Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron
door shut upon a thing alive. The very asking froze her, almost to
stopping her throbs of pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with
any one; but with no one. Not with her mother even. Toward her mother,
she felt guilty of knowing. Her mother had a horror of that curtain.
Nesta had seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from
it; the more when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would
have been another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend
could not state. Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the
theme precluded writing.
It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
unaided. In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
them. The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly
of the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley’s malady--as girls in these
terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed
to her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman
of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet’s divine ignorance; inoffensive
in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
painful independence.
They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence;
such as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth
as ever by the morning’s flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of
accidents--accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we
think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the
generations to follow. Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them;
yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought
coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness
what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.
Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our
evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded,
trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one
out of the fold.
She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey. The
next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
in the girl’s eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in
her breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the
blue smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not
mean hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the
unhappy woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was
the man who would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be
given besides the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness
and the world’s need for it were printed on her understanding. For what
could women do in aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself
very despicably her hero’s inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In
a prison, the gaoler is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be;
and, by the present arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world
allowed not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature’s
blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters, which it
suffers to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal almost in
worship to the man, who was the one man endowed to relieve, and who
locked her mouth for shame.
Thus was she, too, being put into her woman’s harness of the bit and
the blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of
hero Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress
impregnable, not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have
her feelings; she must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have
a sufficient intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the
possessing man. It is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate,
but a happy composition. You see the world which comes of the pair.
This burning Nesta, Victor’s daughter, tempered by Nataly’s milder
blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life,
perforce of the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for
generous imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses
or set them through speculation touching heat; they were taken up
and consumed by the fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the
abhorrences, in a heart all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore.
Self was as urgent in her as in most of the young; but the gift of
humour, which had previously diverted it, was now the quick feeling for
her sisterhood, through the one piteous example she knew; and broadening
it, through her insurgent abasement on their behalf, which was her
scourged pride of sex. She but faintly thought of blaming the men whom
her soul besought for justice, for common kindness, to women. There was
the danger, that her aroused young ignorance would charge the whole of
the misery about and abroad upon the stronger of those two: and another
danger, that the vision of the facts below the surface would discolour
and disorder her views of existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the
lighted world; and she had figures of male friends, to which to cling;
and they helped in animating glorious historical figures on the world’s
library-shelves or under yet palpitating earth. Promise of a steady
balance of her nature, too, was shown in the absence of any irritable
urgency to be doing, when her bosom bled to help. Beyond the resolve,
that she would not abandon the woman who had made confession to her, she
formed no conscious resolutions. Far ahead down her journey of the years
to come, she did see muffled things she might hope and would strive to
do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above all, she flew her blind quickened
heart on the wings of an imaginative force; and those of the young
who can do that, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge,
irradiated under darkness in the mind. Let but the throb be kept for
others. That is the one secret, for redemption; if not for preservation.
Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
regrets at Fredi’s absence from the great whirl ‘overhead,’ as places of
multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He challenged her
to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up
by his gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being
spontaneous. And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and
looked at herself in his laughter, with the thought, that she could
not have become so changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her
humour. Victor turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one
sunny beam of delight and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty
Nesta’s victim, and although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak
in such a manner of a clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were
the opposite partners of a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were
tired out.
Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday. The ladies
remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart
Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.
‘And what did he say?’ said Victor.
Nesta shook her head: ‘It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.
His duty compelled him, though he loves music. He had the look of a
Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.’
Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.
They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem
in the act of repudiating secular song.
‘Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a child, stood before
a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan; when he and her mother noticed
the child’s very studious graveness; and they had talked of it; he
remarking, that she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she
was taken with Hagar’s face.
He seemed surprised at her not having heard from Dudley.
‘How is that?’ said he.
‘Most probably because he has not written, papa.’
He paused after the cool reply. She had no mournful gaze at all; but
in the depths of the clear eyes he knew so well, there was a coil of
something animate, whatever it might be. And twice she drew a heavy
breath.
He mentioned it in London. Nataly telegraphed at night for her girl to
meet her next day at Dartrey’s hotel.
Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each,
though it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother,
daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them. They held
hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with
full warm truth, and looked into eyes and surely saw one another. But
the heart of each was in a battle of its own, taking wounds or crying
for supports. Whether to speak to her girl at once, despite the now
vehement contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly’s deliberation, under
the thought of the young creature’s perplexity in not seeing her at the
house of the Duvidney ladies: while Nesta conjured in a flash the past
impressions of her mother’s shrinking distaste from any such hectic
themes as this which burdened and absorbed her; and she was almost
joining to it, through sympathy with any thought or feeling of one in
whom she had such pride; she had the shudder of revulsion. Further,
Nataly put on, rather cravenly an air, of distress, or she half
designingly permitted her trouble to be seen, by way of affecting her
girl’s recollection when the confession was to come, that Nesta might
then understand her to have been restrained from speaking, not evasive
of her duty. The look was interpreted by Nesta as belonging to
the social annoyances dating, in her calendar, from Creckholt,
apprehensively dreaded at Lakelands. She hinted asking, and her mother
nodded; not untruthfully; but she put on a briskness after the nod; and
a doubt was driven into Nesta’s bosom.
Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday, she was glad
to hear. Of Dudley, there was no word. Nataly shunned his name, with
a superstitious dread lest any mention of him should renew pretensions
that she hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn. So she had told
poor Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his humble request to know. He had
seen Dudley on the pantiles, walking with a young lady, he said. And
‘he feared,’ he said; using, a pardonable commonplace of deceit. Her
compassion accounted for the ‘fear’ which was the wish, and caused her
not to think it particularly strange, that he should imagine Dudley to
have quitted the field. Now that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at
hand, poor Mr. Barmby could have no chance.
Dartrey came to her room by appointment. She wanted to see him alone,
and he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy was in the hotel, and would
certainly receive and amuse Nesta for any length of time.
‘I will take her up,’ said Nataly, and rose, and she sat immediately,
and fluttered a hand at her breast. She laughed: ‘Perhaps I’m tired!’
Dartrey took Nesta.
He returned, saying: ‘There’s a lift in the hotel. Do the stairs affect
you at all?’
She fenced his sharp look. ‘Laziness, I fancy; age is coming on. How is
it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?’
‘Well! how?’ ‘Foolish curiosity?’ ‘I think I have made her of service.
I did not bring the lady here.’ ‘Of service to whom?’ ‘Why, to Victor!’
‘Has Victor commissioned you?’ ‘You can bear to hear it. Her husband
knows the story. He has a grudge... commercial reasons. I fancy it is,
that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the Bank. Blathenoy
vowed blow for blow. But I think the little woman holds him in. She says
she does.’ ‘Victor prompted you?’ ‘It occurred as it occurred.’ ‘She
does it for love of us?--Oh! I can’t trifle. Dartrey!’ ‘Tell me.’
‘First, you haven’t let me know what you think of my Nesta.’ ‘She’s a
dear good girl.’ ‘Not so interesting to you as a flighty little woman!’
‘She has a speck of some sort on her mind.’ Nataly spied at Dudley’s
behaviour, and said: ‘That will wear away. Is Mr. Blathenoy much here?’
‘As often as he can come, I believe.’ ‘That is...?’ ‘I have seen him
twice.’ ‘His wife remains?’ ‘Fixed here for the season.’ ‘My friend!’
‘No harm, no harm!’ ‘But-to her!’ ‘You have my word of honour.’ ‘Yes:
and she is doing you a service, at your request; you occasionally reward
her with thanks; and she sees you are a man of honour. Do you not know
women?’
Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions. ‘There’s very little
left of the Don Amoroso in me. Women don’t worship stone figures.’
‘They do: like the sea-birds. And what do you say to me, Dartrey?--I can
confess it: I am one of them: I love you. When last you left England,
I kissed your hand. It was because of your manly heart in that stone
figure. I kept from crying: you used to scorn us English for the
“whimpering fits” you said we enjoy and must have in books, if we can’t
get them up for ourselves. I could have prayed to have you as brother
or son. I love my Victor the better for his love of you. Oh!--poor
soul--how he is perverted since that building of Lakelands! He cannot
take soundings of the things he does. Formerly he confided in me, in all
things: now not one;--I am the chief person to deceive. If only he had
waited! We are in a network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice in
London--tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who naturally have
their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate me, fascinated by
him:--or bribed--it has to be said. There are ways of bribeing. I trust
he may not have in the end to pay too heavily for succeeding. He seems
a man pushed by Destiny; not irresponsible, but less responsible than
most. He is desperately tempted by his never failing. Whatever he
does!.. it is true! And it sets me thinking of those who have never had
an ailment, up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes. Latterly
I have seen into him: I never did before. Had I been stronger, I might
have saved, or averted.... But, you will say, the stronger woman would
not have occupied my place. I must have been blind too. I did not
see, that his nature shrinks from the thing it calls up. He dreads the
exposure he courts--or has to combat with all his powers. It has been
a revelation to me of him life as well. Nothing stops him. Now it is
Parliament--a vacant London Borough. He counts on a death: Ah! terrible!
I have it like a snake’s bite night and day.’
Nataly concluded: ‘There: it has done me some good to speak. I feel so
base.’ She breathed heavily.
Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it. ‘Happy the woman who has
not more to speak! How long will Nesta stay here?’
‘You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays-her father wishes--up
to--ah! We can hardly be in such extreme peril. He has her doctor, her
lawyer, and her butler--a favourite servant--to check, and influence,
her: She--you know who it is!--does not, I am now convinced, mean
persecution. She was never a mean-minded woman. Oh! I could wish she
were. They say she is going. Then I am to be made an “honest woman
of.” Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until... You
understand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with
those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for having you near.
Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us! Daily I have to
pass through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot
ploughshares--and without the innocence, dear friend! But it’s best that
my girl should not have to be doing the same; though she would have the
innocence. But she writhes under any shadow of a blot. And for her
to learn the things that are in the world, through her mother’s
history!--and led to know it by the falling away of friends, or say,
acquaintances! However ignorant at present, she learns from a mere
nothing. I dread!.... In a moment, she is a blaze of light. There have
been occurrences. Only Victor could have overcome them! I had to think
it better for my girl, that she was absent. We are in such a whirl up
there! So I work round again to “how long?” and the picture of myself
counting the breaths of a dying woman. The other day I was told I was
envied!’
‘Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!’ said Dartrey
sharply, to clip a softness: ‘except when one’s attending on an invalid
uncle. Then it’s peace; rather like extinction. And I can’t be crying
for the end either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out
of his hearing; make believe I’m patient. Now I ‘ll fetch Nesta.’
Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta’s shoulder. She held a
telegram, and said to Nataly--
‘What can this mean? It’s from my husband; he puts “Jacob”: my husband’s
Christian name:--so like my husband, where there’s no concealment!
There--he says:
“Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow.” Can it signify, affairs
are bad with my husband in the city?’
It had that signification to Nataly’s understanding. At the same time,
the pretty little woman’s absurd lisping repetition of ‘my husband’ did
not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.
In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a
silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after
contrasting her fortunes with Nataly’s, on her way downstairs, she had
comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was
not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation
in the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he
admired less, if at all, legally could say.
‘I must leave you to interpret,’ Nataly remarked.
Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For this
reason, she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the
‘singular-looking lady’ seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and
as to whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now,
when questioned, spoken very clearly. So the mother’s alarms were not
raised.
And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently;
finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor’s visit; it was a pity,
because a young woman in Miss Radnor’s position should not by any
possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
appearance.
She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship
bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor’s
conduct. He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by
‘looking here,’ and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was
petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at. And it was
then--and then only or chiefly through Nataly’s recent allusion--that
the man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was
planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest. For
she was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present
education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic
patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to
her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of
the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted
after taken: an old duet to the moon.
Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend. The friend was
Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good
esteem with the authorities. He had not forgiven Dartrey for the
intemperateness which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service. He
was reduced to acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling defence
for him to reply with, in the shape of a fortune gained and where we
have a Society forcing us to live up to an expensive level, very
trying to a soldier’s income, a fortune gained will offer excuses for
misconduct short of disloyal or illegal. They talked of the state of the
Army: we are moving. True, and at the last Review, the ‘march past’
was performed before a mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on
breast. Our English military ‘moving’ may now be likened to Somnolency
on Horseback. ‘Oh, come, no rancour,’ said the colonel; ‘you know he’s a
kind old boy at heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!’
‘So the sycophants are sure of posts!’
‘Come, I say! He’s devoted to the Service.’
‘Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.’
‘He’s not so responsible as the taxpayer.’
‘There you touch home. Mother Goose can’t imagine the need for defence
until a hand’s at her feathers.’
‘What about her shrieks now and then?’
‘Indigestion of a surfeit?’
They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel’s
came near. One of them recognized Dartrey. He changed a prickly subject
to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars. His
companion said: ‘Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?’ He flavoured
eulogies of the girl’s good looks in easy garrison English. She was
praised for sitting her horse well. One had met her on the parade, in
the afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett. Colonel Sudley had seen them
on horseback. He remarked to Dartrey:
‘And by the way, you’re a clean stretch ahead of us. I’ve seen you go
by these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty
woman on the other too.’
‘Nothing is unseen in this town!’ Dartrey rejoined.
Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed
to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta. How had
she come to know this Mrs. Marsett? But he was more seriously thinking
of what Colney Durance called ‘The Mustard Plaster’; the satirist’s
phrase for warm relations with a married fair one: and Dartrey, clear of
any design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations
of pricks and burns. They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory
internal conditions. They were really hard on him, who had none to be
cured.
The hour was nigh midnight. As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off
to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady
had left it at half-past nine. Left it?--Then the lady could not be the
alarming lady. He was relieved. The words of the letter were cabalistic;
these, beneath underlined address:
‘I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this evening. It is
urgent; you will excuse me when I explain. Not late to-morrow. I am sure
you will not fail to come. I could write what would be certain to bring
you. I dare not trust any names to paper.’
The signature was, Judith Marsett.