The day of Nesta’s return was one of a number of late when Victor
was robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
when she had him there. Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
their feet. It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite
us up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder’s tight
extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
other, whichever came first. Somewhere he had an idea, that would
lift and cleanse all degradations. But it did seem as if he were not
enjoying: things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if
not prickly, in the retrospect.
He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the
gloom of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the
thin phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize. His dulled physical
system asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in
the hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was
the substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy,
a deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks
of a whimsical nudity; hardly more. Nay, not more! he said; and at the
end of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the
Society, lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing
picture; the little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and
her hand was a small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt! But so
it is in war: we must pay for our allies. What if it had been, that
he and she together, with their united powers...? He dashed the silly
vision aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys;
and it broke, showing no heart in it. His heart was Nataly’s.
Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk,
or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
besetting the phlegmatic, like this day’s breeze the morning fog; or as
he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.
Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.
‘And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!’ The songful
satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.
He peeped in. It was dark. Sensible of presences, he gradually discerned
a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he drew near.
Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter. He bent over them.
His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi’s; she spoke; she said tenderly:
‘Father.’ Neither of the two made a movement. He heard the shivering
rise of a sob, that fell. The dry sob going to the waste breath was
Nataly’s. His girl did not speak again.
He left them. He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room,
when he said ‘Good!’ For those two must have been lying folded together
during the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother’s
heart had opened; the girl knew. Her tone: ‘Father,’ sweet, was heavy,
too, with the darkness it came out of.
So she knew. Good. He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his pity
of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex which
finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them; he
strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.
All of his girl’s loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
would not be harsh on her father. She would say he loved! And true: he
did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.
He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an
alien woman’s before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women
the flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
is not so bad. Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
a wing, and treat men in that way? It is a breach of the convention; we
pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
tempters. Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was. No
necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while
on behalf of his Nataly he had to... Victor closed the curtain over a
gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the
devourer. Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
circumstances. She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
soul like Dutchmen at the dam. Here she was, and not desired, almost
detested! Nature detested! It had come about through the battle for
Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman’s tenacious hold of the filmy thread
she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living. We may well
marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!
Victor’s reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
them.
Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her
the lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house
was being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the
purchase of it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.
Nesta came. Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room,
praising the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes,
hangings, and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the
firegrates and plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that,
as in sound, muted splendour. He told her it was a reception night, with
music: and added: ‘I miss my... seen anybody lately?’
‘Mr. Sowerby?’ said she. ‘He was to have escorted me back. He may have
overslept himself.’
She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set
a gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.
He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.
More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
whom he had conducted to Moorsedge. ‘Kiss me,’ he said.
She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
his forehead, saying: ‘My love! my papa! my own dear dada!’ all the
words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
Londen street.
He strained her to his breast. ‘Mama soon be here?’
‘Soon.’
That was well. And possibly at the present moment applying, with
her cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a
concealment of the traces of grief.
Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
family dinner. She performed her part for his comfort, though not
prattling; and he missed his Fredi’s delicious warble of the prattle
running rill-like over our daily humdrum. Simeon Fenellan would have
helped. Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
morning’s paper. ‘No harm before Fredi, my dear. She’s a young woman
now. And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.
She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her
‘duque’;--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.
Now, mark me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer. If only we
could have her now!’
‘It would be a pleasure,’ said Nataly. Her heart had a blow in the
thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
bringing criticism.
‘The godmother?’ he glistened upon Nesta.
She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly’s imitation
of the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
theatrical operatic attitude.
‘Delicious!’ he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all
was happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
innocents;--whom heaven bless! Jealousy of their naturally closer
heart-at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and
sweetness was felt to be in the not excluding him.
Nesta engaged to sing one of the ‘old duets with her mother. She saw her
mother’s breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as
if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they
fell to. Her mother’s heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of
the girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.
She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there
might be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
think such a man as her father irrational.
People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced
by Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went
to Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
ascended a stage. There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
voluminous robes.
They crowded about their host where he stood. ‘He, is their Law!’ Colney
said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing. They had an air of
worshipping, and he of swimming.
There were also City magnates, and Lakelands’ neighbours: the gentleman
representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis. Few young
men and maids were seen. Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not
mentioning her. Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the
piano. Priscilla Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus
Barmby. Peridon and Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places.
There was no fluting. A famous Canadian lady was the principal singer.
A Galician violinist, zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of
his corporeal frame in execution, and described by Colney as ‘Paganini
on wall,’ failed to supplant Durandarte in Nesta’s memory. She was asked
by Lady Grace for the latest of Dudley. Sir Abraham Quatley named him
with handsome emphasis. Great dames caressed her; openly approved;
shadowed the future place among them.
Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn’s absence. He said: ‘A
homoeopathic doctor’s wife!’ nothing more; and by that little, he
prepared Nesta for her mother’s explanation. The great London people,
ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
on it. But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
whose marriage was of her making. She did not disapprove Priscilla’s
behaviour. Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
proper feelings. Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
one of the few not ignorant. The rumour was traceable to the City.
‘Mother, we walk on planks,’ Nesta said.
Nataly answered: ‘You will grow used to it.’
Her mother’s habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving. Nesta had a
transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
their feelings chilled her.
Nataly said: ‘It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.’ She smiled;
and at once the girl read woman’s armour on the dear face, and asked
herself, Could I be so brave? The question following was a speechless
wave, that surged at her father. She tried to fathom the scheme he
entertained. The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was.
She could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads
cannot obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding
it is the sun’s brilliance to their eyes.
Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
their world.
Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the
City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation
of a wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home
with him. Lady Grace Halley was at the office. ‘I’m an incorrigible
Stock Exchange gambler,’ she said.
‘Only,’ Victor bade her beware, ‘Mines are undulating in movement, and
their heights are a preparation for their going down.’
She said she ‘liked a swing.’
Nesta looked at them in turn.
The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present. She made play
with Dudley’s name.
This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
jealous foolish mother’s device, or that of a weak man beating about
for protection. But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt. She read rather too much
to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
the lady’s departure. Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
great of soul for jealousy. Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree
when affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
would not stoop to a meanness. ‘Plot? Nataly?’ said he, and shrugged.
In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
Nataly. He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
looked.
But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation. He
told her: ‘Fredi does her dada so much good’; not telling her in what,
or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was. She was trying
to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite
of her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he
dilated in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of
power by the simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his
way;--the lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the
meeting near midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and
dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow. There is no
grasping of one who quickens us.
His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
it was.
At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
help. That was a dream. She could more easily have uttered the words
to Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of
the vision of doing it and casting herself on noblest man’s
compassionateness; and her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music
within her, a wreath of cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with
virgins it may be, plighted her body to him for sheer urgency of soul;
drawn her by a single unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl
outward of the sheathing leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to
the shore of that strange sea, where the maid stands choosing this one
man for her destiny, as in a trance. So are these young ones unfolded,
shade by shade; and a shade is all the difference with them; they can
teach the poet to marvel at the immensity of vitality in ‘the shadow of
a shade.’
Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
the ‘perfect gentleman, good citizen’; prospective heir to an earldom
besides. She bowed to Dudley’s merits; she read off the honorific
pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
passed it.
She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how
coldly unjust. For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their
fellow-creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be
definite: no mercy is in them for the transitional. And Dudley--and it
was under her influence, and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of
development: interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.
Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance’s epigrams
upon their friends. He quite joined with his English world in its
opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of
great guns. Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest
of popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the insolence, when
they are not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed
Foreigner is overshadowing and braceing. Colney’s pretentious and
laboured Satiric Prose Epic of ‘THE RIVAL TONGUES,’ particularly
offended him, as being a clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him,
inasmuch as it was an acid friend’s collapse. How could Colney expect
his English to tolerate such a spiteful diatribe! The suicide of Dr.
Bouthoin at San Francisco was the finishing stroke to the chances of
success of the Serial;--although we are promised splendid evolutions on
the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after brilliant achievements with bat
and ball, abandons those weapons of Old England’s modern renown, for a
determined wrestle with our English pronunciation of words, and rescue
of the spelling of them from the printer. His headache over the present
treatment of the verb ‘To bid,’ was a quaint beginning for one who had
soon to plead before Japanese, and who acknowledged now ‘in contrition
of spirit,’ that in formerly opposing the scheme for an Academy, he
helped to the handing of our noble language to the rapid reporter of
news for an apathetic public. Further, he discovered in astonishment the
subordination of all literary Americans to the decrees of their literary
authorities; marking a Transatlantic point of departure, and contrasting
ominously with the unruly Islanders ‘grunting the higgledy-piggledy of
their various ways, in all the porker’s gut-gamut at the rush to the
trough.’ After a week’s privation of bat and ball, he is, lighted or
not, a gas-jet of satire upon his countrymen. As for the ‘pathetic
sublimity of the Funeral of Dr. Bouthoin,’ Victor inveighed against
an impious irony in the over dose of the pathos; and the same might
be suspected in Britannia’s elegy upon him, a strain of hot eulogy
throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but treasonably, calls it, Papboat and
Brandy:--‘our English literary diet of the day’: stimulating and
not nourishing. Britannia’s mournful anticipation, that ‘The shroud
enwinding this my son is mine!’--should the modern generation depart
from the track of him who proved himself the giant in mainly supporting
her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the note of Conservatism. But
considering, that Dr. Bouthoin ‘committed suicide under a depression
of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical
system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by
the practice’--to translate from Dr. Gannius: we are again at war with
the writer’s reverential tone, and we know not what to think: except,
that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market’s butcher in the Satiric
Art.
Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which,
to her present feeling, was inhuman. As little as our native public, had
she then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs,
visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale
of slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from
the undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire. And truly
it is not a fruit-bearing rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of
it against the damsel’s charges. He thought the use of the rod, while
expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and
those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their
seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the
sharpest rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them. Insensibility
to Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the
worser thing in consequence. And consequently upon the lack of it, and
of training to appreciate it, he described his country’s male venerables
as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting
themselves forked.
‘He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta. ‘Colney will
find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
making concessions. Here’s this absurd Serial--it fails, of course;
and then he has to say, it’s because he won’t tickle his English, won’t
enter into a “frowzy complicity” with their tastes.’
‘But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
always ready to help them,’ said Nesta.
‘If he can patronize.’
‘Does he patronize me, dada?’
‘You are one of his exceptions. Marry a title and live in state--and
then hear him! I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won’t
acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
the success. It is “a dirty road to success,” he says. So that, if
successful, I must have rolled myself in mire. I compelled him to
admit he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a
triumph!’
Nesta’s walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father
was ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his
quotations of her sayings, thoughtful sayings. ‘I declare she helps one
to think,’ he said. ‘It ‘s not precocity; it ‘s healthy inquiry. She
brings me nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else
does. I say, what a wife for a man!’
‘She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,’ said
Nataly. ‘You have not seen...?’
‘Dudley Sowerby? He’s at Cronidge, I believe. His elder brother’s in a
bad way. Bad business, this looking to a death.’
Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.
Let it be cast on Society, then! A Society opposing Nature forces us
to these murderous looks upon impediments. But what of a Society in the
dance with Nature? Victor did not approve of that. He began, under the
influence of Nesta’s companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is
in a chastened nature. And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
Idea. He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight:
a muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by
the inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
spiritual roost. She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause
of humanity. Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm
below, was most mysteriously delayed. Owing to it, in a manner almost as
mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again. But there was
a bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest. And Fredi away, he
might be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery,
one might guess, by a predecessor or two. Ta-ta-ta-to and mum! Still, in
justice to the little woman, she had been serviceable.
She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
here we are with the murder-eye again!
Nesta’s never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
intimation of her bent of mind.
‘And does my girl come to her dada to-day?’ he said, on the fifth
morning since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear,
that this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.
‘Why, don’t you know,’ said she, ‘we all meet to have tea in Mr.
Durance’s chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined by
mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.’
‘Colney’s selection of them! And Simeon Fenellan, I hope. Perhaps
Dartrey. Perhaps... eh?’
She reddened. So Dudley Sowerby’s unspoken name could bring the blush
to her cheeks. Dudley had his excuses in his brother’s condition. His
father’s health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating. Where there
are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
there are complications. Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.
‘And supposing a fog, my dearie?’ he said.
‘The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
through densest fogs as well as over deserts,’ etc. She declaimed a long
sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left
the room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her
mother’s neck, murmuring: ‘Mother! mother!’ a cry equal to ‘I am sure I
do right,’ and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line
of her instinct, without an object in sight.