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G. A. Henty - "Bonnie Prince Charlie"

Archbishop Wake - "Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Volume 6, Clement"

Georg Ebers - "A Thorny Path, Volume 2."

Irving Bacheller - "Eben Holden"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Says he: Is it a Charity Concert? Charity begins at home, says he: and if
I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows you
grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts down
here. He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse him.
Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors all
sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues 'em and rubs
'em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to his
business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor men
don't ask for more. A working man, all the world over, asks but justice
and a little relaxation--just a collar of fat to his lean.

Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and
repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day. The remarks
of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic to
extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
substantially, they are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations of
Mr. Radnor's riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A merchant, a holder
of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails, a
princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim of
the man? It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure of
our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets! The Romans
have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the populace;
we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in this vaunted
age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the hands of the
populace! Panem et circenses! Mr. Caddis repeated it, after his fathers;
his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original voracity.
There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their appetites. And
it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.

Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
bit of fun. Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor had
borrowed footmen of the principal houses about. Cartloads of provisions
had been seen to come. An immediate reward of a deed of benevolence, is a
thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets were paid for as
if for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr. Radnor, although
the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric juices, resembling
in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were chilled, on their steps
along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the house, by seeing three
tables of prodigious length, where very evidently a feast had raged: one
to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted by great gentlemen of
late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children. These had been at it for two
merry hours. They had risen. They were beef and pudding on legs; in some
quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the flourishes of a military
band. Boys, who had shaken room through their magical young corporations
for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing circle to the crumbled
cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes back, and buried another
tart. Plenty still reigned: it was the will of the Master that it should.

We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the
Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates: we have no
right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.
Signora Bianca Luciani: of whom we have read almost to the hearing her;
enough to make the mistake at times. The grand violinist Durandarte:
forcibly detained on his way to America. Mr. Radnor sent him a blank
cheque:--no!--so Mr. Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible; a
great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style. We have
now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife--the drum, some say! We
may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.

England's nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing
population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained
its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting them
to downright uses. Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be
satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at
fife and drum.

But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings for a ticket to
hear the music they love, and not having full assurance of refreshment,
are often, latterly, satirical upon their superiors; and, over this
country at least, require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts in
them may be reconciled with aristocracy. Do not listen to them further on
the subject. They vote safely enough when the day comes, if there is no
praetematurally strong pull the other way.

They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, fourth down the
Concert-bill; marked for a flute-duet with Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta
Victoria Radnor accompanying at the piano. It may mean? . . . do you want
a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean? The father's wealth is
enormous; the mother is a beautiful majestic woman in her prime. And see,
she sings: a wonderful voice. And lower down, a duet with her daughter:
violins and clarionet; how funny; something Hungarian. And in the Second
Part, Schubert's Ave Maria--Oh! when we hear that, we dissolve. She was a
singer before he married her, they say: a lady by birth one of the first
County families. But it was a gift, and she could not be kept from it,
and was going, when they met--and it was love! the most perfect duet. For
him she abandoned the Stage. You must remember, that in their young days
the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem entertained for it now.
Domestic Concerts are got up to gratify her: a Miss Fredericks: good old
English name. Mr. Radnor calls his daughter, Freddy; so Mr. Taplow, the
architect, says. They are for modern music and ancient. Tannhauser,
Wagner, you see. Pergolese.

Flute-duet, Mercadante. Here we have him! O--Durandarte: Air Basque,
variations--his own. Again, Senor Durandarte, Mendelssohn. Encore him,
and he plays you a national piece. A dark little creature a
Life-guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the fifteen
minutes of the performance; but he fills the hall and thrills the heart,
wafts you to heaven; and does it as though he were conversing with his
Andalusian lady-love in easy whispers about their mutual passion for
Spanish chocolate all the while: so the musical critic of the Tirra-Lirra
says. Express trains every half hour from London; all the big people of
the city. Mr. Radnor commands them, like Royalty. Totally different from
that old figure of the wealthy City merchant; young, vigorous, elegant, a
man of taste, highest culture, speaks the languages of Europe, patron of
the Arts, a perfect gentleman. His mother was one of the Montgomerys, Mr.
Taplow says.

And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer, dying knighted.
But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take less than a Barony--and then only
with descent of title to his daughter, in her own right.

Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose that he should say.

Carriages were in flow for an hour: pedestrians formed a wavy coil.
Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall
contain them? Marvels were told of the hall. Every ticket entered and was
enfolded; almost all had a seat. Chivalry stood. It is a breeched
abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a
restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good
things be rather in the fair ones' favour, as they are to think: with the
warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts
an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be mad, to
provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their
good sense. They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets of the
chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of woman in the nose of
man. They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and muslins, magic
interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it. See, hear, smell, they
are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry with them; otherwise
they are better in the kitchen. Is there--but there is not; there is not
present one of the chivalrous breeched who could prefer the shocking
emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety on our sensations and
inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of them.

Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of
Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been to
the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady's man, a
rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that
thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
him, to conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would look
outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other, Lady
Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England's
conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go down
to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and are to
be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while they retain
the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a
maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors,
Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot
yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to
the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in
gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw
for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers
and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among them, chatting right and left.

Lady Carmine asked him: 'Is Durandarte counted on?'

He answered: 'I made sure of the Luciani.'

She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste
will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold
supernumeraries.

He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.

Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--Mr.
Peridon was generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of
amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a movement of
Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. 'They have come,' he said; he jumped on the
orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the
retiring-room.

His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton. An
opinion was unuttered. His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a
pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened was
not flustered by it. But the act of leading, appeared as an official
thing to do. Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under a
breath, without a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell
Blachington would have preferred Radnor's not leading or playing either.
Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
in a man of station . . . notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes. It is
true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!

The colonel fished for Lady Carmine's view. And Lady Swanage too? Both of
the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor's leading--for a leading
off. Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these ladies had none of the
colonel's remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
adolescent's intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a baton without looking affected.
And at one of the Colonel's Clubs in town, only five years back, an
English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now by the
mystery of events knighted!--had been (he makes now fifteen thousand a
year) black-balled. 'Fiddler? no; can't admit a Fiddler to associate on
equal terms with gentlemen.' Only five years back: and at present we are
having the Fiddler everywhere.

A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor
had kept himself somewhat more exclusive. Dr. Schlesien heard remarks,
upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly. Do these English
care one bit for music?--for anything finer than material stuffs?--what
that man Durance calls, 'their beef, their beer, and their pew in
eternity'? His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they
did.

But they do. Art has a hold of them. They pay for it; and the thing
purchased grapples. It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in
time: entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little
objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians. A
people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting in
the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state,
like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.
Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is there
among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or
mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert's pasture.

Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists jump
on his back. Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
scourge. The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
excites to satire. Colney Durance had his excuses. He could point to the
chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning their
survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating unreason
and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around them. Viola
under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich
national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies, the
idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing to one, that
they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their poorer fawning
fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in tricking the world and
their Maker: and so forth, a tiresome tirade: and as it was not on his
lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let him grind that
hurdy-gurdy for himself. His friend Victor set it stirring: Victor had
here what he aimed at!

How Success derides Ambition! And for this he imperilled the happiness of
the worthy woman he loved! Exposed her to our fen-fogs and foul
snakes--of whom one or more might be in the assembly now: all because of
his insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the minute!
Colney's rapid interjections condensed upon the habitual shrug at human
folly, just when Victor, fronting the glassy stare of Colonel Corfe,
tapped to start his orchestra through the lively first bars of the
overture to Zampa.

We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thoroughly fills,
whatever it may be. Zampa takes horse from the opening. We have no
amateur conductor riding ahead: violins, 'cellos, piano, wind-stops:
Peridon, Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn, Dudley
Sowerby: they are spirited on, patted, subdued, muted, raised, rushed
anew, away, held in hand, in both hands. Not earnestness worn as a cloak,
but issuing, we see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader of men.
The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a development in the
character of England's merchant princes. The homage we pay him flatters
us. A delightful overture, masterfully executed; ended too soon; except
that the programme forbids the ordinary interpretation of prolonged
applause. Mr. Radnor is one of those who do everything consummately. And
we have a monition within, that a course of spiritual enjoyment will
rouse the call for bodily refreshment. His genial nod and laugh and word
of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we know not how, of
provision to come. At the door of the retiring-room, see, he is
congratulated by Luciani and Durandarte. Miss Priscilla Graves is now to
sing a Schumann. Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus Barmby.
We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian Operatic
singer! Ices after the first part is over.




CHAPTER XXI

DARTREY FENELLAN

Had Nataly and Nesta known who was outside helping Skepsey to play ball
with the boys, they would not have worked through their share of the
performance with so graceful a composure. Even Simeon Fenellan was
unaware that his half-brother Dartrey had landed in England. Dartrey went
first to Victor's office, where he found Skepsey packing the day's
letters and circulars into the bag for the delivery of them at Lakelands.
They sprang a chatter, and they missed the last of the express trains
which did, not greatly signify, Skepsey said, 'as it was a Concert.' To
hear his hero talk, was the music for him; and he richly enjoyed the
pacing along the railway-platform.

Arrived on the grounds, they took opposite sides in a game of rounders,
at that moment tossing heads or tails for innings. These boys were
slovenly players, and were made unhappy by Skepsey's fussy instructions
to them in smartness. They had a stupid way of feeding the stick, and
they ran sprawling; it concerned Great Britain for them to learn how to
use their legs. It was pitiful for the country to see how lumpish her
younger children were. Dartrey knew his little man and laughed, after
warning him that his English would want many lessons before they
stomached the mixture of discipline and pleasure. So it appeared: the
pride of the boys in themselves, their confidence, enjoyment of the game,
were all gone; and all were speedily out but Skepsey; who ran for the
rounder, with his coat off, sharp as a porpoise, and would have got it,
he had it in his grasp, when, at the jump, just over the line of the
goal, a clever fling, if ever was, caught him a crack on that part of the
human frame where sound is best achieved. Then were these young lumps
transformed to limber, lither, merry fellows. They rejoiced Skepsey's
heart; they did everything better, ran and dodged and threw in a style to
win the nod from the future official inspector of Games and Amusements of
the common people; a deputy of the Government, proposed by Skepsey to his
hero with a deferential eagerness. Dartrey clapped him on the shoulder,
softly laughing.

'System--Mr. Durance is right--they must have system, if they are to
appreciate a holiday,' Skepsey said; and he sent a wretched gaze around,
at the justification of some of the lurid views of Mr. Durance, in signs
of the holiday wasted;--impoverishing the country's manhood in a small
degree, it may be argued, but we ask, can the country afford it, while
foreign nations are drilling their youth, teaching them to be ready to
move in squads or masses, like the fist of a pugilist. Skepsey left it to
his look to speak his thought. He saw an enemy in tobacco. The drowsiness
of beer had stretched various hulks under trees. Ponderous cricket
lumbered half-alive. Flabby fun knocked-up a yell. And it was rather
vexatious to see girls dancing in good time to the band-music. One had a
male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the thing he could not
do.

Apparently, too certainly, none but the girls had a notion of orderly
muscular exercise. Of what use are girls! Girls have their one mission on
earth; and let them be healthy by all means, for the sake of it; only,
they should not seem to prove that old England is better represented on
the female side. Skepsey heard, with a nip of spite at his bosom, a small
body of them singing in chorus as they walked in step, arm in arm,
actually marched: and to the rearward, none of these girls heeding; there
were the louts at their burlesque of jigs and fisticuffs! 'Cherry Ripe,'
was the song.

'It's delightful to hear them!' said Dartrey.

Skepsey muttered jealously of their having been trained.

The song, which drew Dartrey Fenellan to the quick of an English home,
planted him at the same time in Africa to hear it. Dewy on a parched
forehead it fell, England the shedding heaven.

He fetched a deep breath, as of gratitude for vital refreshment. He had
his thoughts upon the training of our English to be something besides the
machinery of capitalists, and upon the country as a blessed mother
instead of the most capricious of maudlin step-dames.

He flicked his leg with the stick he carried, said: 'Your master's the
man to make a change among them, old friend!' and strolled along to a
group surrounding two fellows who shammed a bout at single-stick. Vacuity
in the attack on either side, contributed to the joint success of the
defense. They paused under inspection; and Dartrey said: 'You're burning
to give them a lesson, Skepsey.'

Skepsey had no objection to his hero's doing so, though at his personal
cost.

The sticks were handed to them; the crowd increased; their rounders boys
had spied them, and came trooping to the scene. Skepsey was directed to
hit in earnest. His defensive attitude flashed, and he was at head and
right and left leg, and giving point, recovering, thrusting madly, and
again at shoulder and thigh, with bravos for reward of a man meaning
business; until a topper on his hat, a cut over the right thigh, and the
stick in his middlerib, told the spectators of a scientific adversary;
and loudly now the gentleman was cheered. An undercurrent of warm feeling
ran for the plucky little one at it hot again in spite of the strokes,
and when he fetched his master a handsome thud across the shoulder, and
the gentleman gave up and complimented him, Skepsey had applause.

He then begged his hero to put the previous couple in position, through a
few of the opening movements. They were horribly sheepish at first.
Meantime two boys had got hold of sticks, and both had gone to work in
Skepsey's gallant style; and soon one was howling. He excused himself,
because of the funny-bone, situated, in his case, higher than usual up
the arm. And now the pair of men were giving and taking cuts to make a
rhinoceros caper.

'Very well; begin that way; try what you can bear,' said Dartrey.

Skepsey watched them, in felicity for love of the fray, pained by the
disregard of science.

Comments on the pretty play, indicating a reminiscent acquaintance with
it, and the capacity for critical observations, were started. Assaults,
wonderful tricks of a slashing Life-Guardsman, one spectator had
witnessed at an exhibition in a London hall. Boxing too. You may see
displays of boxing still in places. How about a prizefight?--With money
on it?--Eh, but you don't expect men to stand up to be knocked into
rumpsteaks for nothing?--No, but it's they there bets!--Right, and that's
a game gone to ruin along of outsiders.--But it always was and it always
will be popular with Englishmen!