AN ABYSMAL DARKNESS
And if Nesta had looked out of her carriage-window soon after the train
began to glide, her eagle of imagination would have reeled from the
heights, with very different feelings, earlier, perhaps a captive, at
sight of the tardy gentleman rushing along the platform, and bending ear
to the footman Perrin, and staring for one lost.
The snaky tail of the train imparted to Dudley an apprehension of the
ominous in his having missed her. It wound away, and left regrets, which
raised a chorus of harsh congratulations from the opposite party of his
internal parliament.
Neither party could express an opinion without rousing the other to an
uproar.
He had met his cousin Southweare overnight. He had heard, that there was
talk of Miss Radnor. Her name was in the mouth of Major Worrell. It
was coupled with the name of Mrs. Marsett. A military captain, in the
succession to be Sir Edward Marsett, bestowed on her the shadow of his
name.
It could be certified, that Miss Radnor visited the woman at her house.
What are we to think of Miss Radnor, save that daughters of depraved
parents!... A torture undeserved is the Centaur’s shirt for driving
us to lay about in all directions. He who had swallowed so much--a
thunderbolt: a still undigested discharge from the perplexing heavens
jumped frantic under the pressure upon him of more, and worse. A girl
getting herself talked of at a Club! And she of all young ladies should
have been the last to draw round her that buzz of tongues. On such a
subject!--The parents pursuing their career of cynical ostentation in
London, threw an evil eye of heredity on their offspring in the egg;
making anything credible, pointing at tendencies.
An alliance with her was impossible. So said disgust. Anger came like
a stronger beast, and extinguished the safety there was in the thing it
consumed, by growing so excessive as to require tempering with drops of
compassion; which prepared the way for a formal act of cold forgiveness;
and the moment that was conceived, he had a passion to commit the
horrible magnanimity, and did it on a grand scale, and dissolved his
Heart in the grandeur, and slaved himself again.
Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gave it a stamp and
an edge. His renewed enslavement set him perusing his tyrant keenly, as
nauseated captives do; and he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case.
For this Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it. He had
mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciousness too long for him
to see her taking a culprit’s attitude. What she did, she intended to
do. The mother would not have encouraged her. The father idolized her;
and the father was a frank hedonist, whose blood... speculation on
horseback gallops to barren extremes. Eyes like hers--if there had not
been the miserable dupes of girls! Conduct is the sole guide to female
character. That likewise may be the hypocrite’s mask.
Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called
realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a
man from impact of a cannon-ball on his person. Truly thus it may be
when flesh contends. But an image of the stricken and scattered mind
of the man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater
significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied
and showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of
further steps. Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta’s train, one
half minute too late, according to his desire before he put himself in
motion, was as wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers
and threads off the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler.
He wished every mad antagonism to his wishes: that he might see her, be
blind to her; embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider. He
thanked her for the grossness of an offence precluding excuses. He was
aware of a glimmer of advocacy in the very grossness. He conjured-up her
features, and they said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at
him for the dupe he was willing to be. She had enigma’s mouth, with the
eyes of morning.
More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her
having ideas--or what he deemed ideas. She struck a toneing warmth
through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of
the blood in the frame breathing mountain air. She really helped
him, incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more
cheerfully, if not quite hopefully. For she had been the book of Romance
he despised when it appeared as a printed volume: and which might have
educated the young man to read some among our riddles in the book of
humanity. The white he was ready to take for silver the black were all
black; the spotted had received corruption’s label. Her youthful French
governess Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the
mouth conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature
of her country. In public, the two talked of St. Louis. One of them in
secret visits a Mrs. Marsett. The Southweare women, the Hennen women,
and Lady Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early
days, not transgressing in a glance. Lady Grace Halley had her fit of
the devotional previous to marriage. No girl known to Dudley by report
or acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
Radnor’s: it pertained to the insolently vile.
And on that ground, it started the voluble defence. For certain
suspected things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are
very dark. As soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence
expired. He heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he
sorrowfully acquiesced. She passed from him.
When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying
of hers, with the full melody of her voice. One day, treating of modern
pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a
quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: ‘To set one’s love
upon the swallow is a futility.’ And she, weighing it, nodded, and
replied: ‘May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the
beauty of the swallow’s flight?’
There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
course, the picture we are to have of the bird’s wings in motion, it
has often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
vague. But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated.
And the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the
class of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for
analysis!
She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have
put a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations,
without reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her
father and Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant,
whether an intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions
affecting the state of women, did not rather more than suggest the
existence of urgent senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an
interest in public matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead
her simplicity, was to be absolutely ignorant of her.
He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating
to Nesta’s precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
dactylomancy, the ‘psychical’ of women are not disposed in their
sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship
at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of
foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized
male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper’s
view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely
to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base:
Nature at flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of
the good and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as
well as to thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves,
to discover how much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or
representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces;
and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction
from the poet’s pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the
slough, when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they
have learnt of Nature’s priest to respect her, they will less distrust
those rare daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her
out of slime. It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold
worship at a niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index,
for the enlargement of your charity.
But facts were Dudley’s teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he
read the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. Even at his
darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him
the right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude
for pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a
stammering speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this
Nesta Radnor’s character would have said a brave word, but for her
deeds bearing witness to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous
temperament.
What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had
fallen on the promenading crowds. To do nothing, is the wisdom of those
who have seen fools perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing
nothing, for a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was
the reason of how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance
with the ‘agreeable lady’ she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge. Those
excellent counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings,
that the ‘masterly inactive’ part, so greatly esteemed by him for the
conduct of public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid
girl: nor a hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the
sensations are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable
at a crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst’s consumptive brothers
waved faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely. Superb for the
chances: but what of her offspring? And the other was a girl such as
the lusty Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the
heir of the House’s honours for the perpetuation of his race. No doubt:
and the venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage)
of the Ages backward, temp: Ed: III. inflated him with a thought of
her: and his readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical
regeneration, pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon
instinct opened mouth to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl
of his presiding mistrust of Nature.
He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he had from the
silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may behold how the Conservatism
of a Class, in a world of all the evidences showing that there is no
stay to things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality. His
mistrust was his own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would
make her his own. Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless
adviser. It spurred him, nevertheless.
He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom he was not in
sympathy; and had information that, Southweare said, ‘made the girl
out all right.’ Girls in these days do things which the sainted
stay-at-homes preceding them would not have dreamed of doing. Something
had occurred, relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss Radnor’s name,
acknowledged himself mistaken or amended his report of her, in some
way, not quite intelligible. Dudley was accosted by Simeon Fenellan;
subsequently by Dartrey. There was gossip over the latter gentleman’s
having been up before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick,
and Dartrey said, laughing, to Simeon: ‘Rather lucky I bled the
rascal’;--whatever the meaning. She nursed one of her adorations for
this man, who had yesterday, apparently, joined in a street-fray; so she
partook of the stain of the turbid defacing all these disorderly people.
At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished an
account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan’s participation in the strife, after
mention of him as nephew of the Earl of Clanconan, ‘now a visitor to
our town’; and his deeds were accordant with his birth. Such writing
was enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colney Durance. What a
people!
Mr. Dartrey Fenellan’s card compelled Dudley presently to receive him.
Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusion to Miss Radnor
could be conveyed only in the most delicately obscure manner, spared him
no more than the plain English of his relations with her. Requested to
come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, that he might hear
Major Worrell’s personal contradiction of scandal involving the young
lady’s name, together with his apology, etc., Dudley declined: and he
was obliged to do it curtly; words were wanting. They are hard to find
for wounded sentiments rendered complex by an infusion of policy. His
present mood, with the something new to digest, held the going to Major
Worrell a wrong step; he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan
pledged him hardly less. And besides he had a physical abhorrence, under
dictate of moral reprobation, of the broad-shouldered sinewy man, whose
look of wiry alertness pictured the previous day’s gory gutters.
Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowed; and went.