney made the case
quite intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the
idiomatic in the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent.
No serious harm had been done to the woman. Skepsey was admonished and
released. His wife expressed her willingness to forgive him, now he had
got his lesson; and she hoped he would understand, that there was no
need for a woman to learn pugilism. Skepsey would have explained; but
the case was over, he was hustled out.
However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy; he followed
the couple; and in a particular evening Journal, laughable matter was
printed concerning Skepsey’s view of the pugilism to be imparted to
women for their physical-protection in extremity, and the distinction
of it from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having
objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered her; and
she was never, she said, ready to stand up to him for practice, as he
called it, except when she had taken more than he thought wholesome
for her: he had no sense. There was a squabble between them, because
he chose to scour away to his master’s office instead of conducting her
home with the honours. Nesta read the young reporter’s version, with
shrieks. She led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.
At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they were like a
pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold. She
saw but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations,
which steadily determined the warmth. On the night of the third day,
they kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.
No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in
receiving her: Victor’s child; but, as their phrase would have run,
had they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin. How
foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until
the timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
the married one of those gentlemen, to ‘divert dear Nesta.’ Every night
she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was ‘of the blood.’ She
had Victor’s animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think,
his eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that
any event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all
hazards recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means, they
preserve the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their
existence; and so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck
subjects of their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down,
scatter, dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most
vital to them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among
congregations, often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the
desperate wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr.
Stuart Rem) to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points
they must not think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds
of the pure ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense
of smell, to revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of
their intelligences.
Victor’s eloquence, Victor’s influence, Victor’s child he carried them
as a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature
of the blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned
abstract, and the child’s presence upon earth seen with the indulgence
(without the naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the
numerous offspring of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These things
pass muster from being ‘Britannically cocooned in the purple,’ says our
irreverent satirist; and the maiden ladies’ passion of devotion to ‘the
blood’ helped to blind them; but still more so did the imperious urgency
to curtain closely the night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences
upon Victor’s masterful tongue. Whence it ensued (and here is the danger
for illogical individuals as well as vast communities, who continue to
batten upon fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of
pleasure), that they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a cloak to
their conduct; and doing it, they fell into a habit of yielding to him;
they disintegrated under him; rules, principles, morality, were shaken
to some confusion. And still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced
back, more wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days of early
innocence, at the night when successfully they withstood him. They
who had doubted of the rightness of letting Victor’s girl come into
collision with two clerical gentlemen, one of whom was married,
permitted him now to bring the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and
make appointments to meet Mr. Dudley Sowerby under a roof that sheltered
a young lady, evidently the allurement to the scion of aristocracy;
of whose family Mr. Stuart Rem had spoken in the very kindling hushed
tones, proper to the union of a sacerdotal and an English citizen’s
veneration.
How would it end? And if some day this excellent Mr. Dudley Sowerby
reproached them! He could not have a sweeter bride, one more truly a
lady in education and manners; but the birth! the child’s name! Their
trouble was emitted in a vapour of interjections. Very perplexing was it
for the good ladies of strict principles to reflect, as dimly they
did, that the concrete presence of dear Nesta silenced and overcame
objections to her being upon earth. She seemed, as it were, a draught of
redoubtable Nature inebriating morality. But would others be similarly
affected? Victor might get his release, to do justice to the mother: it
would not cover the child. Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor
blood (drawn from the most ancient of original Britain’s princes), there
was also the Cantor blood for consideration; and it was old, noble,
proud. Would it be satisfied in matching itself with great wealth, a
radiant health, and the good looks of a young flower? For the sake of
the dear girl, the ladies hoped that it would; and they enlarged the
outline of their wedding present, while, in their minds, the noble
English family which could be satisfied so, was lowered, partaking of
the taint they had personally ceased to recognize.
Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them: the gentleman loved
the girl. Her love of him, had it been prominent to view, would have
stirred a feminine sigh; not more, except a feminine lecture to follow.
She was quite uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring. His ardour had no
disguise. They measured him by the favourite fiction’s heroes of their
youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to the
prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that is expected
of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for
his lady’s faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish. Mr. Dudley
Sowerby’s eye upon Nesta was really an apprentice. There is in Love’s
young season a magnanimity in the male kind. Their superior strength
and knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker and
shallower: they crown her queen; her look is their mandate. So was it
when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant
touched maidenly hearts to throb: so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby.
Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor. ‘Oh!
Fredi?’ said he; ‘admires her, no doubt; and so do I, so we all do;
she’s one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid’s darts, she belongs to the
cucumber family, and he shoots without fireing. We shall do the mischief
if we put an interdict. Don’t you remember the green days when obstacles
were the friction to light that match?’ Their pretty nod of assent
displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance: they dreamed of having
once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their nipped natures; and
dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion. Incidentally,
he named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was
calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit. A curious
effect was produced on them. Though they were not imaginatively
mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they
talked of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber. ‘Dukes
have married for less.’ Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a
Principality. Victor had supplied them with something of an apology to
the gentleman proposing to Nesta in their house.
The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the fifteenth
day of September; and that it was not known to the damsel’s parents
before the twenty-third; as they were away on an excursion in South
Tyrol:--away, flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their
envious, exiled girl; though they did not tell her of new constructions
at the London house partly causing them to fly. Subject to their
consent, she wrote, she had given hers. The letter was telegramic on the
essential point. She wrote of Mr. Barmby’s having visited Mr. Posterley
at the Wells, and she put it just as flatly. Her principal concern, to
judge by her writing, was, to know what Mr. Durance had done, during her
absence, with the group of emissary-advocates of the various tongues of
Europe on board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of their
journey to the Court of Japan.
Mr. Simeon Fenellan had written his opinion, that all these delegates of
the different European nationalities were nothing other than dupes of
a New-York Syndicate of American Humorists, not without an eye on the
mainchance; and he was sure they would be set to debate publicly, before
an audience of high-priced tickets, in the principal North American
Cities, previous to the embarcation for Japan at San Francisco. Mr.
Fenellan eulogized the immense astuteness of Dr. Gannius in taking
his daughter Delphica with him. Dr. Gannius had singled forth poor Dr.
Bouthoin for the object of his attacks; but Nesta was chiefly anxious
to hear of Delphica’s proceedings; she was immensely interested in
Delphica, and envied her; and the girl’s funny speculations over the
play of Delphica’s divers arts upon the Greek, and upon the Russian,
and upon the English curate Mr. Semhians, and upon M. Falarique--set
Gallically pluming and crowing out of an Alsace-Lorraine growl--were
clever. Only, in such a letter, they were amazing.
Nataly received it at Campiglio, when about to start for an excursion
down the Sarca Valley to Arco. Her letter of reply was delayed. One to
Victor from Dudley Sowerby, awaited them, on their return. ‘Confirms
Fredi,’ he said, showing it, and praising it as commendable, properly
fervid. She made pretence to read, she saw the words.
Her short beat of wings was over. She had joined herself with Victor’s
leap for a change, thirsting for the scenery of the white peaks in
heaven, to enjoy through his enjoyment, if her own capacity was dead:
and she had found it revive, up to some recovery of her old songful
readiness for invocations of pleasure. Escape and beauty beckoned ahead;
behind were the chains. These two letters of the one fact plucked her
back. The chained body bore the fluttering spirit: or it was the spirit
in bonds, that dragged the body. Both were abashed before the image of
her girl. Out of the riddle of her strange Nesta, one thing was clear:
she did not love the man: and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the
cup of poisonous regrets at the thought. Her girl’s heart would not
be broken. But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold to this
engagement?... It might then be worse. She dropped a plumb-line into the
young man, sounding him by what she knew of him and judged. She had to
revert to Nesta’s charm, for the assurance of his anchored attachment.
Her holiday took the burden of her trouble, and amid the beauty of a
disenchanted scene, she resumed the London incubus.
‘You told him of her being at the Wells? in the neighbourhood, Victor?’
‘Didn’t you know, my dear, the family-seat is Cronidge, two miles out
from the Wells?--and particularly pretty country.’
‘I had forgotten, if I ever heard. You will not let him be in
ignorance?’
‘My dear love, you are pale about it. This is a matter between men. I
write, thanking for the honour and so forth; and I appoint an interview;
and I show him my tablets. He must be told, necessarily. Incidents of
this kind come in their turn. If Dudley does not account himself the
luckiest young fellow in the kingdom, he’s not worthy of his good
fortune. I wish they were both here now, honeymooning among these peaks,
seeing the crescent over one, as we did last night!’
‘Have you an idea, in reading Nesta’s letter?’
‘Seems indifferent?--mere trick to hide the blushes. And I, too, I’m
interested in Delphica. Delphica and Falarique will be fine stage
business. Of course, Dr. Bouthoin and his curate!--we know what Old
England has to expect from Colney.’
‘At any rate, Mr. Durance hurts no one. You will, in your letter,
appoint the day of the interview?’
‘Hurts himself! Yes, dearest; appoint for--ten days homeward--eleventh
day from to-day. And you to Fredi: a bit of description--as you can, my
Nataly! Happy to be a dolomite, to be painted by Nataly’s pen.’
The sign is evil, when we have a vexatious ringing in the ear of some
small piece of familiar domestic chatter, and subject it to scrutiny,
hang on it, worry and magnify it. What will not creatures under sway
of the sensational life, catch at to emphasize and strengthen distaste,
until distaste shall have a semblance of reason, in the period of the
mind’s awakening to revolt! Nataly shrank from the name of dolomite,
detested the name, though the scenes regained their beauty or something
of it beneath her showery vision. Every time Victor spoke of dolomites
on the journey homeward, she had at heart an accusation of her
cowardice, her duplicity, frailty, treachery to the highest of her
worship and sole support of her endurance in the world: not much blaming
him: but the degrading view of herself sank them both. On a shifty soil,
down goes the idol. For him she could plead still, for herself she could
not.
The smell of the Channel brine inspirited her sufficiently to cast off
the fit and make it seem, in the main, a bodily depression; owing to
causes, of which she was beginning to have an apprehensive knowledge:
and they were not so fearful to her as the gloom they displaced.