To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may
be restorative as air of Summer Alps. It is by contrast blooming life.
Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea;
here and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving
to pay visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip
him of the shroud, sing of the sweet old world. He cannot but be moved
to the extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.
A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
him for any utterance of penitence. That worm-like thread of voice came
up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
without the word. He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at
the same time bidding her smell ‘the marvellous oxygen of the park.’ He
declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.
She slightly pressed his arm for answer. Perhaps she did not feel
so deeply? She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
Marechale. At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!
Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
door, who was almost now seeing his mistress’s ghost--would have the
privilege to-morrow. He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn’s,
at Nataly’s request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
odour of the cab. Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him. He talked of the
gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt
figure symbolized!... And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he
had the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta’s hand and hold it until they
reached home. Those two talking together in the brief words of their
deep feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano
filial to the divine maternal contralto. Those two dear ones mounted to
Nataly’s room.
The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
each looked the happier for it. Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed. He
did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to
keep her from excitement. ‘My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
Burman!’ Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness. She was never
below a situation, he affirmed.
He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly. She began panting at
a word about Mr. Barmby’s ready services. When, however, she related
the state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each
of them to her, he said, embracing her: ‘Your wisdom shall guide us, my
love,’ and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.
She sighed: ‘If one could think, that a girl with Nesta’s revolutionary
ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest
in the ideas he entertains!’
Victor sighed too. He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.
She was distressed; she moaned: ‘My girl! my girl: I should wish to
leave her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband. New
ideas must come in politics, but in Society!--and for women! And the
young having heads, are the most endangered. Nesta vows her life to it!
Dartrey supports her!’
‘See Colney,’ said Victor. ‘Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
has. Though you don’t care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and
the blue hand of his nation’s protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
failure with the public, of course! However, he seems to seem wise with
you. The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly.
See Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to sleep. We have got over the
worst. I speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of
notes and points for them.’
His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more
than a skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
America, all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her
way to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would
show himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
upon the world as a factory of ideas. Colney’s insolent charge, that
the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would
be confuted. For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
benevolent aim. And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
future solved.
Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
heated. Only the vision was wanted.
On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
brilliant results. That was after a fall.
There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.
Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
from falling further. His bath-water chilled. He jumped out and rubbed
furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment;
with the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly! And he tested
it to prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically
easier than the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our
internal Courts for surpassing the latter tedious performance.
His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except for the making
of money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
uninterrupted successes, was a blank. Or rather we have to wish it were
a blank. The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it
is in prospect. A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to
proofs of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we
owe him nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding
of Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we
are astonished to find we have in our daylight house. How is it? Would
other men be so sensitive to him? Victor was appeased by the assurance
of his possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he
settled the debate by thinking: ‘After all, for a man like me, battling
incessantly, a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can’t be starved, must be
fed--though, pah! But I’m not to be questioned like other men.--But how
about an aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is
no escaping distinctions! my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And
indulges?--Say, an exceptional nature! Supposing a certain beloved woman
to pronounce on the case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of
it.’---He cried: My love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy
to right her to-day, tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the
hour of my release!
Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure. Victor entered into
it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall. His intensity of sensation
launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness
to the measure of time gone crazy. He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
Burman, as the cause of the nonsense. He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.
Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her
villa over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner.
‘We go,’ Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her
lips--too much a resurrection smile. There was talk of the Meeting
at the theatre: Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the
deceased Member, was known, and was likely to have a good reception. Fun
and enthusiasm might be expected.
‘And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,’ he whispered as
he was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy
knot crossed Nataly’s forehead, she seemed paler. He sent back Nesta and
mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.
Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and
Mr. Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
fortress--were the only guests. When they rose, Nataly drew Victor
aside. He came dismayed to Nesta. She ran to her mother. ‘Not hear papa
speak? Oh, mother, mother! Then I stay with her. But can’t she come? He
is going to unfold ideas to us. There!’
‘My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,’ Nataly said. ‘No,
dearest; it would agitate me to go. I’m better here. I shall be at peace
when the night is over.’
‘But you will be all alone here, dear mother.’
Nataly’s eyes wandered to fall on Colney. He proposed to give her his
company. She declined it. Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.
‘My love,’ Nataly said, ‘the thought of the Meeting--’ She clasped at
her breast; and she murmured: ‘I shall be comforted by your being with
him. There is no danger there. But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace
when this night is over.’
Colney persuaded her to have him for companion. Mr. Peridon, who was to
have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor’s favourite pieces. Nesta
and Victor overbore Nataly’s objections to the lover’s generosity. So
Mr. Peridon was left. Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the
carriage to kiss her mother again, saying: ‘Just one last kiss, my own!
And she’s not to look troubled. I shall remember everything to tell my
own mother. It will soon be over.’
Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.
Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
delivery to her mother of news at the door. ‘She is easily startled now
by trifles--you have noticed?’
Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
believed he had ‘The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
over! And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands. A fortnight, and
we have our first Concert. Durandarte! Oh, the dear heart ‘ll be at
peace when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting. Not a doubt of that, even
though Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.’
‘One critic the less for you!’ said Nesta. Skepsey was to meet her
carriage at the theatre.
Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding
thitherward on foot.
‘I have my speech,’ said Victor. ‘You prepare the way for me, following
our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else
they shout for. We shall have a great evening. I suspect I shall find
Themison or Jarniman when I get home. You don’t believe in intimations?
I’ve had crapy processions all day before my eyes. No wonder, after
yesterday!’
‘Dubbleson mustn’t drawl it out too long,’ said Fenellan.
‘We ‘ll drop a hint. Where’s Dartrey?’
‘He’ll come. He’s in one of his black moods: not temper. He’s got a
notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him. She was
not only ready to go, she was glad to go. She had a bit of the heroine
in her and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to
herself.’
‘Tell Nataly that,’ said Victor. ‘And tell her about Dartrey. Harp on
it. Once she was all for him and our girl. But it’s a woman--though the
dearest! I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes. We must
make the best of things, if we’re for swimming. The task for me to-night
will be, to keep from rolling out all I’ve got in my head. And I’m
not revolutionary, I’m for stability. Only I do see, that the firm
stepping-place asks for a long stride to be taken. One can’t get the
English to take a stride--unless it’s for a foot behind them: bother
old Colney! Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.
There!--But I want to say it! I want to save the existing order. I want,
Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we ‘re threatened with. Great
fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
mediaeval Barons. Dispersion of wealth, is the secret. Nataly’s of that
mind with me. A decent poverty! She’s rather wearying, wants a change.
I’ve a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean. All
our set. She likes quiet. I believe in my political recipe for it.’
He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.
‘It appears to me, you’re on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,’
observed Simeon. ‘Strike off Priscilla’s viands and friend Pempton’s
couple of glasses, and there’s your aristocracy established; but with
rather a dispersed recognition of itself.’
‘Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your
own,’ said Victor. ‘Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial.
The last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not
so bad. The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness. And Bobinikine
turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
discovered in an emigrant’s house-to-let! And Semhians--I forget what
and Mytharete’s forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
vulture on the skull of a desert camel! But, I complain, there’s nothing
to make the English love the author; and it’s wasted, he’s basted, and
the book ‘ll have no sale. I hate satire.’
‘Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor. Does it hurt our people much?’
‘Not a bit; doesn’t touch them. But I want my friends to succeed!’
Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme. Victor wished
the Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset. He deferred to
the suggestion, that the Hospital’s doing so seemed appropriate.
‘I’m always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,’ he said. Then
he queried: ‘But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
She may be going--or she’s gone already, poor woman! I shall have that
scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
Only, you know, Simeon, they don’t feel the end, as we in health
imagine. Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace. I
‘ve a mind to send up to Regent’s Park with inquiries. It would look
respectful. God forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn.
Though I will say, a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out
of it yesterday. I don’t feel it any longer. What are you jerking at?’
‘Only to remark, that if the thing’s done for us, we haven’t it so much
on our sensations.’
‘More, if we’re sympathetic. But that compels us to be philosophic--or
who could live! Poor woman!’
‘Waft her gently, Victor!’
‘Tush! Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
what I can’t mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
on their forsaken South of the City. I ‘ve my scheme. Elected or not, I
shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first instalment.’
Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he
was to deliver. He could not but reflect on the genial man’s willingness
and capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the
position into which he had plunged himself.
They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors
by Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged. When finally they reached
the stage, they spied at Nesta’s box, during the thunder of the rounds
of applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham
Quatley, Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a
politician ‘never of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny
fellow!--go anywhere to hear him,’ he vowed.
‘Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,’ said
Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
in it.
Nesta was wondering at Dartrey’s absence. Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
chairman, the ‘gentleman of local influence,’ had animated the drowsed
wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
Simeon, did Dartrey appear. Simeon’s name was shouted, in proof of
the happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind
Nesta. ‘Half an hour with the dear mother,’ he said.
Nesta’s eyes thanked him. She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
sitting close behind. Louise de Seilles. ‘You know Matilda Pridden.’
Dartrey held his hand out. ‘Has she forgiven me?’
Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the
no need for it, with perfect good breeding. Dartrey was moved to think
Skepsey’s choice of a woman to worship did him honour. He glanced at
Louise. Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with
Nesta. He said: ‘I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear
that the great speech of the evening is done; it’s nothing else. I’ll
run to her as soon as it’s over.’
‘Oh, good of you! And kind of Mr. Peridon!’ She turned to Louise, who
smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.
Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand
to them, and his delight at Simeon’s ringing points: which were, to
Dartrey’s mind, vacuously clever and crafty. Dartrey despised effects
of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
nerved to stand for their country.
Nesta dived into her father’s brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle
pained by Dartrey’s aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads
agape and another cheer rang round. He smiled with her, to be with her,
at a hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner
of winning electors to consider the country’s interests and their own.
One fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon,
that permitted the taking of liberties with the orator’s Christian
name, mildly amused him. He had no objection to hear ‘Simmy’ shouted, as
Louise de Seilles observed. She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
machinery of Freedom.
Skepsey entered the box.
‘We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,’ he said, after a look at Matilda
Pridden.
There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.
‘And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
promises,’ continued Simeon: ‘You have his word, my friends!’ And he
told the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned
the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo
hand on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled
forth three white hairs, and presented them: ‘And as honourably to
the usurious Jews as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was
accepted!’
Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
would hear the enemy say he did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered,
if we ‘re not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish,
who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
nostrum. So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors. And sure enough his patient
came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one
at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good physician did.
Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and
with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices. He vowed he
was the man. Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his
tender parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten
nothing whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized
on him in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the
surgery, knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the
felicity of exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under
dissecting hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific
for him. All to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions
of all the scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr
on the scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be no such
empirical science.
Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy. He brought it home to Beaves
Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it. Yet the orator
was asked: ‘Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?’
He countered his questioner: ‘Just to liberate you from your moribund
state, my friend.’ And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit
for interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to
give her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
feathers, and shouting: ‘Polly tho dram dry!’--which struck on the nob
of Jack’s memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
cried; ‘That did it! Now to business!’ for he was hungry. ‘And when I
catch the ring of this world’s laugh from you, my friend...!’ Simeon’s
application of the story was drowned.
After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: ‘You
keep that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the
old widow woman for her money, Simmy!’
Victor leaned forward. Simeon towered. He bellowed
‘And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!’
It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre. The man went under.
Simeon flowed. Conscience reproached him with the little he had done for
Victor, and he had now his congenial opportunity.
Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed.
To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the
devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort. Dartrey sat
rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap. Nesta looked at Louise
when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It
was Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face. Apparently he was not
intelligible or audible but the next moment Victor sprang erect. Dartrey
quitted the box. Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried words to right
and left. He passed from sight, Mr. Peridon with him; and Dartrey did
not return.
Nesta felt her father’s absence as light gone: his eyes rayed light.
Besides she had the anticipation of a speech from him, that would win
Matilda Pridden. She fancied Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the
spell of the hilarity he roused. A gentleman behind him spoke in his
ear; and Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his flow. Matilda Pridden’s
gaze on him and the people was painful to behold: Nesta saw her mind.
She set herself to study a popular assembly. It could be serious to the
call of better leadership, she believed. Her father had been telling
her of late of a faith he had in the English, that they (or so her
intelligence translated his remarks) had power to rise to spiritual
ascendancy, and be once more the Islanders heading the world of a new
epoch abjuring materialism--some such idea; very quickening to her,
as it would be to this earnest young woman worshipped by Skepsey. Her
father’s absence and the continued shouts of laughter, the insatiable
thirst for fun, darkened her in her desire to have the soul of the good
working sister refreshed. They had talked together; not much: enough for
each to see at either’s breast the wells from the founts of life.
The box-door opened, Dartrey came in. He took her hand. She stood-up to
his look. He said to Matilda Pridden: ‘Come with us; she will need you.’
‘Speak it,’ said Nesta.
He said to the other: ‘She has courage.’
‘I could trust to her,’ Matilda Pridden replied.
Nesta read his eyes. ‘Mother?’
His answer was in the pressure.
‘Ill?’
‘No longer.’
‘Oh! Dartrey.’ Matilda Pridden caught her fast.
‘I can walk, dear,’ Nesta said.
Dartrey mentioned her father.
She understood: ‘I am thinking of him.’
The words of her mother: ‘At peace when the night is over,’ rang. Along
the gassy passages of the back of the theatre, the sound coming from an
applausive audience was as much a thunder as rage would have been. It
was as void of human meaning as a sea.