All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to
meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would
have felt at home; more at home than with her parents. He and the cool
world he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his
giving of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present
to her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and
round, now and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried
his head semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he
was, he appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives
inducing to speculation.
She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
people.
The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as
a muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls
are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
up to the parent Spirit.
She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole
true life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by
Dudley’s generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for
her uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected
quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of
what she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover’s generosity. So her
keen intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus
divided) thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred
passion lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a
quiring cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with
an unwelcome touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving
tenderness for her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother.
Could he love the daughter without some little, which a more intimate
knowledge of her dear mother would enlarge? The girl’s heart flew to her
mother, clung to her, vindicated her dumbly. It would not inquire, and
it refused to hear, hungering the while. She sent forth her flights
of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird
after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast
ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her
never losing her filial hold of the beloved. She and her mother grew
together, they were one. Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one
beneath it. She had neither vision nor active thought of her father, in
whom her pride was.
At the hour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment of their sweet
reward. Manton, their maid, came down to sit with Nesta on the watch for
Skepsey. Perrin, the footman, returning, as late as twenty minutes to
eleven, from his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to Manton
‘a row in town’; and he repeated to Nesta the policeman’s opinion and
his own of the ‘Army’ fellows, and the way to treat them. Both were for
rigour.
‘The name of “Army” attracts poor Skepsey so, I am sure he would join
it, if they would admit him,’ Nesta said.
‘He has an immense respect for a young woman, who belongs to his “Army”;
and one doesn’t know what may have come,’ said Manton.
Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the bell gained
admission for some person: whispering was heard in the passage.
Manton played eavesdropper, and suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested
him when about to dash upstairs. His young mistress’s voice was a
sufficient command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and stepped
into her presence for his countenance to be seen, or the show of a
countenance, that it presented.
‘Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good night to me?’ said
she; leaving unnoticed, except for woefulness of tone, his hurried
shuffle of remarks on ‘his appearance,’ and ‘little accidents’; ending
with an inclination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and a
petition: ‘If I might, Miss Nesta?’ The implied pathetic reference to
a surgically-treated nose under a cross of strips of plaster, could not
obtain dismissal for him. And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing
beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had
couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two eyes blinked rapidly.
He was a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring to be sent into
concealment.
The cruelty of detaining him was evident.
‘Yes, if you must,’ Nesta said. ‘But, dear Skepsey, will it be the
magistrate again to-morrow?’
He feared it would be; he fancied it would needs be. He concluded
by stating, that he was bound to appear before the magistrate in the
morning; and he begged assistance to keep it from the knowledge of the
Miss Duvidneys, who had been so kind to him.
‘Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?’
‘A good gentleman, a resident,’ he replied; ‘a military gentleman;
indeed, a colonel of the cavalry; but, it may so be, retired; and
anxious about our vast possessions; though he thinks a translation of
a French attack on England unimportant. He says, the Germans despise us
most.’
‘Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?’
‘He is a friend of Captain Dartrey’s.’
Hearing that name, Nesta said: ‘Now, Skepsey, you must tell me
everything. You are not to mind your looks. I believe, I do always
believe you mean well.’
‘Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate’s not being prejudiced
against the street-processionists!
‘But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if your case is good?’
‘I would not say no, Miss Nesta. But we find, the opinion of the public
has its effect with magistrates--their sentences. They are severe on
boxing. They have latterly treated the “Army” with more consideration,
owing to the change in the public view. I myself have changed.’
‘Have you joined it?’
‘I cannot say I am a member of it.’
‘You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were maltreated? Your friend
was there?’
‘I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along the pavement.’
‘I hope she came out of it unhurt?’
‘It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?’
This time Nesta looked her question.
Manton interposed: ‘You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey’; and she stopped a
flood of narrative, that was knocking in his mind to feel its head and
to leap--an uninterrupted half-minute more would have shaped the story
for the proper flow.
He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a manner to
correct them rather than solace; and the beginning was the end:
‘Captain Dartrey rescued us, before Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to
mention--the chin, slight, teeth unshaken; a beautiful set. She is angry
with Captain Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her defence: it
is against her principles. “Then you die,” she says; and our principles
are to gain more by death. She says, we are alive in them; but worse if
we abandon them for the sake of living.--I am a little confused; she is
very abstruse.--Because, that is the corruptible life, she says. I have
found it quite impossible to argue with her; she has always a complete
answer; wonderful. In case of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the
Lord; and the Lord’s will shall be manifested. If we are robbed, we ask,
How came we by the goods? It is unreasonable; it strikes at rights
of property. But I have to go on thinking. When in danger, she sings
without excitement. When the blow struck her, she stopped singing only
an instant. She says, no one fears, who has real faith. She will not let
me call her brave. She cannot admire Captain Dartrey. Her principles are
opposed. She said to him, “Sir, you did what seemed to you right.” She
thinks every blow struck sends us back to the state of the beasts. Her
principles...’
‘How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present, Skepsey?’
‘She is very firm. You cannot move her.--Captain Dartrey was on his way
to the station, to meet a gentleman from London, Miss Nesta. He carried
a stick--a remarkable stick--he had shown to me in the morning, and he
has given it me now. He says, he has done his last with it. He seems to
have some of Matilda Pridden’s ideas about fighting, when it’s over. He
was glad to be rid of the stick, he said.’
‘But who attacked you? What were the people?’
‘Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head while she breeds
young women like Matilda Pridden: right or wrong, he says: it is the
substance.’
Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little man with
a snappish word, to bring him to attention. She got him together
sufficiently for him to give a lame version of the story; flat until
he came to his heroine’s behaviour, when he brightened a moment, and
he sank back absorbed in her principles and theories of life. It was
understood by Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace,
found their way blocked and were assaulted in one of the sidestreets;
and that Skepsey rushed to the defence of Matilda Pridden; and that,
while they were engaged, Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the
street, and recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the
worst of it, owing to numbers. ‘I will show you the stick he did it
with, Miss Nests’; said Skepsey, regardless of narrative; and darted
out of the room to bring in the Demerara supple-jack; holding which, he
became inspired to relate something of Captain Dartrey’s deeds.
They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly perceived:--thus it
is with the fair sex ever, so fond of heroes! She shut her eyes from
the sight of the Demerara supple-jack descending right and left upon the
skulls of a couple of bully lads. ‘That will do--you were rescued. And
now go to bed, Skepsey; and be up at seven to breakfast with me,’ Nesta
said, for his battle-damaged face would be more endurable to behold
after an interval, she hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate
its evil look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.
The thought of her hero taking active part in a streetfray, was
repulsive to her; it swamped his brilliancy. And this distressed her, by
withdrawing the support which the thought of him had been to her since
mid-day. She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain, under
oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, bloodshedding men. It was
long before she grew mindful of the absurdity of the moan recurring
whenever reflection wearied. Translated into speech, it would have run:
‘In a street of the town! with a stick!’--The vulgar picture pursued her
to humiliation; it robbed her or dimmed her possession of the one bright
thing she had remaining to her. So she deemed it during the heavy sighs
of night; partly conscious, that in some strange way it was as much
as tossing her to the man who never could have condescended to the
pugnacious using of a stick in a street. He, on the contrary, was a
cover to the shamefaced.
Her heart was weak that night. She hovered above it, but not so detached
as to scorn it for fawning to one--any one--who would offer her and her
mother a cover from scorn. And now she exalted Dudley’s generosity,
now clung to a low idea of a haven in her father’s wealth; and she was
unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first. She did know
herself cowardly: she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at
the creature who could think of purchasing the world’s respect. Dudley’s
generosity sprang up to silence the voice. She could praise him, on a
review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under
a more positive obligation. Her sense of it was not without a toneless
quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously
caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win
their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of
high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.
Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets
and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may
imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay. If
she had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of
one of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been
thus abject. Skepsey’s discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey’s behaviour
behind it, threw her upon Dudley’s generosity, as being the shield for
an outcast. Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in
its appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she
could think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.
According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea
and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the
good-bye to them and their Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a
silken ball in a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his
being unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their
bedroom. Dorothea, kissing her, said: ‘Adieu, dear child; and there is
home with us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however it may
be, you will, for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our
orders--Manton--your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to
accompany you. We will not have it on our consciences, that by any
possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge. The good
innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to
him; we are sure of that.’
Nesta said: ‘Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.’
‘However it may be,’ Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.
Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso’s temper he enjoyed
ordinarily a slumber of half an hour’s longer duration. He was, Dorothea
feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia murmured: ‘Except once!’
and both were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,
nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem’s published
beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the
night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could
reply to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart
Rem at his loftiest: ‘“Let us not bring into the sacred precincts
Dirt from the roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a
fructification.”’ Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise
weighty. Nesta stood between the thin division of their beds, her right
hand given to one, her left to the other. They had the semblance of a
haven out of storms.
She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing
with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember
how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten;
and she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that
would not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort. Luxurious quiet
people were as ripening glass-house fruits. Her bitter gathering of the
knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even
in the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow
soil. But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might
have been snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and
conventional, or shed the pity which is charity’s contempt. She had only
to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to
them at once. And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women
embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now
bore, her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear
the shock of other knowledge! How would she have borne it before she
knew of the infinitely evil? Saving for the tender compassion weeping
over her mother, she had not much acute personal grief.
For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that
infinitely evil! Her intellect fortified her to be combative by
day, after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so
serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed
the world snorting Dragon’s breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half
withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The daylight, spreading thin at the
windows, restored her from that weakness. ‘We will quit England,’ she
said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father’s
surely following them. She sighed thankfully, half way through the
breakfast with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was
hurriedly sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at
a chance that Dudley would be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly
feeling not so well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on
her mother in Dudley’s company.
Skepsey’s face was just sufferable by light of day, if one pitied
reflecting on his honest intentions; it ceased to discolour another.
He dropped a few particulars of his hero in action; but the heroine
eclipsed. He was heavier than ever with his Matilda Pridden. At the
hour for departure, Perrin had a conveyance at the door. Nesta sent off
Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dartrey. Her maid Mary
begged her to finish her breakfast; Manton suggested the waiting a
further two or three minutes. ‘We must not be late,’ Nesta said; and
when the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the drive to the
station, she took her seat and started, keeping her face resolutely
set seaward, having at her ears the ring of a cry that was to come
from Manton. But Manton was dumb; she spied no one on the pavement who
signalled to stop them. And no one was at the station to greet them.
They stepped into a carriage where they were alone. Dudley with his
dreaded generosity melted out of Nesta’s thoughts, like the vanishing
steam-wreath on the dip between the line and the downs.
She passed into music, as she always did under motion of carriages and
trains, whether in happiness or sadness: and the day being one that
had a sky, the scenic of music swung her up to soar. None of her heavy
burdens enchained, though she knew the weight of them, with those of
other painful souls. The pipeing at her breast gave wings to large and
small of the visible; and along the downs went stateliest of flowing
dances; a copse lengthened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught
grey for flights through enchantment. Cottage-children, wherever seen in
groups, she wreathed above with angels to watch them. Her mind all the
while was busy upon earth, embracing her mother, eyeing her father.
Imagination and our earthly met midway, and still she flew, until she
was brought to the ground by a shot. She struggled to rise, uplifting
Judith Marsett: a woman not so very much older than her own teens, in
the count of years, and ages older; and the world pulling at her heels
to keep her low. That unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help
her: and how she clung to the slender help! Who else was there?
The good and the bad in the woman struck separate blows upon the
girl’s resonant nature. She perceived the good, and took it into her
reflections. The bad she divined: it approached like some threat of
inflammation. Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, are
quick at the wells of understanding: and she had her intimations of the
world’s wisdom in withholding contagious presences from the very
mangy of the young, who may not have an aim, or ideal, or strong human
compassion, for a preservative. She was assured of her possessing it.
She asked herself in her mother’s voice, and answered mutely. She had
the certainty: for she rebuked the slavish feverishness of the passion,
as betrayed by Mrs. Marsett; and the woman’s tone, as of strung wires
ringing on a rage of the wind. Then followed her cry for the man who
could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honour. An image of one,
accompanying the faster beats of her heart, beguiled her to think away
from the cause. He, the one man known to her, would act the brother’s
part on behalf of the hapless creature.
Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at once imagination
came to dust. She had to thank him she knelt to him. For the first
time of her life she found herself seized with her sex’s shudder in the
blood.