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Grimm Brothers - "Household Tales by Brothers Grimm"

George Meredith - "One of Our Conquerors, v3"

Samuel Pepys - "Diary of Samuel Pepys, August/September 1664"

Rev. William Evans - "The Great Doctrines of the Bible"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, Complete




The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold of
Dudley Sowerby at Dreux. He was at the window from time to time, counting
heads below. For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to supplant the
flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena section of the
Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile. She consulted her
mother, and they sang it. The crowds below, swollen to a block of the
street, were dead still, showing the instinctive good manners of the
people. Then mademoiselle astonished them with a Provencal or Cevennes
air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but it suited her mezzo-soprano
tones; and it rang massively of the martial-religious. To what heights of
spiritual grandeur might not a Huguenot France have marched! Dudley
Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that could be stirred in him with
force, by the soul of religion issuing through music, addressed his
ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley. She did nor shrug or snub him, but
rejoined: 'I could go to battle with that song in the ears.' She liked
seeing him so happily transformed; and liked the effect of it on Nesta
when his face shone in talking. He was at home with the girl's eyes, as
he had never been. A song expressing in one of the combative and
devotional, went to the springs of his blood; for he was of an old
warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed peaceful maxims and
commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness. As much as wine, will
music bring out the native bent of the civilized man: endow him with
language too. He was as if unlocked; he met Nesta's eyes and ran in a
voluble interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts; and at the
moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some extent assured, station
beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady would be helped to
perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.

Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering subtlety. She had
hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
she had stipulated for his presence on the journey. She remembered
Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man. Mr. Barmby had tried
all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably once
at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle found
themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought work while Nesta
had to take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there along the
narrow outer castle-walls. And Mr. Barmby, upon occasions, had set that
dimple in Nesta's cheek quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was not at
hand, and there was no telling how it was done, beyond the evidence that
Victor willed it so.

From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought more
into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
struggle with him. But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was almost as
if he had descended to earth from the skies. She now saw his mortality in
the miraculous things he did. The reason of it was, that through the
perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an opposing spirit had
plainer view of his aim, to judge it. She thought it a mean one.

The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly. She
could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she could trust
him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery. Still
she was compelled to judge.

When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: 'This is the news
of the day, my love! It's death at last. We shall soon be thanking heaven
for freedom'; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a torture
of remorse on his behalf. A shattering throb of her heart gave her sight
of herself as well. For so it is with the woman who loves in subjection,
she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.'

'You have a letter, Victor?'

'Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.'

He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
interested animated conduit necessarily will. Neither of them smiled.

The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.

It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!

She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness. The murderous hope stood
up, stood out in forms and pictures. There was one of a woman at her ease
at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic haunting
figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of scorn
for a bold-faced impostor. Nataly's lips twitched at the remembrance of
quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing that a large
instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social offender
fearing exposure. Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a confounding
spectacle. To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her glorious
attributes have become the executioner's implements. She must for her
soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration approaches.

'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.

She nodded. Down rolled the first big tear.

We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.

'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
tears. 'Don't mind me. I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the tearful
woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake of soap.
Skepsey has made his peace with you?'

Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about. We're a mixed
lot, all of us-the best! You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'

'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them. Captain Dartrey
thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'

'So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he's a worthy little
velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes Colney had been with us.
Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
grow again.'

Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby! It was the
very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
with us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement. A
pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the contrast
of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which the guilty
was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push be eloquent
to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence rose up to
clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not any
sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy to come, nothing could
remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed of the succour in
eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke over the
population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard word. But
eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to Nesta. It
seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the Merciful Disposer!
. . . . Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed. They clash to the end
of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a remote
Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or that issue,
instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we will; marking on
us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to the divine, we and
ours who follow, offspring of body or mind. She was in her error, from
judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals. Chiefly her
error was, to try to be thinking at all amid the fevered tangle of her
sensations.

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
footing with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself for taking
pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard,
ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not
to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater
than common need of the protection.




CHAPTER XVII

CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS

That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us. History, pleads for the
pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there. The
pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in
the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in coloured glass
and marbles.

Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit 'the spot of so
impressive a monument': as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures of
incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
pathos of his exhaustless 'whacking of the platitudes'; which still
retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.

Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
poetic fire. It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
estimation among his countrymen of all classes. They are shown by example
how to look, think, speak; what to do. Poets are disturbing; they cannot
be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the metal, unless
you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and decorations; and
these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind us of a parody, to
convulse the sacred dome! Established plain prose officials do better for
our English. The audience moved round with heads of undertakers.

Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendoveer' while Mr.
Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags. And those
who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
wits are absent. Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
Barmby's remarks: The Fate of Princes! The Paths of Glory! St. Louis was
a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader. St. Louis was for
Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness
by tears. She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's halo, that
swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers. She listened to
Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt: he
rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
service she was holding mutely. Mademoiselle upon St. Louis: 'Worthy to
be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the
thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother
emotions. Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply
moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be
musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales. This crypt of the
recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
altar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death. With such a
King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to
political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were,
would be appeased, transfigured. She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
leader's advent.

On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature
saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her hopes and
prayers were dumb in her bosom. It signified shame. She knew not the how,
for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment of earth and
a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse. But if the new
crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born prince nobly man
would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face of
women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.
Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
through their obscurities find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The Rev. Septimus of
course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections
to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong sentiment
rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility of her
lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England: an all
but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper. He
remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
nuptials in his fifty-fourth year. Why not? But we ask it of Heaven and
Man, why not? Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or youngish; her
own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue the matter with a
young or youngish person of her sex. Could it be a reasonable woman--a
woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the flocks?
But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument thereon
with a lady.

Luther . . . but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature . . . no, nor can
there possibly be allusions to Nature. Mr. Barmby wondered at Protestant
parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower of English
womanhood. However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially also; there
they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman, a handsome
face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in the looks
which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously adverse.

The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
keep guard over the deeper among her own. At the Chateau de Gisors,
leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle's,
a reverence for the prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his
watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on the
circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres. But the
Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
re-edified it. The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a day rather
increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the possessor of
it, more the worshipper.

Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!' after seeing the drift
of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the Bethesda
and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were, the
towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of its
multitudinous outroar. The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus, addressed to
Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her 'Either'; and his gentle
hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could not be
unnoticed by women.

Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
indulgent skipper of parental pages?

Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators' daggers out at any
instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly's peace of mind. But she
trusted her girl's laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
overbalancing. She left the ground where maternal meditations are
serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's heart as a lover.
Was it worth inquiry?

A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with mention
of Mr. Barmby's name.

Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders. 'We are at present much enamoured of
Bethesda.'

That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
smothered it.

Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:

Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
waves on deep sea. The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington's third son to the
coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor. These
are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the man
who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
Service. 'To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is a
step!' Lady Blachington said. Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints and
revealings. There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor's London
table. He was already winning his way, apparently without effort, to be
the popular man of that neighbourhood. A subterranean tide or a slipping
of earth itself seemed bearing her on. She had his promise indeed, that
he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of his freedom
had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the heart of the word
went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who
could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to
thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at Lakelands in August, to
an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
an East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening. Doubtless a worthy
Charity. Nataly was alive to the duties of wealth. Had it been simply a
demand for a donation, she would not have shown that momentary pucker of
the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a contrast with the generous
vivacity of the husband.

Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement. Nay, she beheld
herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
doing of things against the better mind. An outer world is thoughtless of
situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of
the readily heroical. She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of
the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency
affecting her character lay in her want of language. A tongue to speak
and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way. But then
again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and strike
at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
electrical vitality of a man like Victor. It was an exultation of their
life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
breathed a reproach upon one another.

She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
or acts. The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
prostrate. She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.

Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree for
stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta. The girl not having inclinations,
and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they were easily kept
from the dangerous count of two.

Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever a
minute quite alone with her lamb. Incredulously she perceived signs of a
shock. The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return for
a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids. Out it came, on a
nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident, to bring it
nearer to comprehension. Mr. Barmby--and decide who will whether it is
that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by his fires are
subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by stealing minutes
enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself. And no wonder the girl
looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace of
illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap from hounds;
her instincts alarmed, instead of rich imagination colouring and
fostering.

She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
love in her ears from the mouth of a man.

There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be,
the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of
her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
grasses to the breath of a still twilight. She lived too spiritedly to
hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the
virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her
down, disorder, discolour. But now she had heard it: the word, the very
word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man's voice! The
first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book
of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;--the shimmering woods
and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the
recognition--the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson
outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
an end. These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of! That
masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden. The voice she
had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.