Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the
sweetness in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end.
Yesterday, before Dudley Sowerby’s visit, Nataly would have been stirred
where the tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell
when seeing her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing
her speak repentantly, most tenderly. Mrs. John said: ‘You will believe
I have suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think’: and she did not
set the smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had
a key of laughter between them. Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and
at the parting kissed her. She would rather have seen her friend than
not: so far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to
the dead in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who
best loved darkness and silence. She cried to herself wilfully, that
her pride was broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of
a dignity they cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they
live.
The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain
space for recovery combative. She said:
Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I
would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt--what
I can of it. All I contend against is, injustice. And she sank into
sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to
phrase them.
Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
loneliness;--an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not
how, more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her
girl;--seemed under the hand of the angel of God. The abandonment of her
by friends, was merely the light to show it.
Midday’s post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating
to be allowed to call on her next day.--We are not so easily cast off!
Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not
been so great. She wrote: ‘Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.’
Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
receipt of Priscilla’s empty letter: for her soul’s desire was to be
doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength,
she said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.
Nesta’s being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
Doubts of the girl’s possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting
to reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational
leap, and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to
the divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal
spot for chastisement. She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal.
And that calmed her.
She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came! Therefore
the blow was proved divine. Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex! And
brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!
Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice. She
had denied herself to Nesta’s redoubled petition. Nesta knocking at the
door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her
girl on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge. She heard
the voice of Dartrey Fenellan.
He was admitted. ‘No, dear,’ she said to Nesta; and Nesta’s, ‘My own
mother,’ consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired,
sprang a stinging tear to the mother’s eyelids.
Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.
‘Is it a very low woman?’ Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
face abashed.
‘It is not,’ said he, quick to meet any abruptness.
‘She must be cunning.’
‘In the ordinary way. We say it of Puss before the hounds.’
‘To deceive a girl like Nesta!’
‘She has done no harm.’
‘Dartrey, you speak to a mother. You have seen the woman? She is?--ah!’
‘She is womanly, womanly.’
‘Quite one of those...?’
‘My dear soul! You can’t shake them off in that way. She is one of us.
If we have the class, we can’t escape from it. They are not to bear all
the burden because they exist. We are the bigger debtors. I tell you she
is womanly.’
‘It sounds like horrid cynicism.’
‘Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.’
‘Do not make me hate your chivalry. This woman is a rod on my back.
Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta’s mind!’
‘Don’t fear!’
‘Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?’
‘To Nesta herself?--not any: not to a girl like your girl.’
‘To my girl’s name? Speak at once. But I know she has. She induced Nesta
to go to her house. My girl was insulted in this woman’s house.’
Dartrey’s forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present
contempt. ‘I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of
it, knowing the facts ‘s not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers
of your girl.’
‘She is talked of!’
‘A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of
idlers!’
‘The woman is notorious.’ Nataly said it shivering.
He shook his head. ‘Not true.’
‘She has an air of a lady?’
‘She sits a horse well.’
‘Would she to any extent deceive me--impose on me here?’
‘No.’
‘Ah!’ Nataly moaned....
‘But what?’ said Dartrey. ‘There was no pretence. Her style is not worse
than that of some we have seen. There was no effort to deceive. The
woman’s plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or
two tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use. There are
women who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the
wilderness.’
‘Yes; I know!--those ideas of yours!’ Nataly had once admired him for
his knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot. ‘You
have spoken to this woman? She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?’
‘She thanked God for having met her.’
‘Is it one of the hysterical creatures?’
Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.
He laughed to himself. ‘A clever question. There is a leaning to
excitement of manner at times. It ‘s not hysteria. Allow for her
position.’
Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly
said: ‘What rank of life does the woman come from?’
‘The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your
Book-stalls. I am not precise?’
‘Leave Mr. Durance. Is she in any degree commonly well bred?...
behaviour, talk-her English.’
‘I trench on Mr. Durance in replying. Her English is passable. You may
hear...’
‘Everywhere, of course! And this woman of slipshod English and excited
manners imposed upon Nesta!’
‘It would not be my opinion.’
‘Did not impose on her!’
‘Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.’
‘Think what that says, Dartrey!’
‘You have had a detestable version of the story.’
‘Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!’
‘She may. She’s a better woman for having met her. Don’t suppose we’re
for supernatural conversions. The woman makes no show of that. But she
has found a good soul among her sex--her better self in youth, as one
guesses; and she is grateful--feels farther from exile in consequence.
She has found a lady to take her by the hand!--not a common case. She
can never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta. I forget if
she says it; I say it. You have heard the story from one of your
conventional gentlemen.’
‘A true gentleman. I have reason to thank him. He has not your ideas on
these matters, Dartrey. He is very sensitive... on Nesta’s behalf.’
‘With reference to marriage. I’ll own I prefer another kind of
gentleman. I ‘ve had my experience of that kind of gentleman. Many
of the kind have added their spot to the outcasts abominated for
uncleanness--in holy unction. Many?--I won’t say all; but men who
consent to hear black words pitched at them, and help to set good women
facing away from them, are pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites.
They, if you’ll let me quote Colney Durance to you to-day--and how is it
he is not in favour?--they are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of
Society into pillars of salt. Down comes the house. And priests can
rest in sight of it!--They ought to be dead against the sanctimony
that believes it excommunicates when it curses. The relationship is
not dissolved so cheaply, though our Society affects to think it is.
Barmby’s off to the East End of this London, Victor informs me:--good
fellow! And there he’ll be groaning over our vicious nature. Nature is
not more responsible for vice than she is for inhumanity. Both bad, but
the latter’s the worse of the two.’
Nataly interposed: ‘I see the contrast, and see whom it’s to strike.’
Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning. ‘Hardly that. Let it stand.
He ‘s only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for
crushing hope out of its frailest victims. They’re that--no sentiment.
What a world, too, look behind it!--brutal because brutish. The world
may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman. To hear of Nesta down
there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining! He
had the privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished. There
are men who think--men!--the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty
business. They depute it to certain officials. And your women--it’s the
taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little
take the humane as the enlightened view. Except, by the way, sometimes,
in secret;--they have a sisterly breast. In secret, they do occasionally
think as they feel. In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call
Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts. I won’t
repeat my reasons for educating them differently. At present we have but
half the woman to go through life with--and thank you.’
Dartrey stopped. ‘Don’t be disturbed,’ he added. ‘There’s no ground for
alarm. Not of any sort.’
Nataly said: ‘What name?’
‘Her name is Mrs. Marsett.’
‘The name is...?’
‘Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward. He came back from the Continent
yesterday.’
A fit of shuddering seized Nataly. It grew in violence, and speaking
out of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said:
‘Always that name?’
‘Before the maiden name? May have been or not.’
‘Not, you say?’
‘I don’t accurately know.’
Dartrey sprang to his legs. ‘My dear soul! dear friend--one of the best!
if we go on fencing in the dark, there’ll be wounds. Your way of taking
this affair disappointed me. Now I understand. It’s the disease of a
trouble, to fly at comparisons. No real one exists. I wished to protect
the woman from a happier sister’s judgement, to save you from alarm
concerning Nesta:--quite groundless, if you’ll believe me. Come, there’s
plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts are
more looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without
the horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim
distinction from the luckless. A girl who’s unprotected may go through
adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions.
Better if protected, we all agree. Better also if the world did not
favour the girl’s multitude of enemies. Your system of not dealing with
facts openly is everyway favourable to them. I am glad to say, Victor
recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for.
And now I must go and have a talk with the--what a change from the blue
butterfly! Eaglet, I ought to have said. I dine with you, for Victor may
bring news.’
‘Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?’
‘He makes it wherever he steps.’
‘He would reproach me for not detaining you. Tell Nesta I have to lie
down after talking. She has a child’s confidence in you.’
A man of middle age! he said to himself. It is the particular
ejaculation which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday.
He resolved, that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of
his age; and he went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of
years should give him. Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her
was an ennobling equal to celestial. For this fair girl was one of the
active souls of the world--his dream to discover in woman’s form. She,
the little Nesta, the tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though
she was, already in the fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the
simply Christian. The worse for it? Sowerby would think so. She was not
of the order of young women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary,
consent to the peace with evil, and are kept externally safe from the
smirch of evil, and are the ornaments of their country, glory of a
country prizing ornaments higher than qualities.
Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by
Mrs. Marsett--not incredulous of the girl’s heroism: that capacity
he caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the
measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:--but her beauty, or
the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of
thought in our fens. Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to
service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this
earth. Nesta was of the blooming earth. Where do we meet girl or woman
comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted
of her sex? He was puzzled by Nesta’s unlikeness in deeds and in aspect.
He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld
her; presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind. His doubts cleared
off. Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be
attached to the man Sowerby? That entirely passed belief.
And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing? Her tones were
singularly vibrating.
They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: ‘I
fancy I am in disgrace with my mother.’
‘You have a suspicion why?’ said he.
‘I have.’
She would have told him why: the words were at her lips. Previous to her
emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out. They were
arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him
drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
worshipped.
He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.
To spare pain, he said: ‘No misunderstanding with the dear mother will
last the day through. Can I help?’
‘Oh, Captain Dartrey!’
‘Drop the captain. Dartrey will do.’
‘How could I!’
‘You’re not wanting in courage, Nesta.’
‘Hardly for that!’
‘By-and-by, then.’
‘Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.’
‘You see; Dartrey, it must be.’
‘If I could!’
‘But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend,
very old friend: he’ll be tipped with grey in a year or two.’
‘I might be bolder then.’
‘Imagine it now. There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by
their names.’
Her nature rang to the implication. ‘I am not bound.’ Dartrey hung fast,
speculating on her visibly: ‘I heard you were?’
‘No. I must be free.’
‘It is not an engagement?’
‘Will you laugh?--I have never quite known. My father desired it: and
my desire is to please him. I think I am vain enough to think I read
through blinds and shutters. The engagement--what there was--has been,
to my reading, broken more than once. I have not considered it, to
settle my thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be
broken. I have given cause--if it is known. There is no blame elsewhere.
I am not unhappy, Captain Dartrey.’
‘Captain by courtesy. Very well. Tell me how Nesta judges the engagement
to be broken?’
She was mentally phrasing before she said: ‘Absence.’
‘He was here yesterday.’
All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight
drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment. ‘Then I
understand; it enlightens me.
My own mother!--my poor mother! he should have come to me. I was the
guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer. That, if in life were
direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer
through others or for them.’
‘You have soon seen that, dear girl,’ said Dartrey.
‘So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!’ Nesta sighed;
she took a sharp breath. ‘You? do you blame me too?’
He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and
heavenly candour.
But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be
honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: ‘Blame?
Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing. I’ve
made mistakes, with no bad design. A good mother’s view is not often
wrong.’
‘You pressed my hand,’ she murmured.
That certainly had said more.
‘Glad to again,’ he responded. It was uttered airily and was meant to be
as lightly done.
Nesta did not draw back her hand. ‘I feel strong when you press it.’
Her voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged. How was he to relax the
pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.
Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
shower.
‘Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,’ he said; and her
gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.
He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it
for a revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
obscurity.
The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
quicken slumbering seeds of passion.
But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock. He
stopped the word at his mouth. It was not in him to stop or moderate the
force of his eyes. She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression,
only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun. And when such an exchange
has come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded
one.
Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved. She was his. She
had not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved. Showers
of painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had
let her hand go, she had the pressure on it. The quivering intense of
the moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and
of all days coming. That is how Love slays Death. Never did girl so give
her soul.
She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
for the character she worshipped. But she could have given it to
Dartrey, despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without
any of the cravings, except to bestow.
He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
on it. Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of
young life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no
shrinking from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl
sovereignly pure, angelically tender. Was there a point of honour to
hold him back?
Nataly entered the room. She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.
‘Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?’ Nesta said.
‘We have spoken,’ her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion
to that theme.
She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the Why
should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother’s
heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
not set going, to have them discussed. And the appalling theme, sitting
offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
girl’s unblushingness. After standing as one woman against the world so
long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless. Her mind had
taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--And
Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
would have approved his doing.
She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they
say when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for
aid. The world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it
and behaviour toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of
hypocrites.
These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta’s husband. But, as she would
have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her
to require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
protection instead of inciting to rebellion. And Dartrey, the loved and
prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters
as they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta’s
head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
was.
Dartrey read Nataly’s brows. This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.
CHAPTER XXXIX. A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
accustomed. She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were
driven to whiteness. ‘Only these telegrams,’ she said, in apology.
‘Lakelands on fire?’ Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: ‘I
should not be sorry.’
Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.
Dartrey interposed: ‘I’m sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.’
‘That ranks low among the worries,’ Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.
Nesta touched her arm: ‘Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
let me!’--she turned to him: ‘before...’ at the end of her breath she
said: ‘Dartrey Fenellan. You shall see my whole heart, mother.’
Her mother looked from her at him.
‘Victor returns by the last train. He telegraphs, that he dines with--’
She handed the paper to Dartrey.
‘Marsett,’ he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for
not knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.
‘It’s to tell you he has done what he thought good,’ said Dartrey. ‘In
other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter’s work. So we
won’t talk about it till he comes. You have no company this evening?’
‘Oh! there is a pause to-night! It’s nearly as unceasing as your brother
Simeon’s old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom, till
they danced her to pieces. I do get now and then an hour’s repose,’
Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
had applied.
‘My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,’ the owner of the name
said to Nesta.
Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
the directest of the bare statements. She could have protested, that her
love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
regard for decency was livelier. Pass the deficiency in a man. But a
girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of
a Mrs. Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging:
and this girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled;
she could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential
admission of her sin’s having found her out.
She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable
to endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
Dartrey’s nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night.
It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a
manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and
an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they
are!
For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known,
that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
abominable Mrs. Marsett’s friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.
Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl’s embrace, against
whom her door was jealously locked. She hoped those two would talk much,
madly if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible,
through any short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially
glowing in Nesta, ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth.
But both of them were mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear,
that they might fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them
perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself,
shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud
in a ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a
physical effect on me!
They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them. Yet
she saw the girl’s heart brimming, either with some word spoken to
her or for joy of an unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked,
without distressful pauses. Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly
another drop in Nesta’s foolish happy cup. Could it be all because
Dartrey Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The
mother had lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost hold of
herself.
Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of
the truth of man’s list of charges against her sex, starting from their
capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had
now a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.
This led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters,
and feasts, and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential
Sunday service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition
to critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and
the thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning
again, and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in
being where she stood. She heard Dartrey’s praise of Nesta’s voice for
tearing her mother’s bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it
was haphazard irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident
of a shot.
At last, after midnight Victor arrived.
Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain. ‘Pray, go,
dear,’ her mother said. Victor kissed his Fredi. ‘Some time to-morrow,’
said he; and she forbore to beseech him.
He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey’s hand for the
good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.
Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to
do another? Nataly could merely observe. A voice pertaining to no
one present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their
daughter’s faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity
to cope with the girl. She watched Nesta’s passage from the room,
somewhat affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching
her.
‘And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!’ Victor
exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl. ‘I promised
Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps. You
remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands. Fancy the dear bit of
bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
eight; and there she lay wide awake. “What ‘s Fredi thinking of?”--“I’m
thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada.”--She could climb
them now; she has the legs.’
Nataly said: ‘You have some report to make. You dined with those
people?’
‘The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough. It’s to happen before
Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
Fredi’s doing! He has to manage, arrange.--She’s a good-looking woman,
good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won’t make a bad Lady
Marsett. Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to
her eyelids.’
‘Come to me before you go to bed,’ Nataly said, rising, her voice
foundering; ‘Good-night, Dartrey.’
She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
composure. Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp
from Victor, it burned like a poison.
‘Really Fredi’s doing--chiefly,’ said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room. ‘I played the
man of pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the
woman. She’s the better horse, as far as brains go. Good enough Lady
Marsett. I harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted. He knew of
it--spoke of you properly. The man offered all apologies; he has told
the Major he is no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite
so--and has cut him dead. Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy
as he can of the honour of my daughter’s acquaintance. Rather comical
grimace, when he vowed he’d fasten the tie. He doesn’t like marriage.
But, he can’t give her up. And she’s for patronizing the institution.
But she is ready to say good-bye to him “rather than see the truest
lady in the world insulted”--her words. And so he swallows his dose
for health, and looks a trifle sourish. Antecedents, I suppose: has to
stomach them. But if a man’s fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her
from slipping lower--and it’s an awful world, for us to let a woman be
under its wheels:--I say, a woman who has a man to lean on, unless she’s
as downright corrupt as two or three of the men we’ve known:--upon my
word, Dartrey, I come round to some of your ideas on these matters. It’s
this girl of mine, this wee bit of girl in her little nightshirt with
the frill, astonishes me most:--“thinking of the tops of the mountains
at night!” She has positively done the whole of this work-main part. I
smiled when I left the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting
us all on the road. It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow,
you know; he never came nearer to doing it. I hope it’s his better
mind now; I do hope the man won’t have cause to regret it. He speaks of
Nesta--sort of rustic tone of awe. Mrs. Marsett has impressed him. He
expects the title soon, will leave the army--the poor plucked British
army, as you call it!--and lead the life of a country squire: hunting!
Well, it’s not only the army, it’s over Great Britain, with this
infernal wealth of ours!--and all for pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost
for a sugar plum! Eh, Dartrey? Upon my word, it appears to me, Esau’s
the Englishman, Jacob the German, of these times. I wonder old Colney
hasn’t said it. If we’re not plucked, as your regiments are of the
officers who have learnt their work, we’re emasculated:--the nation’s
half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle.’
‘Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give
the army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take
the shilling--and not worth it,’ said Dartrey.
‘Sounds like old Colney,’ Victor remarked to himself. ‘But, believe me,
I’m ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me. It wouldn’t
so much matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and
self-respect. That little fellow Skepsey’s closer to the right notion,
and the right practice, too, than any of us. With his Matilda Pridden!
He has jumped out of himself to the proper idea of women, too. And
there’s a man who has been up three times before the magistrates, and is
considered a disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens,
I declare! I never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary,
witless kind of envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once
had and never quite got hold of again. The match for him is Fredi. She
threatens to be just as devoted, just as simple, as he. I positively
doubt whether any of us could stop her, if she had set herself to do a
thing she thought right.’
‘I should not like to think our trying it possible,’ said Dartrey.
‘All very well, but it’s a rock ahead. We shall have to alter our
course, my friend. You know, I dined with that couple, after the private
twenty minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as
we were close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the
woman happy, besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good
intentions--politic! And subsequently I heard from her, that--you’ll
think nothing of it!--Fredi promised to stand by her at the altar.’
Dartrey said, shrugging: ‘She needn’t do that.’
‘So we may say. You’re dealing with Nesta Victoria. Spare me a contest
with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.’
‘When the thing to be done is thought right by her.’
‘But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?’
‘In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.’
‘Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
Sowerby! I don’t complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!’
‘Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
women rooted to the bed of the river, they’ll veer with the tides, like
water-weeds, and no wonder.’
‘Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey. We can’t have
women independent.’
‘Then don’t be exclaiming about their vagaries.’
Victor mused: ‘It’s wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
now: but what a head she has! Oh, she’ll listen to reason: only mark
what I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young
fellow, will imagine she’s the most docile of wives in the world. And
as to wife, I’m not of the contrary opinion. But qua individual female,
supposing her to have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it’s he who’ll
have to turn the corner second, if they’re to trot in the yoke together.
Or it may be an idea of service to a friend--or to her sex! That Mrs.
Marsett says she feels for--“bleeds” for her sex. The poor woman didn’t
show to advantage with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks
in jerks, hot phrases. She holds herself well. At the end of the dinner
she behaved better. Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead. But
Marsett ‘s Marsett to the end. Rather touching!--the poor fellow
said: Deuce of a bad look-out for me if Judith doesn’t have a child!
First-rate sportsman, I hear. He should have thought of his family
earlier. You know, Dartrey, the case is to be argued for the family as
well. You won’t listen. And for Society too! Off you go.’
A battery was opened on that wall of composite.
‘Ah, well,’ said Victor. ‘But I may have to beg your help, as to the
so-called promise to stand at the altar. I don’t mention it upstairs.’
He went to Nataly’s room.
She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
might have sleep.
She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade
us--we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!
Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon
his girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta’s conduct. She
thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a
moral insensibility to the offence?
This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby’s knock at the street door. Or
sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
withdraw from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed
about her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to
the protection of Dudley’s name. Robust, sanguine, Victor’s child, she
might--her mother listened to a devil’s whisper--but no; Nesta’s aim was
at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body. No, but the world would
bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity,
it would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation
until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth,
and she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that
another would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to
the act of breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I
were galloping across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth: and
out of ken of the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.
Nature thereat renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that
were supported by Dr. Themison’s account of the virtuous married lady
who chafed at the yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent
union the ideal. Nataly’s brain had a short gallop over moorland. It
brought her face to face with Victor’s girl, and she dropped once more
to her remorse in herself and her reproaches of Nesta. The girl had
inherited from her father something of the cataract’s force which won
its way by catching or by mastering, uprooting, ruining!
In the morning she was heavily asleep. Victor left word with Nesta,
that the dear mother was not to be disturbed. Consequently, when Dudley
called to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would
receive him.
Their interview lasted an hour.
Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.
His perplexity of countenance was eloquent. He had, before seeing the
young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
English gentleman should be asked to consume. She now referred him
to her father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said,
explain whatever there was to be explained. But she added, that if she
was expected to abandon a friend, she could not. Dudley had argued with
her upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues;
he had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
stamp of honourable families.
‘And what did Fredi say to that?’ Victor inquired.
‘Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the
precepts were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees. When it is a
question of a young lady associating with a notorious woman!’
‘Not notorious. You spoil your case if you “speak extremely,” as a
friend says. I saw her yesterday. She worships “Miss Radnor.”’
Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,’ said Dudley
hurriedly. ‘As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
association ceases. Her name: I have to consider my family.’
‘Good anchorage! You must fight it out with the girl. And depend
upon this--you’re not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of
character; unless you try to bridle her. She belongs to her time. I
don’t mind owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi ‘ll be merry
to-night. Here’s a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh
this morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in
May; desirous to embrace her. She wrote to the office. Not a word of her
duque. She has pitched him to the winds. You may like to carry it off to
Fredi and please her.’
‘I have business,’ Dudley replied.
‘Away to it, then!’ said Victor. ‘You stand by me?--we expect our South
London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
February. You have family interest there.’
‘Personally, I will do my best,’ Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
with the universal censor’s angry spite, that the revolutions of the
world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
Bohemians. And there are eulogists of the modern time! And the man’s
daughter was declared to belong to it! A visit in May to the Italian
cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.
At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
between Nesta and Nataly. He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison,
and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:
particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after
opposing, strongly favoured. How are we ever to get a clue to the
labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex! Dartrey’s
theories were absurd. Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?
The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.
‘Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,’ said Nesta.
‘Mr. Sowerby! My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart. You
did not dismiss him?’
‘I repeated the word he used. I thought of mother. The blood leaves her
cheeks at a disappointment now. She has taken to like him.’
‘Why, you like him!’
‘I could not vow.’
‘Tush.’
‘Ah, don’t press me, dada. But you will see, he has disengaged himself.’
He had done it, though not in formal speech. Slow digestion of his
native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
told him he had the strongest hold.
She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley’s
grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for
them. But Nataly was not the weeper.
Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor. Dudley bore no
resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more
her mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
actually supplicating. So that the reality of Dudley’s love rose to
conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
thoughts. Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity
of her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had
her whole being in charge accept or reject her. Nothing else appeared in
prospect. Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
depart with it. But always he returned. At last, as if under tuition,
he refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to
be increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
distasteful to her. The slight cast of sourness on his lower features
had almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged. He complimented
her for her ‘generous benevolence,’ vaguely, yet with evident
sincereness; he admitted, that the modern world is ‘attempting
difficulties with at least commendable intentions’; and that the
position of women demands improvement, consideration for them also.
He said feelingly: ‘They have to bear extraordinary burdens!’ There he
stopped.
The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt. He had,
however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
tolerance. Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
affected her. Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society
to its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under
cloak;--not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the
vitiation of the soul. He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning
her. It followed, that he had the lover’s desire for assurance of
exclusive possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned,
he grew exacting. He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey
Fenellan’s ideas.
Nesta replied: ‘I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.’
A provoking evasion. He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
stiffen her figure. ‘Is one of them from that gentleman?’
‘One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles. She comes to me early
next month.’
‘The other?’
‘The other is also from a friend.’
‘A dear friend?’
‘Not so dear. Her letter gives me happiness.’
‘She writes--not from France: from...? you tempt me to guess.’
‘She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a
way to make her eternally thankful.’
‘The place she writes from is...?’
The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting. He
demanded assurance.
‘It matters in no degree,’ she said.
Dudley ‘thought himself excusable for inquiring.’
She bowed gently.
The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
Bohemians enraged him.
‘Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--I
surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother’s
consent:--in communication, in correspondence with...?’
Again she bowed her head; saying: ‘It is true.’
‘With that person?’
He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
only to be bitten. ‘I decline to believe it,’ he said with forcible
sound.
‘She is married,’ was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.
‘Married or not!’ he cried, and murmured: ‘I have borne--. These may be
Mr. Dartrey Fenellan’s ideas; they are not mine. I have--Something
at least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know,
clergymen who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to
call one of them a friend! Ask any lady, any! Your mother...’
‘I beg you will not distress my mother,’ said Nesta.
‘I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?’ said Dudley.
‘All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.’
‘You are.’ He added hastily: ‘Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
living who would tell you otherwise. At all events, in public opinion,
if it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife
or spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with... hard words
are wholesome in such a case: “touch pitch,” yes! My sense is coherent.’
‘Quite,’ said Nesta.
‘And you do not agree with me?’
‘I do not.’
‘Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?’
‘In this instance, better.’
‘Then I retire. I cannot retain my place here. You may depend upon it,
the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance
of women leading disorderly lives.’
‘Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?’
‘Men, too, of course.’
‘You do not exclude the men from Society.’
‘Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.’
‘Oh! the worthy books, then. I would read them, if I could find them.’
‘They are banned by self-respecting readers.’
‘It grieves me to think differently.’
Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed
to him, that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not
extinguish, was in a state of liquefaction.
Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: ‘I do hope
you may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
erroneous.’
‘But do not distress her,’ Nesta implored him. ‘She is not well. When
she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the
lady, so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women. I
shall hope she will not disapprove of me. I cannot forsake a friend.’
‘I beg to say good-bye,’ said Dudley.
She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.
He ‘wished her prudent advisers.’
She thanked him. ‘In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.’
A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.
Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
under a salutation regretful in frostiness.
A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
happy with a piece of Parisian riband.
Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth
and House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs.
Burman was the sole exception. To the stupefaction of physicians, in a
manner to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an
instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are
we standing if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.
February went by. And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman. That is to say,
the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
one of our fixtures. On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
from her. Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
for the middle of April. Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman
and nourished her on comfortable fiction. So the death of the member
for the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in
maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility
lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his
vacant seat.