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Anthony Trollope - "The Belton Estate"

Horatio Alger, Jr. - "Frank's Campaign or the Farm and the Camp"

Carrie V. Shuman - "Favorite Dishes"

Georg Ebers - "In The Fire Of The Forge, Volume 5."

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his
darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious pictures
of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth from the
London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks and snow
lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood
undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a
dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it shooting
aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and wide-armed in its
pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in immobility, to the
heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory.
And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and maize, and
lower vineyards and central tall green spires! Walking beside young
Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the trips and twists
of a rill, that was lured a little further down through scoops, ducts,
and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.

He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on
the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver
foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an
air of 'Whither you will, so it be on'; happy for service as in freedom.
Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded
through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:
dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest
on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.
Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and
that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly's
tender pleading, 'Could you not help to give him another chance, dear
Victor?'--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or more
or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office; which
he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an untutored
rill of the mountains, if ever was one.

Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures: Lakelands had hold of him!

Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the
slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must
be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the
disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on
the centre.--You're dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry
the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!

Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court. He
entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to
independence. It could not be argued publicly, and the more the
pity:--for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his outlook
over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly
constrained) spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to
the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent. And it helped the plea in
his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he had
to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the most
unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself it was to
cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in
not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass. He could see
his Nataly's pained endurance beneath her habitual submission. Her effort
was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the gathering at
Lakelands.

On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs
by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the
Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the
railway-carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast
octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of
its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while. He had
the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as when
the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down upon
tablets in the head behind. Victor observed his look at Nataly. The look
was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing. She was not or did not
appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
professional gentleman's holiday reckoning of the hours before the return
train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it. She was, as
she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self
again--defying suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world
honoured in uplifting her.

Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison's very warm
applause. He named the greatest of contraltos. Colney did better service
than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured Dr.
Themison's ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of European
Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at the Court of
Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the follies of the
countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think, those of Old
England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was about to begin, she made
her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, 'Oh! Delphica!' For she was
naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby's distaste for the story and disgust
with the damsel Delphica.

Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of the
expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter for an
Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not encourage a
Cis-Atlantic bard. To America the honours from beginning to end belong.

So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption of
the language it may choose among the foremost famous European tongues.
Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a whole people
at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as the most
precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the principal Seats of
Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity to match that of his unexampled
and all but stupefying mission. A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman, the
slight American accent contracted during a lengthened residence in the
United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him to pay his visit of
exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court to the distinguished
Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the
learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him; a scholar
endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to cite and
instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan and
civilization in the filial embrace of mother English. 'For to this it
must come predestinated,' says the astonishing applicant. 'We seem to see
a fitness in it,' says the cogitative Rev. Doctor. 'And an Island England
in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,' adds the former. 'We
think of things more pregnant,' concludes the latter, with a dry gleam of
ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the Review upon his
recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let the
newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!

Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at Dr.
Bouthoin's disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the
expedition be secret. 'Better so,' says pure Saxon's champion. On a day
patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.
Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,
stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and
other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in the
ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest
adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic
pair speaking pure Saxon or other.

Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period
(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a
belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience. He passed
under veil the Rev. Doctor's acknowledgement of Neptune's power, and the
temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments of
these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of
certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the
indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,
pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking
of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him
is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for
the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible
incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then, of
the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages the
young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them to say
a word? What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble, uncontrolled
M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like the
pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood,
which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another, hitherto
unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires
as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of
Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language. Greek, is
it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic
chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with
the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth. There
must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in privacy. Delphica
draws Mr. Semhians aside.

Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the
transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells
of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent
as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths of
the races of mankind. Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman, the
Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the
Court of Japan. Concurrents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on a
contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius. He is
astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!

'Have you ever imagined anything?' Dr. Gannius asks him. Entomologist,
botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready
regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of
bath-slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who, in
awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of
discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he
has no alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong
one; a relative too; he is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least. This
German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his
argumentative war into the enemy's country: and he presents on all sides
a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the
doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really
like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless
flesh to his beak. So we are cousinly.

Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from 'our
simpleton of the pastures,' as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his daughter,
that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth upon this most
mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their Government! Babes
in the Wood that they are! 'a la grace de dieu' at every turn that cries
for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of English arms behind them, to
support--and with the grandest of national prizes in view!--the pleading
oration before the Court of the elect, erudites, we will call them, of an
intelligent, yet half barbarous, people; hesitating, these, between
eloquence and rival eloquence, cunning and rival cunning. Why, in such a
case, the shadow-nimbus of Force is needed to decide the sinking of the
scale. But have these English never read their Shakespeare, that they
show so barren an acquaintance with human, to say nothing of
semi-barbaric, nature? But it is here that we Germans prove our claim to
being the sons of his mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the
mask: he also is a concurrent. And not only is he the chosen by election
of the chief Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene
dilating Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and
lightning of his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before
them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine
double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his
beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the
masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his
hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in hiding their own.

Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be
encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.
The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the
blessed old English manner. 'It has even been thus with us: unhelped we
do it!' exclaims the Rev. Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing
Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed
Delphica's phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.
Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the
person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship of
our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her
guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,
charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience of
the Japanese erudites. Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn, is very
pretty Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most redoubtable
adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats (containing
newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the Polypheme puffing
past Sandy Hook.

There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the serial.

Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for his pained frown at
the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would
keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;
and mischievously she said: 'Do you take to Delphica?'

He replied, with an evident sincerity, 'I cannot say I do.'

Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?

'One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,' Victor said to
Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.

'In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals. I
want to know what comes of it,' said the doctor.

'There's a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me, it will all end in
satire upon poor Old England. According to Colney, we excel in nothing.'

'I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment for
which I am indebted to you to-day.'

'Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The contralto?'

'Exquisite.'

Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.

'Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?' said Victor; and
hearing 'the privilege' mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to
limpid. 'You have seen how it stands with us here!' At once he related
what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the
case.

Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her
desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to
the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted man;
setting her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of the husband
soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor's comrade's manner of it,
was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling for the
elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung away the
world for him and borne him their one dear child. Victor took the blame
wholly upon himself. 'It is right that you should know,' he said to the
doctor's thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame; and a flame shot
across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the hurricane of a man
he was in the passion: indicating the subjection of such a temperament as
this Victor Radnor's to trials of the moral restraints beyond his human
power.

Dr. Themison said: 'Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but
supposing the poor lady . . . ?'

Victor broke in: 'I see her wish: I will.'

The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison's faltering query.

We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to stammer.
If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor's hand warmly.

'I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind
will be granted?' he said.

'She has but to call me to her,' said Victor, stiffening his back.




CHAPTER XX

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS

Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that the day of the
great gathering there had been authoritatively foretold as fine, by Mr.
Victor Radnor; and he delivered his prophecy in the teeth of the
South-western gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really inspired
belief or a kind of trust; some supposing him to draw from reserves of
observation, some choosing to confide in the singularly winged sparkle of
his eyes. Lady Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs. Blathenoy; and
Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it. And when women stand for Hope,
and any worshipped man for Promise, nothing less than redoubled confusion
of him dissolves the union. Even then they cling to it, under an
ejaculation, that it might and should have been otherwise; fancy partly
has it otherwise, in her caerulean home above the weeping. So it is good
at all points to prophecy with the aspect of the radiant day foretold.

A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to pieces. Nataly's
faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered beneath the crashes. She had not
much power of heart to desire anything save that which her bosom
disavowed. Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated. She wished her
beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all
successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness
of blood and being. Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack
of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feeling, under
privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused her
reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of him;
known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both sexes
in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are proved
quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of nature. A
constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired, and was
bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed her; a
perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject to the
thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its reviled
brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions. She coldly
felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been the temporary
rapture. Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate withholding of
it helped her spirit to escape a stain. Less coldly, she thanked at heart
her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke. It plighted them over
flesh.

He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike
himself, a word of City affairs: 'That fellow Blathenoy, with his
increasing multitude of bills at the Bank: must watch him there, sit
there regularly. One rather likes his wife. By the way, if you see him
near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don't forget. He heads the
subscription list of Lady Blachington's Charity.'

Victor chuckled at Colney's humping of shoulders and mouth, while the
tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist. 'If old Colney had
listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa began
heaving, he'd have been a fairly wealthy man by now . . . ha! it would
have genialized him. A man may be a curmudgeon with money: the rule is
for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at his
countrymen all round and getting hated. Well, Colney popular, can't be
imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid. He has the
six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his miserable
pay for Essays. Literature! Of course, he sours. But don't let me hear of
bachelors moralists. There he sits at his Temple Chambers hatching
epigrams . . . pretends to have the office of critic! Honest old fellow,
as far as his condition permits. I tell him it will be fine to-morrow.'

'You are generally right, dear,' Nataly said.

Her dropping breath was audible.

Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven's blessing on her
and a dose of soft nursery prattle.

He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day. She heard him sigh
settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of
the world's good children. She could have turned to him, to show him she
was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear
founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the
semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror
kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was
the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.

Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor's popularity was already up over the
extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine tomorrow, to
a certainty! he had been heard to say. The doubt weighed for something;
the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for he
had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was a
real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten. The reasoning
went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one of
the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
gifts. 'You can't foretell weather!' cried a pothouse sceptic. But the
workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics among the
common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a whiff
from the delirium attending any mention of his name.

How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to have
the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing
of his politics? Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days when
wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful to
their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis,
if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral
shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he subscribed,
patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was
unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its
rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more
agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor
mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day!
Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his
popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.
He did this:--and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing
wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their
thinking well of themselves. It came first from the workmen at his house.
'The right sort, and no humbug: likes you to be men.' Such a report made
tropical soil for any new seed.

Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even
in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think
it of ourselves. Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and
you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are
equal. Humanity's historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration
bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently has
to be administered. Certes the cocks among men do not require the
process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen,
cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands, a
Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel
themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.
Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on
legs. Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy of
wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat in their
persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative exaltation.
They send up their rough glory round the name of the gentleman--a
stranger, but their friend: and never is friend to be thought of as a
stranger--who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham and thereabout,
that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of a doddered
humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he has unwound.