THE CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master’s private room, and
entertained her during his master’s absence. He had buried his wife,
he said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one
shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,
to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation
for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking
the acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his
hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
fare.
A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman’s
bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at
night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public
house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse ‘the ravens’
flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of
the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming
into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer
is not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone. Thinking which,
he was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way:
who inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She described
him, and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she
insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions
to withdraw him from ‘that snare of Satan,’ he had accompanied her, and
he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down. But friends, or
the acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were ‘in
drink,’ and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young
man’s arm, quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the name
of Englishmen--and it was hardly much better if they pleaded
intoxication!--they were not content to tear the young man from her
grasp, they hustled her, pushed her out, dragged her in the street.
‘It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,’ said Skepsey. ‘She
had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she
did not recriminate. I was able to release her and the young man she
protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my
proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against
me were not a proper match. And of course, they jeered, but they had
the evidence, on the pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily
oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was a bigger
man; they laughed at the little one. I told them, it depended upon a
knowledge of first principles, and the power to apply them. I will not
boast, my lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down
a second time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing
but first principles put into action. I mention the incident, for the
extreme relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.’
‘So you cured your grief!’ said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his
master.
Victor’s festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the
window-sill, lamps inside.
‘Am I so welcome?’ There was a pull of emotion at her smile. ‘What with
your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come
here. He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician,
the putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the
widowed:--meant most kindly! and it’s a thousand pities women haven’t
their padded gloves.’
‘Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough. You have something to
say, I see.’
‘How do you see?’
‘Tusk, tush.’
The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked
to suit her laden look. ‘You hit it. I come from Dudley. He knows the
facts. I wish to serve you, in every way.’
Victor’s head had lifted.
‘Who was it?’
‘No enemy.’
‘Her mother. She did rightly!
‘Certainly she did,’ said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of
the thing done. ‘Oh, then she spoke to him! She has kept it from me.
For now nearly a week--six days--I’ve seen her spying for something she
expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She has not been
half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from
him, of him:--the decision, whatever it’s to be!’
‘I can’t aid you there,’ said Lady Grace. ‘He’s one of the unreadables.
He names Tuesday next week.’
‘By all means.’
‘She?’
‘Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing.
Here is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she
lives. Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical,
lives by sheer force of will--it’s a miracle of the power of a human
creature to .... I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they
can’t guess what she holds on, to keep her breath. All the happiness in
life!--if only it could benefit her. But it ‘s the cause of death to us.
Do you see, dear friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,’ he took her
hand, and held and pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to
emphasis; and having this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with
it. ‘The friend I need! You have courage. My Nataly, poor dear--she can
endure, in her quiet way. A woman of courage would take her place beside
me and compel the world to do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile
does it! She would never be beaten. Of course, we could have lived under
a bushel--stifled next to death! But I am for light, air-battle, if you
like. I want a comrade, not a--not that I complain. I respect, pity,
love--I do love her, honour: only, we want something else--courage--to
face the enemy. Quite right, that she should speak to Dudley Sowerby. He
has to know, must know; all who deal closely with us must know. But see
a moment: I am waiting to see the impediment dispersed, which puts
her at an inequality with the world: and then I speak to all whom it
concerns--not before: for her sake. How is it now? Dudley will ask...
you understand. And when I am forced to confess, that the mother,
the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is not yet in that state
herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle has crumbled
to dust! I say, probably: I have information--doctors, friends,
attendants--they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But you are
here--true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me. A woman’s hand?
Well, yes: I read by the touch of a woman’s hand:--betrays more than her
looks or her lips!’ He sank his voice. ‘I don’t talk of condoling: if
you are in grief, you know I share it.’ He kissed her hand, and laid it
on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her eyes, and
lost himself. A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say: ‘As for
guilt, if it were known... a couple of ascetics--absolutely!’ But this
was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology to his
conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one who
was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed
in enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the
thoroughbred’s contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught
the word ‘guilt,’ to hide the Philistine citizen’s lapse, by relating
historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
of it.
‘Fiddle,’ said Lady Grace. ‘The thing happened. You have now to carry it
through. You require a woman’s aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain
with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has
no aversion?’
‘Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.’
‘Good enough beginning.’ She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
heavy. ‘And if one proves to be of aid, you’ll own that a woman has her
place in the battle.’
The fair black-clad widow’s quick and singular interwreathing of the
evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind
on a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his
chin, her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.
Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct
to the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle
with the King of Terrors for the other poor harper’s half-night
capped Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the
solicitude, a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call
it a fact, to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty
youth in its coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of
the regiment absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the
cross of a track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very
much more, and which affects us at times so much less than did the
pressure of a soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On
the contrary, we triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our
pains; we commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big
fact.
The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed,
she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness
of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit
nor glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal
of them. He glowed transparently. He said: ‘You are the woman to take
a front place in the battle!’ With this woman beside him, it was a
conquered world.
Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman
had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would
have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as
bring her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her
thought of reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent
in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And
she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
superior being to direct and restrain a gambler’s hand perhaps for the
fee of a temporary pressure.
‘I may be able to help a little--I hope!’ she fetched a breath to say,
while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
inheritance of property in stocks and shares.
Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
projects he entertained:--Parliament! ‘But I have only to mention it at
home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.’
He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.
‘You succeed in everything you do,’ said she, and she cordially believed
it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.
‘I can’t consent to fail, it’s true, when my mind is on a thing,’ Victor
rejoined.
He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.
These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though
she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him
a grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how
greatly relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the
capturing intrepidity.
‘I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?’ she suggested.
‘At any hour he pleases to appoint.’
‘A visit signifies...’
‘Whatever it signifies!’
‘I’m thinking of the bit of annoyance.’
‘To me? Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.’
Her smile was flatteringly bright. ‘By the way, keep your City people
close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,’ she said.
‘At home?’
‘Better. Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.
There’s no drawing back now. And I will meet them.’
She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.
But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.
The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor stated the figures; he
saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top
of them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had
her experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.
Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.
Compared with other players, this man was gifted.
Victor went in to Mr. Inchling’s room, and kept Inchling from speaking,
that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what.
The good fellow was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called
the wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could
not but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful. He
had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his
wife being always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think
in private--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not
originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak
of obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could
illumine to give him back splendid reflections. Inchling and his wife,
it was: because the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him,
knowing all the story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.
They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand. So it
had been.
He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and
let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had
no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls
of his room.
Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.
He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled
affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
him for gentle treatment.
‘You have not seen any one?’ she asked.
‘City people. And you, my love?’
‘Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
some friend there.’ She added, in pain of thought: ‘I have seen Dartrey.
He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects
he will have to take him to Brighton.’
‘Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!’
Her breast heaved. ‘If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
to me for a day:
‘But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
her.’
‘It is becoming imperative that I should.’
‘No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week. And I must see
Dartrey, on business, at once!’
She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had minutes to spare
before dinner, and flew. She was not inquisitive.
Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her. She had
little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint. After her interview
with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to
secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.