Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of Colney Durance,
and he ran down to Brighton, to give the exiled Nesta some taste of
her friendly London circle. The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded
gentleman had a regard for the girl. Their own, which was becoming
warmer than they liked to think, was impressed by his manner of
conversing with her. ‘Child though she was,’ he paid her the compliment
of a sober as well as a satirical review of the day’s political
matter and recent publications; and the ladies were introduced, in
a wonderment, to the damsel Delphica. They listened placidly to a
discourse upon her performances, Japanese to their understandings.
At New York, behold, another adventurous representative and advocate
of the European tongues has joined the party: Signor Jeridomani: a
philologer, of course; a politician in addition; Macchiavelli redivivus,
it seems to fair Delphica. The speech he delivers at the Syndicate
Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York Press as a
masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be the only one of the party
who has an eye for the dark. She fancies she may know a more widely
awake in the abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric
laughter over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the
concurrents are all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the
American public. Dr. Bouthoin’s eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures
his name by greatly gaping. Shall they return to their Great Britain
indignant? Patriotism, with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no
cost to the private purse, restrains them. Moreover, there is no sign of
any one of the others intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians
has done a marvel or two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up
where she can. What is painfully extraordinary to our couple, they find
in the frigid attitude of the Americans toward their ‘common tongue’;
together with the rumour of a design to despatch an American rival
emissary to Japan.
Nesta listened, inquired, commented, laughed; the ladies could not have
a doubt that she was interested and understood. She would have sketches
of scenes between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young
Germania was cleverly ingenuous indeed--a seminary Celimene; and between
Delphica and M. Mytharete, with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly
amoebaean of Homer. Dr. Gannius holds a trump card in his artless
daughter, conjecturally, for the establishment of the language of the
gutturals in the far East. He has now a suspicion, that the inventive M.
Falarique, melted down to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle
their camp by the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent
on establishing alliances; frightens the supple Signor Jeridomani to
lingual fixity; eulogizes Football, with Dr. Bouthoin; and retracts, or
modifies, his dictum upon the English, that, ‘masculine brawn they have
in their bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds’;
to exalt them, for a signally clean, if a dense, people: ‘Amousia, not
Alousia, is their enemy:’--How, when we have the noblest crop of poets?
‘You have never heartily embraced those aliens among you until you
learnt from us, that you might brag of them.’--Have they not endowed us
with the richest of languages? ‘The words of which are used by you,
as old slippers, for puns.’ Mr. Semhians has been superciliously
and ineffectively punning in foreign presences: he and his chief are
inwardly shocked by a new perception; What if, now that we have the
populace for paymaster, subservience to the literary tastes of the
populace should reduce the nation to its lowest mental level, and render
us not only unable to compete with the foreigner, but unintelligible to
him, although so proudly paid at home! Is it not thus that nations are
seen of the Highest to be devouring themselves?
‘For,’ says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, ‘this excessive and
applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile, in
your modern literature, is it ever a crop? Is it even the restorative
perishable stuff of the markets? Is it not rather your street-pavement’s
patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?’ Mr.
Semhians appeals to Delphica. ‘Genius you have,’ says she, stiffening
his neck-band, ‘genius in superabundance’:--he throttles to the
complexion of the peony:--‘perhaps criticism is wanting.’ Dr. Gannius
adds: ‘Perhaps it is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an
unrivalled splendid rabble!’
Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a
famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before
an enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages.
‘I hear,’ says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily
extending), ‘that the tickets cost ten dollars!’
There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.
Colney asked: ‘Have you seen any of our band?’
‘No,’ she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a
funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by
Dudley. A funny and a naughty reason, was it? Not so very naughty: but
it was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an
inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.
Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical
evening, as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the
ladies to bed, made them share her father’s amused view of the lamb
of the flock this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious
instrument tucked under his chin. He was a guest for the night. Dressing
in the early hour, Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon
joined him, to hear him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine.
‘These lengths of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!’ were the
satirist’s present black beast. ‘So these moneyed English shoulder
to the front place; and that is the appearance they offer to their
commercial God!’ He gazed along the miles of ‘English countenance,’
drearily laughing. Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle.
Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation: ‘Capital!’
‘Come where the shops are,’ said Nesta.
‘And how many thousand parsons have you here?’
‘Ten, I think,’ she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him
contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the Rev. Septimus; Mr.
Sowerby.
‘News of our friend of the whimpering flute?’
‘Here? no. I have to understand you!’
Colney cast a weariful look backward on the ‘regiments of Anglo-Chinese’
represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said: ‘The face of a
stopped watch!--the only meaning it has is past date.’
He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby. But it might have been an allusion
to the general view of the houses. But again, ‘the meaning of it past
date,’ stuck in her memory. A certain face close on handsome, had a
fatal susceptibility to caricature.
She spoke of her ‘exile’: wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned
over the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the reason for the long
separation from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.
They turned on to the pier.
Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her
visit to the place when she was a child:
‘“And then along the pier we sped,
And there we saw a Whale
He seemed to have a Normous Head,
And not a bit of Tail!”’
‘Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
condition rules,’ Colney said.
‘“And then we scampered on the beach,
To chase the foaming wave;
And when we ran beyond its reach
We all became more brave.”’
Colney remarked: ‘I was a poet--for once.’
A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very
enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry
of pleasure and--a silvery ‘You dear!’ at sight of Nesta; then at sight
of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
conventional. ‘We ride to-day?’
‘I shall be one,’ said Nesta.
‘It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you were absent.’
‘Till eleven, then!’
‘After my morning letter to Ned.’
She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the adieu, blushed,
blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the underone, and
passed in a discomposure.
‘The lady?’ Colney asked.
‘She is--I meet her in the troop conducted by the riding-master: Mrs.
Marsett.’
‘And who is Ned?’
‘It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning. He is a captain in
the army, or was. He is in Norway, fishing.’
‘Then the probability is, that the English officer continues his
military studies.’
‘Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance?’
‘Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed it and toned it a
little!
‘She is different, if you are alone with her.’
‘It is not unusual,’ said Colney.
At eleven o’clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Marsett
amid the troop.
A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of
brilliance under the sun.
‘I took a liberty this morning, I called you “Dear” this morning,’
the lady said. ‘It’s what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out
everything I feel, and I was ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared
ridiculous. I got quite nervous.’
‘You would not be ridiculous to me.’
‘I remember I spoke of Ned!
‘You have spoken of him before.’
‘Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck out my heart and pitch
it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim. That’s a funny
idea, isn’t it! I tell you everything that comes up. What shall I
do when I lose you! You always make me feel you’ve a lot of poetry
ready-made in you.’
‘We will write. And you will have your husband then.’
‘When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and
behaved like a fool for several minutes. I can’t bear the thought of
losing you!’
‘But you don’t lose me,’ said Nesta; ‘there is no ground for your
supposing that you will. And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you
more closely.’
‘If you knew!’ Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery tongue, and she
carolled: ‘If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a
naked lot of people we should be!’
They were crossing the passage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end
of the East Cliff. One among them, large and dominant, with a playful
voice of brass, cried out:
‘And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett--ha? Beautiful morning?’
Mrs. Marsett’s figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level
ahead. Her woman’s red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.
‘He did not salute you,’ Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having
responded.
The lady breathed a low thunder: ‘Coward!’
‘He cannot have intended to insult you,’ said Nesta.
‘That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast. He will learn that
I carry a horsewhip.’
‘Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?’
The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett.
‘Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself
that I was born “one of the frail sex.” We are, or we should ride at the
coward and strike him to the ground. Pray, pray do not look distressed!
Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man barks it out on the
roads. It doesn’t matter.’
‘He has offended you before?’
‘You are near me. They can’t hurt me, can’t touch me, when I think that
I ‘m talking with you. How I envy those who call you by your Christian
name!’
‘Nesta,’ said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced, that she might show
kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.
Mrs. Marsett opened her lips: ‘Oh, my God, I shall be crying!--let’s
gallop. No, wait, I’ll tell you. I wish I could! I will tell you of that
man. That man is Major Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to
their grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome woman, above him
in rank, with money; a good woman. She was a good woman, or she would
have had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her. She must
have loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox. He spent her money and
he deceived her.--You innocent! Oh, you dear! I’d give the world to have
your eyes. I’ve heard tell of “crystal clear,” but eyes like yours have
to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for them to be in! I did
pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you--I said
Nesta--might never have to go through other women’s miseries. Ah me! I
have to tell you he deceived her. You don’t quite understand.’
‘I do understand,’ said Nesta.
‘God help you!--I am excited to-day. That man is poison to me. His wife
forgave him three times. On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave
him. He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She walked
out one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious
creature. You know there are bad women. They passed her, laughing. And
look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.’ Mrs. Marsett pointed
her whip hard out. ‘The poor lady went down from the height here; she
walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and
she plunged; she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major
Worrell--I ‘ve told you enough.’
‘We ‘ll gallop now,’ said Nesta.
Mrs. Marsett’s talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with
those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great
elements are conspiring. She felt that there was a cause why she had to
pity, did pity her. It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was
of inferior station,’ and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
The supposition seemed probable. The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as
the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?
She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled to some
breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance:
not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of
our life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.
But she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.
Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend
Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved
reason: she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady
seemed to need her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for
swallowing and digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.
At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to
hear praises of ‘innocence’; and women can do so little to cure that
‘wickedness of men,’ among the lady’s conversational themes; and ‘love’
too: it may be a ‘plague,’ and it may be ‘heaven’: it is better left
unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett’s looks and tones
touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
signification in the girl’s bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett’s quieted good looks had a shadow of
a tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.
These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English
was guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce
and drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated
ladies in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature
betray now and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta’s maid Mary’s. Mrs.
Marsett liked love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite
noble poet, and she begged Nesta’s pardon for naming him, and she would
not name him, and told her she must not read him until she was a married
woman, because he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one
of her silences, emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever
read him. She did not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard! he fought his
battle: he shall not be named for the brand on the name. He has lit a
sulphur match for the lover of nature through many a generation; and to
be forgiven by sad frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil’s
agent to them at the perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastisement
enough. This it is to be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity
sitting in judgement will grant, that they were part of his honest
battle with the hypocrite English Philistine, without being dupe of the
plea or at all the thirsty swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Marsett
expressed aloud her gladness of escape in never having met a man like
him; followed by her regret that ‘Ned’ was so utterly unlike; except
‘perhaps’--and she hummed; she was off on the fraternity in wickedness.
Nesta’s ears were fatigued. ‘My mother writes of you,’ she said, to vary
the subject.
Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright: ‘I have had my dream of
a friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother
objects?’
‘She has inquired, nothing more.’
‘I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you.
I know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that
water first, and take Mrs. Worrell’s plunge:--the last bath; a thorough
cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn’t want it, as
we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!
Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you
to call me Judith. Damnable name!’ Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of
the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of
the girl’s alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves
and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady’s
lips. She murmured: ‘Forgive me,’ and had the passion to repeat the
epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the
twitch of Nesta’s brows made her say: ‘Do pardon me. I did something
in Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me
riding with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended
you.’
‘We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing
else.’
‘They frighten you.’
‘They make me shut; that is all.’
‘Supposing you were some day to discover... ta-tata, all the things
there are in the world.’ Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup.
‘You must have some ideas of me.’
‘I think you have had unhappy experiences.’
‘Nesta... just now and then! the first time we rode out together,
coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was
enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were
not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she’s
bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you
did--you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel
of compassion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget
the words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so.
I worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to
find out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could
hear you, and only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven! Unhappy
experiences? Yes. But when men get women on the slope to their
perdition, they have no mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they
are false in acts and words; they do as much as murder. They’re never
hanged for it. They make the Laws! And then they become fathers of
families, and point the finger at the “wretched creatures.” They have a
dozen names against women, for one at themselves.’
‘It maddens me at times to think...!’ said Nesta, burning with the sting
of vile names.
Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and
the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and
execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!’
‘I blame women--if I may dare, at my age,’ said Nesta, and her bosom
heaved. ‘Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the
names; they should go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they
are sisters! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean--Christ shows it does
not. He changes the tone of Scripture. The women who are made outcasts,
must be hopeless and go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be
better, step between them and that. There cannot be any goodness unless
it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on
canvas. You speak to me of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only
a picture and does no work to help to rescue? I fear I think most of the
dreadful names that redden and sicken us.--The Old Testament!--I have a
French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines--you should hear her: she
is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not:
but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex! I love
her. It is love. She will never marry until she meets a man who has
the respect for women, for all women. We both think we cannot separate
ourselves from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when she
speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty
when they have succeeded. She is right, it is the--brute: there is no
other word.’
‘And French and good!’ Mrs. Marsett ejaculated. ‘My Ned reads French
novels, and he says, their women.... But your mademoiselle is a real
one. If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she
talk much about men and women?’
‘Not often: we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at
present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and
the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create
an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them;
but we groan at the slowness of it.’
Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad
as men. ‘I don’t think I could take up with a profession. Unless to be a
singer. Ah! Do you sing?’
Nesta smiled: ‘Yes, I sing.’
‘How I should like to hear you! My Ned’s a thorough
Englishman--gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting,
Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He’s
immensely proud of England in those things. And such muscle he has!
though he begins to fancy his heart’s rather weak. It’s digestion, I
tell him. But he takes me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he
can’t stand German. Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me,
when there ‘s company, he has--I’m sure you sing beautifully. When I
hear beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my
word, it’s true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I’m new-made:
I can’t bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the
end of next week?--it would do me such real good, you can’t guess how
much; if I could persuade you! I know I’m asking something out of rules.
For just half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do
me good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
don’t think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
on me? once!’
‘No,’ said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they
were; or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her
vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the
stamp of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed
and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to
inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust
those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel,
the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled
to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when
nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of
accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune’s issue, if
we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from
these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the
Fates. Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad
incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain;
the latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the
simply feminine claim on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of
the flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that
the good predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires
when nature speaks.
She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.
‘An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?’ she was asked, and she said: ‘This
afternoon, if you like.’
So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
felt in the prospect.
The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name
of Marsett to be a reputable County name. ‘There was a Leicestershire
baronet of the name of Marsett.’ They arranged to send their
button-blazing boy at Nesta’s heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a
side-street not very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly
terrace of the glassy stare at sea.